The Window
Hopper’s paintings are frequently built around a vignette that unfolds as the viewer gazes into a window, or out through a window. Sometimes, as in Railroad Sunset (1929), Nighthawks (1942) and Office in a Small City (1953), it is still possible to see details of the scene beyond even after Hopper has guided the viewer’s gaze through two panes of glass. When Hopper wishes to obscure the view, he tends to position the window at a sharp angle to the viewer’s vantage-point, or to block the view with curtains or blinds. Another favourite technique—used, for example, in Conference at Night (1949),—is to use bright light, flooding in from the exterior at a sharp angle from the sun or from an unseen streetlight, to illuminate a few mundane details within inches of the far side of the window, thereby throwing the deeper reaches of the view into shadow.
By way of comparison, in Automat the window dominates the painting, and yet "allows nothing of the street, or whatever else is outside, to be seen." The complete blackness outside is a departure both from Hopper’s usual techniques, and from realism, since a New York street at night is full of light from cars and street lamps. This complete emptiness allows the reflections from the interior to stand out more dramatically, and intensifies the viewer’s focus upon the woman.
The window conveys an impressionistic view, rather than one that is realistic, in another way. As Mark Strand notes, "The window reflects only the twin receding rows of ceiling lights and nothing else of the automat interior." It is possible that Hopper omitted these reflections in order to avoid distractions that might turn the viewer’s away from the woman. Strand, however, suggests an alternative reason why the woman’s reflection is omitted:
| “ | The painting suggests several things, but the most obvious and most resonant is that if what the window reflects is true then the scene takes place in limbo and the seated woman is an illusion. This is a troubling idea. And if the woman thinks of herself in this context, she cannot possibly be happy. But of course she does not think, she is the product of another will, an illusion, an invention of Hopper’s. | ” |
The focusing effect of the blank window behind the woman can be seen most clearly when it is contrasted with Sunlight in a Cafeteria (1958), one of Hopper’s late paintings. In that painting, a female and a male subject sit in an otherwise empty cafeteria in spots reminiscent of the tables occupied, respectively, by the female subject and the viewer in Automat. Even the bowl of fruit on the windowsill in Automat has its parallel in a small potted plant on the windowsill in Sunlight in a Cafeteria. But in Sunlight in a Cafeteria, the well-illuminated street scene outside the large window seemingly distracts the man's attention from his counterpart, so that the two subjects "do not seem to be acting in the same scene, as it were." By contrast, in Automat the viewer is fully engaged by the presence of the woman.
Read more about this topic: Automat (painting)
Famous quotes containing the word window:
“As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their ocellated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)