The Boulevard of Broken Dreams

(Click here for the Romanian version)

I saw it firstly in an apartment in Manhattan. A framed poster of The Nighthawks. By that time I didn’t know anything about Hopper. The image had some strange power, it was like telling you that there was a story behind, or more. A bar, looking like virtually any given bar in the Greenwich Village. The name, Phillies, was not meant to give a localization, rather to suggest some indefinite place anywhere in that universe fastened around Christopher Street and Sheridan Square.

I discovered him again in Bucharest. The bookstore at the Dalles Foundation, a Hopper album – and on the cover, The Nighthawks. Near the albums of Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Georgia O'Keefe. Only Hopper was looking alone, even among them. The painter of loneliness – lonely people, alone at a table, alone in a room, alone in a crowd. Alone among alone objects.

The Nighthawks, a couple, each one alone, like strangers, then another drinker, and the bartender - all caged behind the huge window – a mystery in each character, almost unbearable.

What could be the story of the couple, strangers living together? And what story carries the other man, alone with his glass? And the bartender? What does he know about these stories? Could even be Hopper, this bartender? Omniscient and discreet? Skeptic and understanding everything? A skeptical humanist of Chekhovian elegance?

And the explanation in the album was flowing, the heroes, life-weary, no illusions, à la James Dean, à la Humphrey Bogart.

The original is in Chicago, at the Art Institute. Copies spread all over the world.

At the Washington National Gallery, another Hopper, Cape Cod Evening. Another couple – he seems lost into his thoughts, while looking absently at their dog. The dog is full of life, looks smart, curious, keen… in dialogue with the wind. She is also looking at the dog, while smiling. There is in her smile irony, and resignation, and understanding, everything. Is that woman actually Hopper? Her smile like his smile, from a self-portrait seen in the album in Bucharest.



New York, Whitney Museum, a Hopper room. Why South Carolina Morning (a woman rested on her door) and Seven AM (the window of a pharmacy, with a wall clock) suggest the same loneliness?



Soir Bleu, with a Pierrot in a café. The other characters seem like coming from the universe of Cezanne, only the waitress looks like painted by Guy Pené du Bois. Each one alone – and Pierrot as a synthesis of all the others.

Why is Soir Bleu considered an insuccess? It’s fantastic. Is Pierrot actually Hopper? His last painting would show two comedians on the stage, behind them the curtain, in front of them the attendance – they are not on the canvas, for we are the attendance – the comedians are Hopper and his wife, also an artist. Two comedians, the name of the painting.

Almodovar in his movies is obsessed by the existential condition of the actor. An actor wears always a mask, does he exist as himself any more? Or has he become just a wanderer from one character to another?

Small Town Station, Second Story Sunlight, Railroad Sunset – known from the album seen so many times in Bucharest, now hanging on the walls at Whitney.

And I was dreaming again at The Nighthawks, at those life-weary heroes, à la James Dean, à la Humphrey Bogart… I ordered a copy, it came by mail after a week.

Well, it was The Nighthawks while it was not.

For it was The Boulevard of Broken Dreams - a replica to The Nighthawks. The characters were exactly James Dean and Humphrey Bogart, the woman was Marilyn Monroe. And the bartender was Elvis Presley.

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Where the city sleeps...
I walk a lonely road.
The only one that I have ever known.
Don't know where it goes.
But it's home to me and I walk alone.
I walk this empty street.
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

So I discovered another painter, Gottfried Helnwein – he painted the replica. One of the few exciting painters of today (according to Norman Mailer). And Bogart, Dean, Marilyn and Elvis are from now on together, smiling at us in the eternity. Loneliness is over.







(New York, New York)

(Hopper)