NICHOLAS MULROY

Hopper’s work has a dangerously cool beauty, a deceptive glamour that easily derails us from the important questions. Who is this woman? Where’s she been (or where is she going) with those full cases? There’s cruelty, too – his wife was the model and a(nother) woman whose artistic talent was subdued for the sake of her husband’s. With its combination of isolation and exposure, of solitude and being watched, it tells us something about city life, of being surrounded by people but shut out or in. Loneliness, as the song goes, comes with life.