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Why does Edward Hopper's picture of postwar isolation look so similar to early 21st-century prosperity?

At the northeast corner of St. Denis and Rachel, there’s a billboard
advertising the condo-lofts that will go in on the upper storeys of the
Le Château building there. It shows a computer-generated artist’s
rendering of what the apartments will look like once they’re finished:
a bare floor, Bauhaus knock-off chairs, a stainless steel fridge, a
stainless steel gas stove, an HD tv built into the wall, a man on a
sofa, a woman in a pyjama-bathrobe combo.



This billboard—it’s a tarp, really—has been stretched across the side
of this building for quite a while now. Much longer than you’d expect
in Montreal’s grab-what-you-can-get housing market, where old
factories, train stations and churches are gutted, restuffed and sold
to whoever has enough money to buy a housing unit inside the
transformed corpse.



Maybe, like a good number of condo projects, construction has stopped
on this one thanks to a developer gone belly up, and those people who
“invested” in an unbuilt home are left licking their wounds and
wondering if they’ll ever get their $100,000 back.



But the graphic designers who dreamed up this open concept living
space, and the passers by who briefly pictured themselves in it, agree
on one thing: that this imagined spot would be a nice place to live.
The man reclines on the loveseat, turtle-necked and relaxed. If you
follow his eyes, you’ll notice he’s not looking at what’s on tv, but at
some fascinating fixed point in the corner. He seems to show the same
lobotomized interest in his girlfriend. His girlfriend appears content
to admire the immaculately unfurnished square footage of their floor,
while—like a housecat—she demurely soaks up the sunshine pouring in
through the huge windows.



The American painter Edward Hopper used lighting like that—and to the
same chilling effect as the designer who Photoshopped our loft space
rendering. In 1953, he painted a scene called “Office in a Small City.”
It shows a pale office worker staring into the beating sunlight,
losing his mind in a daydream.






Hopper said a few words about an earlier office painting that I think
apply to this one: “My aim was to try to give the sense of an isolated
and lonely office interior rather high in the air, with the office
furniture which has a very definite meaning to me.”



When it comes to this particular painting, the words “isolated” and
“lonely” seem too soft to describe the feeling I get when imagining
being that poor little guy. You get the sense that there are no other
people in those windows across the street, no cars beeping through the
streets below. Hopper’s small city is as sterile as a hospital hallway.



And, when you try to make sense of that quote, the other part of it is
a bit frustrating. Hopper says that office furniture holds “a very
definite meaning” for him. Of course, being an artist and all, he sure
as hell isn’t going to tell us what that very definite meaning is.



The furnishings in the small city office look a lot like the geometric
building blocks that make up this city itself. All those big
rectangles—the enormous flat desk he sits at, the other one almost
poking into his back, the blank white wall of the building across the
street and to the left, the blank white wall of the one he’s actually
in—make the scene appear more like an urban planner’s diorama than a
likeness of a living city. It’s as if he’s at work in the concrete
frame on an unfinished high rise, like those simple polygon structures
that stood in for military complexes in the videogame, “Doom.” (If you
were a 13-year-old boy in 1994, you’ll get what I mean.)



Few would disagree that more than “we are what we eat,” we are
where we live. For the small city office worker, the very colour of his
complexion, hair and even clothes is as drab as the town, street and
room he finds himself in. There is no colour in his figure that isn’t
found in some object within his immediate view. In other words, he’s
defined by his environment.



As for that sexless couple in the St. Denis lofts, their surroundings
also take on “a very definite meaning.” This home is supposed to be the
perfect spot for ideal leisure time as imagined by our age. No
responsibilities, no disruptions, no thoughts, nothing to perceive with
those fussy senses.