Solitude ≠ Loneliness
The 2026 Edward Stanley Award Essay on the Humanities
The standard take on Edward Hopper is that he’s the great visual chronicler of the loneliness, alienation, and anomie of Americans and America in the rah-rah American Century. That cliché, like most clichés, isn’t entirely untrue, but Hopper resisted it. “The loneliness thing,” he told an art journalist who interviewed him near the end of his life in the 1960s, “is overdone.”
He aspired to an Emersonian ideal of self-reliance. “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion,” wrote his philosopher hero, who died just before Hopper was born, and “it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” On the other hand, about the loneliness take? “Maybe they’re right,” Hopper conceded to the same critic, Brian O’Doherty. Perfectly ambiguous, like his pictures.
In 2020, at the start of COVID’s sudden universal isolation, the critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote a piece about Hopper that made an important distinction about his subject and meanings. “Aloneness is his great theme, symbolizing America,” making him “the visual bard of American solitude—not loneliness, a maudlin projection.” Schjeldahl, dying of lung cancer at the time, had some standing to dismiss easy maudlin sentiment.
It’s undeniable that the people in Hopper’s work—and the buildings when the pictures are unpeopled—seem isolated, even or especially when they’re with other people. But are they unhappy? Only at that moment, or most of the time? We don’t and can’t know. Indeed, despite “the isolation of the people” in Hopper’s paintings, O’Doherty pointed out, they “don’t seem oppressed by that”—rather, “their outstanding characteristic seems to be, well, a certain heedlessness, submission.” Which the characters may not find sad even if we sympathizing, assuming viewers do.
It makes sense that people in Hopper’s pictures seem stoically or wearily submitting to isolation, maybe to disappointment and loneliness. He was essentially alone until his early forties, when he finally found his mate, an artist he promptly married, living and working with her in his small New York apartment—suddenly the opposite of alone. Right then, too, he experienced both his full creative flowering and art-world acclaim after two decades as an unknown artist for ad agencies and publishers. “Illustration didn’t really interest me,” he said later. “I was forced into it by an effort to make some money.” Finally, suddenly, before reaching fifty, he was a star with one-man shows and work in the big museums, selling paintings for the equivalent of thousands, then tens of thousands apiece.
His extended yeomanry, however, shaped and served his art. The people in his paintings we find so touching are essentially the same unsmiling, expressionless, featureless people in his magazine illustrations. (Like Pop Art’s illustration-style images of the next generation minus the shouted irony and heartlessness.) In Hopper’s fine art pictorial universe his people no longer come across as imperious or cool or blithe or glamorous. They’re still generic, and highly relatable, but now sympathetically human because of the inner confusions and pining and melancholy that the light and shadow and colors and careless body language let us impute and infer. The moods are quiet, complicated, enigmatic. No one is posing, no sales pitches are involved.
His most narratively dense and emotionally intense paintings are the urban scenes, mostly of New York, specifically Manhattan. More specifically, of Greenwich Village—the compact village where he lived and painted in the same apartment in Washington Square for half the twentieth century, from age thirty-one to eighty-four.
In 1932 he painted the picture on the front and back cover of this issue, Room in New York, and showed it that fall at the first biennial exhibition of the new Whitney Museum a couple of blocks away. “The idea was in my mind a long time before I painted it. It was suggested by glimpses of lighted interiors seen as I walked along city streets at night, probably near the district where I live.”
He’d recently painted a couple of other views through windows, but fragmentary, no faces, as if seen for a second from a passing elevated train—not like this clear, straight-on chronicle of a long moment, like a scene from a play. Night, windows open, the whole small room visible in the harsh overhead light, a couple each occupied with their own thoughts. She’s neither with him nor turned away, pecking a piano key but not really playing. Visually the door separates them, but in reality the parlor table they’re both touching is a tether.
Naturally, it gets the standard critical take—it portrays “loneliness,” “pensive figures,” “a haunting emptiness” (New York Times, 2017) and “poke[s] at what simmers beneath the placid surface of ordinary lives, and what they unearth is darkly disturbing” (Times, 2000).
Maybe. Maybe she’s bored or lonely; maybe they both are. But maybe not. Maybe once again that’s “the loneliness thing” being overdone. Maybe she’s just idly passing the time for a minute or two while he finishes reading an article. Maybe they’re going out to dinner or the movies, or waiting for friends to arrive to play cards, or about to go to bed and make love. To a questioner asking about the meaning of Cape Cod Morning, his 1950 pictureof a woman leaning on the sill of an open ground-floor window, Hopper answered, “She’s just looking out the window.”
Any of his paintings of people could be a random moment from any of our lives, revealing our existential angst . . . or not. The power derives not from their (imperfect) visual photorealism but from their street-photography quality, of subjects caught unaware and unselfconscious, not smiling or posing or looking at the taker or maker of the picture. Each painting probably isn’t the truth about the people in it, just a truth that’s resonant because it’s a truth about all people.
Asked again, at age eighty-two, on the NBC News Sunday show about “the lack of communication between the people” in his paintings, Hopper said okay, sure, maybe it’s a reflection of his own loneliness, but “I don’t know. It could be the whole human condition.” Exactly.
“Hopper’s region is the Northeast,” Schjeldahl wrote, New York City and bits of New England, “but his perceptions apply from coast to coast.” Again: exactly.
