By Fiona Sinclair
The announcement of a ‘major retrospective’ sent Alice’s friends giddy with excitement. Reviews in The Guardian raved. The five stars awarded barely seeming adequate.
Alice remained silent. In truth she had never heard of the American artist. Her tastes were more European; Turner, Vermeer, Caravaggio.
Some friends raced to become early bird visitors. They had joined queues like static conga lines and came away gushing with praise. But to Alice, the Hoppers became like an irritating family, who mutual friends declared “You will love’. However past experience had taught her that when introduced, she had found no common ground.
“We must put it on the list,” declared Julia. Her closest friend and partner for any such cultural initiatives. Julia hated finding herself on the back foot at parties when the latest event was mulled over by guests who had already taken it in.
Alice nodded noncommittally, changed the subject by drawing attention to a stylish pair of shoes in a store window.
Fortnightly visits to the Maudsley psych hospital in southwest London had become routine to her now. A years’ worth of psychotherapy was succeeding in untangling her past. She no longer entered the outpatients with eyes fixed on the squares of carpet tiles. A ploy in those early days to avoid any interaction with the human flotsam that mental health had beached in the waiting room.
But over time she saw that this was a place where calmness was carefully curated. Pictures of flowers bloomed on the walls. The décor was always spruce and the staff — from receptionists to psychiatrists — treated the patients, however ramshackle, with respect.
Now she and her therapist Margaret would chit chat as key codes where punched into pads, in order to gain admittance to each level of the labyrinthine building. The sounds like birds of prey that issued from the acute wing no longer made her start.
This particular Monday morning, her appointment was at a bleary eyed 8 am. Fine if she lived in London — however she was a two hours train ride away so her alarm clock blared reveille at 5 am.
Her session was finished by nine. “You’ve got the rest of the day to yourself,” Margaret remarked as she shouldered the final door whose second line of defence seemed to be that it always stuck. Alice was at a loss as to how to spend this time. London brimmed with museums and galleries, but nothing tempted her. “You know what Dr Johnson said,” grinned her therapist.
“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” responded Alice. “Probably not the best sentiments to quote in Maudsley,” they both agreed.
Since the peak hour ticket had been expensive Alice felt the outlay should reward her with more than counselling. She was not in the mood for aimless shopping. But scrolling from memory through the current exhibitions, she found there was a dearth, except of course for the Hoppers at the Tate. It was a short tube ride away. “Well there’s always cappuccino and cake in the café afterwards.” She consoled herself.
On the Victoria line, as the train jolted to a halt at each station, her carriage never fully aligned with hoardings that trumpeted the event. And as the tube accelerated away, she only got a zoetrope impression of images that did nothing to ignite her enthusiasm.
“If it’s crowed,” she decided, “I won’t bother.” Envisaging hordes of retirees, school parties and tourists mobbing the entrance, all waiting for 10am like a starting gun.
In truth most exhibitions only admitted a hundred or so visitors every hour. But even so, from past experience, she knew there would be a funeral pace past each picture as if it was laying in state.
Alice blamed those headphones that explained each painting down to the final daub. Visitors planted themselves in front of the picture until the recording told them to move onto the next image. “Just look and form your own opinion,” she would mutter whilst craning to catch a glimpse of the artwork.
The Thames accompanied her towards the Tate. There was a Monday morning feeling in this part of London, as if the area was drawing breath after a busy weekend. The district was dedicated to tourism with The Globe and The Turner being near neighbours.
The gallery was housed in a decommissioned power station designed by the architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scot, in a time when even functional buildings were given an aesthetic flourish. The conversion to art gallery had retained the original deco building but also made sympathetic modern additions. The brickwork was cleaned back to its original red and the towering chimney advertised itself on the London skyline.
With the internal machinery removed, the empty core allowed for spacious galleries ideal for art on an ambitious scale. The turbine hall alone was so vast that it dwarfed the escalators that bore visitors up to the galleries. Here even Michelangelo’s’ 17 ft David would look lonely.
Alice was quite accustomed to taking herself off to the cinema, theatres, exhibitions alone. Most of her friends were married, therefore had commitments. She was often too impatient to wait whilst they managed the logistics of their domestic lives, to find time to accompany her.
There was a freedom in being on her own, a spontaneity that meant she could hop on a train, and head to London whenever she felt inclined.
