Yes, As a Matter of Fact, My Purse Is Occupying This Seat

The East Side is like the past and a foreign country -- they do things differently there.

Tonight we got on the M3 bus, to ride near home from a curator tour of the Whitney's "Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time", only to find the front aisle of the bus jammed and all seats filled except for the three person bench seat, the one where you must give up your place should a handicapped person board, directly behind the driver. Two women, apparently not acquainted, sat at either end of the bench, and between them, occupying the third space, sat their two fat purses. Despite the numerous standees, neither made any move to set the purses on their respective laps and there the matter rested for two stops until one of them got up, taking her purse and, at the same time, revealing the cause of the congestion in the aisle -- she had a midsized suitcase on wheels whose pull handle she had fully extended into the aisle, so that the suitcase blocked all access to the rear of the bus. Call her Woman Number One. She got off and, with my wife now sitting on the facing bench, I sat in Woman Number One's place. As I did, I saw a small laminated card, like a club or museum membership card, where she had been plopped. I picked it up and immediately Woman Number Two ordered, "Give me that." Too surprised to do anything but comply, I handed it over and, after examining it front and back, she dropped it into the purse, which did now rest on her lap. I guess I looked like I wanted nothing more than to snatch it.

The curator tour was excellent, how pictures were selected for the exhibition, how they were prepped, and shipped to Europe for two museum runs before opening at Hopper's home museum, how Hopper lived for the last 50 years of his life until his death at 86 in a small fourth floor walkup apartment in the village.

I love Hopper, but I have always thought that the critics have his work completely wrong. He is the artist of isolation and alienation only if you consider the often solitary people in his paintings to be the primary subject of them. Instead, Hopper is, I think, about something else, saying again and again in his work that man is part and only part of something much bigger, the buildings of the modern city and, even more, the openness of small towns and the fields beyond and about them.