Automat (painting)

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Automat

Edward Hopper, 1927

Oil on canvas

71.4 × 91.4 cm, 28 × 36 in

Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines

Automat (1927) is a painting by Edward Hopper which portrays a lone woman staring into a cup of coffee in an Automat at night. The reflection of identical rows of light fixtures stretches out through the night-blackened window.

As is often the case in Hopper's paintings, both the woman's circumstances and her mood are ambiguous. She is well-dressed and is wearing makeup, which could indicate either that she is on her way to or from work at a job where personal appearance is important, or that she is on her way to or from a social occasion. She has removed only one glove, which may indicate either that she is distracted, that she is in a hurry and can stop only for a moment, or simply that she has just come in from outside, and has not yet warmed up.

The time of year--late autumn or winter--is evident from the fact that the woman is warmly dressed. But the time of day is unclear, since days are short at this time of year. It is possible, for example, that it is just after sunset, and early enough in the evening that the automat could be the spot at which she has arranged to rendezvous with a friend. Or it could be late at night, after the woman has completed a shift at work. Or again, it could be early in the morning, before sunrise, as a shift is about to start.

Whatever the hour, the restaurant appears to be largely empty and there are no signs of activity (or of any life at all) on the street outside. This adds to the sense of loneliness, and has caused the painting to be popularly associated with the concept of urban alienation. One critic has observed that, in a pose typical of Hopper's melancholic subjects, "the woman's eyes are downcast and her thoughts turned inward." ^[1] Another critic has described her as "gazing at her coffee cup as if it were the last thing in the world she could hold on to." ^[2] In 1995, Time magazine used Automat as the cover image for a story about stress and depression in the 20th century. ^[3]

The pose is reminiscent of Edgar Degas's L'Absinthe--although unlike the subject in Degas' painting, the woman is introspective, rather than dissipated. In an innovative twist, Hopper made the woman’s legs the brightest spot in the painting, thereby “turning her into an object of desire” and “making the viewer a voyeur.”^[4] By today’s standards this description seems overstated, but in 1927 the public display of women’s legs was still a relatively novel phenomenon. The presence of a chairback in the lower right-hand corner of the canvas suggests that the viewer is sitting at a nearby table, from which vantage-point a stranger might be able to glance, uninvited, upon the woman.

Hopper would make the crossed legs of a female subject the brightest spot on an otherwise dark canvas in a number of later paintings, including Compartment C, Car 293 (1938) and Hotel Lobby (1943). ^[5] The female subject of his 1931 painting, Barber Shop, is also in a pose similar to the woman in Automat, and the viewer's image of her is similarly bisected by a table. But the placing of the subject in a bright, populated place, at midday, makes the woman less isolated and vulnerable, and hence the viewer's gaze seems less intrusive.

Hopper’s paintings are frequently built around a vignette that unfolds as the viewer gazes into a window, or out through a window. Sometimes, as in Railroad Sunset (1929), Nighthawks (1942) and Office in a Small City (1953), it is still possible to see details of the scene beyond even after Hopper has guided the viewer’s gaze through two panes of glass. When Hopper wishes to obscure the view, he tends to position the window at a sharp angle to the viewer’s vantage-point, or to block the view with curtains or blinds. Another favourite technique (used, for example, in Conference at Night (1949), is to use bright light, flooding in from the exterior at a sharp angle from the sun or from an unseen streetlight, to illuminate a few mundane details within inches of the far side of the window, thereby throwing the deeper reaches of the view into shadow.

By contrast, in Automat the window dominates the painting, and yet conveys no information at all about the world outside, other than the fact that it is night. The complete blackness outside is a departure both from Hopper’s usual techniques, and from realism, since a New York street at night is full of light from cars and street lamps. This complete emptiness allows the reflections from the interior to stand out more dramatically, and intensifies the viewer’s focus upon the woman. The focusing effect of the blank window behind the woman can be seen most clearly when it is contrasted with Sunlight in a Cafeteria (1958), one of Hopper’s late paintings. In this painting, a female and a male subject sit in an otherwise empty cafeteria in spots reminiscent of the tables occupied, respectively, by the female subject and the viewer in Automat. But in Sunlight in a Cafeteria, the well-illuminated street scene outside the large window seemingly distracts the man's attention from his counterpart, so that the two subjects “do not seem to be acting in the same scene, as it were.”^[6] By contrast, in Automat the viewer is fully engaged by the presence of the woman.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Iversen, Margaret: Edward Hopper. Tate Publishing, 2004, p. 57.
2. ^ Schmied, Wieland: Edward Hopper: Portraits of America. Translated by John William Gabriel. Munich: Prestel, 1999, p. 76.
3. ^ Time magazine, August 28, 1995
4. ^ Robert Hobbs, Edward Hopper. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987, p. 72.
5. ^ The comparison between Automat and Hotel Lobby is made in Robert Hobbs, Edward Hopper. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987, p. 137.
6. ^ Rolf Gunter Renner, Edward Hopper. Cologne, Germany: Benedikt Taschen, 1990, p. 81.