Friends found her ease at flying solo incomprehensible. “You’re so brave,” they would remark in tones that simultaneously managed to be admiring but also patronising, “I could never do anything like that on my own.”
“It’s practice,” she would explain. As an only child she had grown up used to her own company. Moreover, without a partner now, the fact was if she wanted the rich cultural life she craved, Alice had to take matters into her own hands.
Over time she had developed strategies that gave her confidence. Aware that even in the 21st , a single woman going to the theatre or cinema on her own still garnered curious glances, she was, therefore, always accompanied by a book.
Arriving at the Tate’s ticket desk, Alice was surprised to find only a dribble of people. 10 am on a Monday morning was apparently too early even for the keenest of visitors.
Consequently, with extraordinary timing she had the luxury of being the only person in the exhibition. Grinning at her good fortune she placed herself in the centre of the largest room. She then made a 360 degrees turn to get an overview of the Hoppers before moving in on specific images that beckoned to be examined.
What she saw utterly contradicted her preconceptions of the artist and his work. These were not the cosy representations of American life she had expected.
Human loneliness was delineated in every scene. There were no cosy family meals or girlfriends gossiping. Indeed, these people seemed to possess no faculty for laughter. Married couples who had run out of things to say to each other long ago, now gazed off into their own private horizons. Solitary men sat on stoops smoking with blank expressions as if they had given up on thinking. Many eyes were cast down, or concealed beneath hats, so that all emotional cues were transferred to their body language whose droop spoke of hopelessness.
This despair was not confined to cityscapes. There were landscapes too, where forests growled at the edges of civilisation, and unkept grass prowled up to the stoops of solitary white wooden houses. These homes were personified as if conveying by proxy the emotions the characters in other pictures could not. Doors screamed and windows gaped.
Above all she had never seen an artist paint silence so effectively. It emanated from the pictures, seeming to seep into the gallery itself.
In all the years of visiting exhibitions she had never seen one that reflected back her own experience of life. The images did not bring her mood down rather she felt exhilarated that she was able to look these pictures in the face without flinching.
Alice returned home buzzing with a convert’s zeal. As a result, her friend hastily cleared a Saturday. She farmed her kids off to their cousins for the day and left a ready meal for her husband in the fridge. Of course, Alice was champing to revisit the exhibition, although she was savvy enough to understand that she would never be able to recreate the timely conditions or the wonder she had experienced on first seeing the pictures.
The two women arrived at the gallery early enough for there to be a lunchtime lull. From past experience she knew her friend did not work her way methodically through an exhibition but liked to see the artist’s greatest hits first. Juila made for the voyeuristic
‘Night Windows’, where a woman is observed in a bedsit, her back to an open window from which curtains billow, a favoured image for fridge magnets and coasters.
Alice felt the same rush of enthusiasm for the pictures. She was desperate to enjoy again images that had particularly affected her, but good manners tethered her to Julia’s side. Nevertheless, she could not help breathlessly pointing out details in ‘Night Windows’ that had struck her before. Alice’s words tumbled out in her desire to share the image with her friend. However, Julia seemed to have left her enthusiasm with her coat in the cloakroom. She regarded the painting in silence. Alice grimaced inwardly wondering if her effusiveness was deterring her friend so turned off her gush of words.
Julia still did not engage with this painting or indeed any others. She paused before each image briefly without comment. Alice trailed behind her at a loss. She wondered if her friend had suddenly become unwell. There was a precedent for this when she had once passed out from a UTI at the theatre. And she knew her friend well enough that if she hated an exhibition, she was quick to speak her mind.
“Are you feeling okay?” she whispered.
“I’m fine,” Julia responded. But the ‘fine’ was loaded with a subtext Alice could not at that moment fathom.
Julia stood briefly before the artist’s other well-known pictures as if mentally ticking them off. Alice desultorily picked out a detail here and there like offering titbits to someone who had lost their appetite. Her friend merely nodded or squeezed out a ‘hmmm’.
From her peripheral vision the paintings she ached to enjoy again beckoned to her. Finally, she made her way to them, hoping that by giving her friend some space she might find some way into the works. However, looking over her shoulder she saw Juia had begun to move past the paintings without pausing, barely glancing at the images. Eventually feeling as if she was abandoning her friend at a party of strangers she returned to her side. They had reached ‘Night Hawks’. “Surely she’ll respond now,” she thought. Her friend did but not with appreciation, instead she raised her hand to her eyes as if shielding her gaze. Alice was reduced to foolishly gesturing ‘the famous one’ as if trying to chivvy a child’s interest.
