What is the girl doing alone in the room?
Poor Vincent. Anyway...
Since I saw it on the dust jacket of a book by Soledad Puértolas called "Queda la noche" edited by Planeta in 1989, this painting surprised me: "Hotel Room" painted by Edward Hopper in 1931.
It is an allegory to loneliness. What is the girl doing alone in a hotel room? It looks as if she has just arrived from a journey and is making herself comfortable. It is hot, the window is open, her bags and shoes are on the floor, her hat on the furniture on the right, her clothes on the armchair in the back, next to the window. Who is she waiting for? What is she waiting for? Her look seems to get lost in a paper, a train timetable they say. Where is she going? Where is she coming from? What we know for sure is that she is lonely and pensive, even though behind the window there might be hundreds, thousands, millions of people, or no one. She is alone. Is she thinking about it?
Hopper plays with the vertical and horizontal lines, only broken by the diagonal of the bed from the girl to the window. He plays with light and shadow. He takes us into the painting and incites us to ask her: What is wrong? What do you need?
This would be the first one of a series of paintings Hopper made on hotels, to which he went a lot because he liked travelling very much. He was born in Nyack, United States, in 1882, in a well-off family. In 1900, he enters the New York School of Art, at the same time as future North American painters of the fifties.
