I have just returned to my home in Berkeley, California, after being in Russia for three weeks.
I spent two of my three weeks in Russia in the town of Nizhny Novgorod. This town of about 2.5 million people is an overnight train ride from Moscow and it has a Linguistics Institute. The Institute has within it an American Cultural Center. (This is what used to be called a USIS Library, for those of you who have lived overseas.)
I was put in touch with the ACC co-directors, one American, one Russian, and they in turn connected me with an English teacher in one of Nizhny's schools. When she heard that I was an experienced teacher of English as a second language, she invited me to meet with a group of her colleagues. Seven or eight meetings ensued with a group of wonderful women. I have little to teach them about teaching. They are highly trained and, although in most cases they had never met a native speaker of English, they are fluent and have great teaching ideas and techniques.
Nonetheless, let's face it: I am an American; I have lived in other countries. I have taught American Culture courses. I have *a lot* to teach them about our culture. One of the things they requested was a survey course in American art. The ACC had some very good books on the topic, but I made a policy decision to concentrate on one artist. I chose Edward Hopper.
Hopper's most important work was done in the 30's and 40's. His oil paintings are his most famous pieces. This group depicts an America of urban spaces or interiors viewed as though from an automobile in the street. His colors are not muddy, but they are dark. The paintings are very geometrical, with virtually no decoration, just spaces molded by their outlines. The over-all sense many of his paintings is depression born of loneliness.
His most famous painting, probably, is"Night Hawks." From across the street, we look into a diner. The night and the street are dark; the diner is harshly lit. Sitting at one end of the counter in the diner are a man and a woman. Along the counter's side is another man. An employee is leaning over the sink or stove behind the counter. None of these people is looking at any other person. There is a powerful feeling of people alone in a lonely space. The white walls of the diner throw into relief the darkness of the night and of the men's clothes. The woman is wearing a red dress, but even that is muted. The faces of the people are not detailed. They could be Any One. I cannot think of even one Hopper painting, including those which have as their subjects the countryside, which does not depict loneliness.
Sitting in the ACC library in Nizhny Novgorod, I opened the Hopper book for my English teacher colleagues. I opened it to another urban loneliness painting. They immediately responded strongly to the emotion in the painting and began discussing it in English. It was a sad thrilling moment for me, sharing this aspect of the United States with women half way across the world, who understood everything.
When I returned to the U.S. and was in Manhattan for a few days before coming home, I went to a Hopper retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This exhibition does something I don't think I've ever seen in a major museum: it weaves the paintings which are the focus of the exhibit into the over-all artistic experience of the time -- poetry, film, photography, fiction, essays. The catalogue, Edward Hopper and the American Imagination , includes short stories and essays from the same era.
Check it out.