“Well I think we’ve seen enough,” Julia suddenly found her voice again, “Let’s get out of here.” And without waiting for Alice, she bolted through the exit and plonked herself in a comfy armchair in the coffee shop and took a deep breath as if the atmosphere in the gallery had tried to choke her. In an effort to raise her friend’s spirits, Alice brought her a double shot cappuccino and a slab of cake. Seated by a large picture window looking down on the Thames, Alice commented on a few landmarks by way of breaking the silence. It was still a one-way conversation though until revived by the food, Julia began to join in.
Clearly there was not to be their usual post event discussion. This was unprecedented. They could not even agree to disagree as they had many times before if they could not even discuss the exhibition. During this smallest of small talk, Alice tried to make sense of her friend’s reaction. She began to feel as if she had forced Julia to accompany her. Then remembered it was actually her friend’s agency that had brough them to the Tate. Reasoning to herself that they couldn’t spend the rest of their lives avoiding all reference to the Hoppers she brushed the small talk aside, took a breath and blurted out, “Did you not like the exhibition?”
Julia paused before speaking, “Look, I know you love them but for me, there was no beauty in there.” She gestured with her head towards the gallery they had come from. “They are so dreary.” Her tone verged on whining as if the exhibition had got her there under false pretences. Alice was quick to point out that they had seen other exhibitions genuinely devoid of conventional beauty — Rothko, Warhol, Gilbert and George. None of whose work could have comfortably inhabited a sitting room.
“But I know what to expect with abstract art,” her friend pointed out. “I can stomach geometric shapes and dribbled paint because they engage my mind not my emotions,” she paused, “also somehow they don’t reflect real life.” The caffein had clearly loosened her tongue. “I expect at least some beauty in representational art.” She began to list Hopper’s faults. “Why are there so few people in the city? It looks post-apocalyptic. And they are so miserable. That picture of the psycho house seems to sum up the whole collection.” She added as a last shot.
Alice felt as if her friend’s criticism was aimed at her as well as the artist. She attempted to put her case for the paintings. “But don’t you see that they reflect the isolation of modern life?” Her friend’s face remained adamant. Alice searched for a comparison then had a brain wave, “Look’ we both studied TS Eliot at uni. Can’t you see it’s ‘The Waste Land’ translated into art?” She felt rather pleased with her analogy.
But Juila shook her head. “You can distance yourself from words, but pictures,” she grimaced. “Nothing erases an image, once seen it gets trapped in your mind.”
Alice pondered the two divergent responses to the Hoppers. Both were extreme in their own ways. She wondered if the roots of their reactions lay in their backgrounds. Her own history, even her therapist agreed, verged on the Gothic. Whereas Julia had enjoyed an Enid Blyton childhood. Throughout her life she had been adored by her father and encouraged by her mother. Her marriage to Jim was that rare thing, a pairing that lasted without a whiff of infidelity. Admittedly their life together had not been entirely charmed — ill health, a father’s dementia — redundancy had been faced down over time. Now their reward was a very comfortable life.
Her friend seemed to have read her thoughts. “I know I have a good life compared to most,” Juila admitted. “And I know there’s ugliness in the world. I just don’t want to be reminded of it on a day out.”
Alice began to understand that the pictures were an uncomfortable reminder of less kind lives. Whilst they were not in the face brutality of war, instead they showed men and women recognizably modern whose lives were the playthings of circumstance and as such had visibly given up.
They seemed to have awakened some existential fear in her friend, perhaps a dread of feeling hopeless. The Hoppers were a reminder that even middle-class lives could falter and fall if fate gave a push.
Julia suddenly changed the subject with a hand brake turn. She gave a round up of her daughters’ careers and love lives, her husband’s progress on the kit car he was building. She seemed in this way to be deploying her family as a buffer against the images she had just seen.
Making for the exit, it was usually part of their ritual to visit the gift shop. But whilst Alice turned to enter, eager to buy more Hopper related merchandise, Juila swept passed deep in describing the minutiae of her family’s next trip to Italy . Alice shrugged, “I’ll pop in next time,” she thought.
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Fiona Sinclair has had several collections of poetry published by small presses. Her short stories have been published in magazines in the UK, US and Australia.
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