Two and a half years ago, I made
a video on Jan Matejko’s Stanczyk. That video blew up and, in two weeks, we
went from 30,000 to 100,000 subscribers. I’ll make a proper video to celebrate, but
for now, welcome to all the new comers, thank you so much for subscribing
and I’m glad you enjoy these videos. But what if I told you there’s a sadder
clown than Jan Matejko’s Stanczyk? Sad clowns make for extremely strong and
melancholic imagery. I won’t go into the whole sad clown paradox, so you can watch the video
I made on Stanczyk if you want to know more. What I do want to show you is a modern
sad clown, made about a century ago. It was made by a 32 year old artist who would
only get his first gallery show a decade later, at the age of 42. This artist would later
make a name for himself painting cityscapes, buildings and, what I personally love him
for, lonely figures. These lonely figures are presented in very intimate scenes. The subjects
don’t know we’re watching them, they feel alone, they’re often lost in thought, our disconnection
from them reinforces their own disconnection, their isolation, their alienation. We’re voyeurs,
we shouldn’t be seeing this person in this state, they’re vulnerable, yet that’s what
pulls our gazes towards these paintings. The artist behind these paintings is
Edward Hopper and, if you don’t know him, you probably know his 1942 Nighthawks. We are
still voyeurs, people are still isolated and alienated, we are still as disconnected to the
subjects as they are disconnected from themselves. Hopper was already quite
successful when he made Nighthawks, 9 years prior to its completion,
he had a retrospective at the MoMa. But let’s go back to 1914. At a time when Edward
Hopper wasn’t commercially successful. He just came back from a trip to Paris, ambitiously
looking for a breakthrough in America. As his biographer Gail Levin put it, Soir Bleu was
one of his boldest projects, his magnum opus. It was his biggest artwork to date, being 183 by
91 cm. Levin would even say that Soir Bleu was “for Hopper’s development what seven years before,
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon had been for Picasso”. It’s a French scene, with a French title.
Soir Bleu or, Blue Evening. The title already prefigures the painting’s melancholy. The French
scene is, obviously, set in a café. You can see a bourgeois couple, a woman standing, a man
from the military with fancy épaulettes, a bohemian artist and this man
which, in a sketch made by Hopper, was labelled a mackerel, or a pimp, meaning
that the lady could be a sex-worker. All of these characters have their own costumes
and styles, their own signifiers and codes, yet none of them interact with each other. It’s
like they all showed up to a party, they dressed up, yet no one is talking to eachother. Hopper is
portraying loneliness, not by showing physically lonely people, but by showing disconnected
people, people who are alienated from each other. But, more crucially, there’s the main character, the man that makes, to me, this painting
even more striking than Hopper’s Nighthawks, the sad clown. Dressed in blinding white,
from the costume to the makeup he’s wearing, the clown grabs our attention. He’s
smoking a cigarette melancholically, looking in front of him with an empty stare,
similar to the one Matejko would portrait in 1862. The story doesn’t end there. The painting
gains additional meaning and somberness through Levin’s interpretation. She says that there’s
a chance Hopper identifies with the clown as an artist. Like a clown, an artist can often perform
for an audience. A clown, without an audience, can struggle with a sense of purpose. An artist,
without an audience, can live a similar struggle. This painting was an important one for Hopper, not
only because it was his biggest to date, not only because it was his Demoiselles d’Avignon, not
only because he was personally connected to it, but because this, he had hoped,
would be his breakthrough. No longer will he be a clown without a spectator. When his Soir Bleu was exhibited
alongside another of his paintings, New York Corner, critics answered: ““Edward Hopper
is not quite successful with his ‘Soir Bleu’, a group of hardened Parisian absinthe drinkers,
but he is entirely so with his ‘New York Corner’; and again, “in Edward Hopper’s ‘New
York Corner’, there is a completeness of expression that is scarcely discoverable
in his ambitious fantasy, ‘Soir Bleu’.”” His ambitious fantasy was a failure. The
clown was not able to make his audience laugh. Hopper would roll up the canvas, store it, and
never revisited it. It would never be shown during his life time. He would never paint a French
scene again. He would never paint a clown again. What I find fascinating about this
painting is that it’s made by one of the most successful American artists, and
I’d argue that it triumphs, in many ways, his Nighthawks, yet it’s not widely recognized,
at least not as much as I think it should be. I’d argue that Edward Hopper made himself
vulnerable by creating his ambitious and personal Soir Bleu, and that
its shutting down must have been quite disheartening considering that
it made him nearly disown the work. However, and I’m sure you can agree on
this, it’s possible that Hopper simply hadn’t found his audience yet because, to
many people today, this work is strikingly incisive in its melancholic personification of
alienation. I’d like to know what you think. Hopper is mostly known for Nighthawks,
yet, do you prefer it to Soir Bleu; Do you find them both equally
enjoyable; or do you prefer Soir Bleu? I’m really interested in seeing if there’s
a consensus here on any of those answers.