In art, the sublime means pictures of scary but thrilling and beautiful nature, storm-tossed seas, icebergs looming in mists, vast untamed Alps and Catskills at sunset, Ride of the Valkyries and Thus Spoke Zarathustra awesomeness. That is, the opposite of the aesthetic of Edward Hopper, who pointedly declined to depict the transformation of Manhattan into a breathtaking vertical Oz during his lifetime. Concerning the sublime, however, Kant said there were actually three kinds, the Noble and the Splendid versions in addition to the Terrifying. (High-rise Manhattan qualifies as Noble Sublime.) I’d add a fourth type—the Quiet Sublime, differently breathtaking glimpses of exquisite beauty on more intimate scales, more austere and elegiac and mysterious, a sensibility akin to the Japanese Mono no aware appreciation of fleeting bittersweet moments. The dramatically undramatic Quiet Sublime encompasses all of Hopper—pictures with and without people, lonely sunlit buildings in small towns as well as scenes of New York, the sad and beautiful isolation of both rural fields and the urban hive.
I’ve been thinking about his pictures a lot the last three years, ever since spending a day at the Whitney Museum’s amazing Edward Hopper’s New York show. After sixty-one years uptown, the museum is back in the Village. As I wandered and stopped to immerse in each of his images of old buildings in his neighborhood (such as the iconic Early Sunday Morning, 1930), sometimes sharing a few words with my wife of forty-one years but mostly silent, I also took long glances out the huge windows framing old buildings in the same neighborhood. It was a surprising, thrilling trompe l’oeil treat.
I came to Room in New York, looked at it for the first time in real life. It was one of the handful of paintings mentioned by name in Whitney’s promotion of the show; the museum’s Hopper collection is the largest and most comprehensive in the world, but doesn’t include this one. I was gobsmacked and spent five delicious minutes taking it in.
Then I stepped close to read the label, and possibly gasped—a loan from the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. The picture has hung in Lincoln since its creation. In 1936, the people in charge of the Nebraska Art Association, the forerunner of the Sheldon, bought it during their forty-sixth annual invitational exhibition. I was born and raised in Omaha, my parents and friends attended the university, and I visited Lincoln dozens of times but never saw Room in New York, had no clue it was even there. Until I saw it in a room in New York.
As a cheerfully, lovingly raised child in prosperous, leafy, lawned, suburbanoid West Omaha, I found I had a taste for minor-key chiaroscuro moments—unfamiliar, a little strange, a little sad. That is, I realized later, why I like Edward Hopperesque moments and milieux.
The ambient melancholy I felt on almost every long, empty, listless Sunday provided my earliest feelings of a memorably strong atmospheric emotion. The sensation was intensified on weekends I spent alone with my grandparents in the country town of Valley, population 1,452—the train whistles, the sweet earthy smell from the big alfalfa dryer, the metal creaks of the empty school playground’s wooden merry-go-round as I spun myself by myself.
Then I sought out urban Hopperesque moments in Omaha. On Saturdays, starting at age eleven, right after I’d visited big cities for the first time (Chicago, New Orleans, Boston), I’d regularly take a city bus six miles by myself to spend the day all the way downtown. It was more empty than not, unfamiliar, a little dark and dirty, stone and brick buildings from the 1800s, nothing like where I lived. I spent hours inside the main public library, at a philatelic shop laundering the cash I swiped from my parents to build my stamp collection, among the old abandoned warehouses being turned into a proto-Soho of shops and galleries and cafes. I saw movies at grand 1920s theaters (the Orpheum, the Astro). One day, for no particular reason, I paid ten dollars for a twenty-five-pound 1940s adding machine. I was finding my Quiet Sublime.
An interviewer asked Hopper with which American fiction writers he felt artistic affinities, and suggested Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser. “I think maybe they’re a little too Midwestern for me,” he replied with a chuckle. I think maybe he was being a little too much of a New York City provincial; he’d only sped through the Midwest on trips to California and Mexico. His paintings of Vermont and Cape Cod—cows and barns and silos, a church alone in a field, isolated houses near railroad tracks (like the 1925 one Hitchcock used in 1960 as his model for the Psycho house)—could just as easily be Nebraska or Wisconsin. And Office in a Small City (1953) looks very Omaha or Des Moines or Dayton to me. Hopper came of age as the various modern isms of abstraction took over serious painting, but he remained unswervingly committed to his realistic style through the century—a stubborn conservative independence that seems Midwesternish, no? As does this quote from near the end of his life: “The only real influence I’ve ever had was myself.”
Hopper’s artistic perceptions apply from coast to coast and also from then to now. His pictures, Schjeldahl wrote, are “timeless, or perhaps time-free: a series of freeze-dried, uncannily telling moments.” As soon as I became an adult I left Omaha for New York—to the Village, a few blocks from where, a few years earlier, Hopper had lived and wandered, peeping into apartment windows and imagining the Room in New York he would paint. That couple, I thought as I gazed at the picture up close at the Whitney show, could be here in the 2020s, each of them on a device, he reading news on a screen, she wearing headphones and scrolling a playlist. I also thought of the autumn of 1976, sitting with my girlfriend in the living room of the Village apartment we shared, each of us reading, a Satie piano piece on the record player, together but alone with our thoughts, me unaware she was cheating, she thinking of when and how she’d tell me it was over between us.
