Pensive Lady in Pink (Morning Sun)
By Edward Hopper, 1952
Realism
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is over 1,000 pages long. It’s a book you could bludgeon a man to death with and yet, it reads as proof that words can’t quite articulate the isolating experience of being human. Edward Hopper, on the other hand, does it practically on accident using only oil paints, time and resentment.
Admiring Edward Hopper’s work is an uncomfortable undertaking. If an abrupt record scratch just echoed through the back of your brain just now, then I apologize in advance for ruining him for you. Sorry to say this, but Edward Hopper was the hot garbage equivalent of a person. But if you’re a practiced admirer of European art, then you should get used to dramatic reversals like this. Picasso spoke of burning women when he’s done with them and Egon Schiele kidnapped an adolescent girl to use as his “muse”. Art history is filled with great and terrible people.
For an account of Edward’s crimes against humanity, I would suggest you read Obituary, 1968, or Stuff You Missed in History Class .
As for analyzing Pensive Lady in Pink, it’s more relevant to discuss how the unhappy marriage of Josephine Nivison and Edward Hopper translated into the fluency with which Hopper’s oeuvre speaks the language of melancholy. After all, it is Josephine’s pensive despondency that persuades you to linger with this painting, waiting just a little longer to see if you might figure out what she’s thinking.
Of all his sittings with Josephine, it’s this piece that actually lets you feel a hint of Edward’s dissatisfaction with Jo’s private nature. Through out their marriage, Edward Hopper tried to control every aspect of Josephine’s life. Her mind, however, was the one place he couldn’t assert objective dominance and therefore became the part of her that disturbed him the most. The tension we feel peering into this pensive lady’s world was put there by Hopper.
We want to know what she’s thinking because he so does he. Moreover, he wants to control what she’s thinking.
What’s made clear through private letters, public disappointment, and ghoulish caricatures, is that Edward wanted a wife whose sole purpose was to validate him as an artist and a man. Every time Jo failed to do so, he felt deprived of something he deserved.
Pensive Lady in Pink feels driven by Edward’s feelings of victimization and fear of Josephine’s independence. Perhaps it’s the reason this painting hurts a little, why the woman and her world remind us of how ultimately alone we are.
Of the people we spend our lives with, only their faces become familiar. We can only guess at what happens in their minds and hope that who we want to be and who we are thought to be bear some resemblance to one another.
Feelings of alienation, insignificance, and helplessness are the price of admission for an Existential awakening, and they all feel at play in Edward’s work and marriage. Coping with these feelings are struggles we all face, but we don’t need to be such a dick about it.
Even though the man who painted Pensive Lady in Pink used anger and violence to cope with his existential longing, audiences appreciate his work differently. We’ve used Edward Hopper’s paintings to illustrate our solidarity. The woman in this painting reminds us that feeling isolated could actually be something that brings us together.
Longing, melancholy, and a pensive gaze into the distance are all things we share.
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