In 1989, artist and scholar Maryanne Meltzer submitted a grasp’s thesis to the College of Texas at Dallas with a title that reads like a analysis: Artists Depict Alienation: The Modern Social Illness. For Meltzer, alienation wasn’t an summary thought—it was a lived situation, “the religious malaise of contemporary Western society,” marked by “loneliness, estrangement, melancholy, and a sense of impotency in coping with the advanced issues of contemporary life.”
The thesis traces this malaise again to seismic historic modifications. “The widespread up to date points of alienation,” she wrote, “appear to stem primarily from the main modifications in life patterns which have been the results of the Industrial Revolution.” Karl Marx had described alienation in 1844 because the separation of individuals “from the product of [their] labour… from different males,” whereas Erich Fromm noticed its roots within the breakdown of medieval neighborhood life and the rise of individualism underneath capitalism. For Meltzer, these forces left folks “deserted, forlorn, and weak,” even in an age of technological progress.
Artists, she argued, have lengthy mirrored and resisted such social circumstances. Traditionally, they moved from serving as shamans and artisans for rulers to changing into unbiased commentators on “the seamier points of society.” Within the fashionable period, many have turned their consideration to alienation. Meltzer zeroed in on two American painters who, regardless of stylistic variations, shared an uncanny capacity to depict isolation: Edward Hopper and George Tooker.
Hopper, “the painter of loneliness,” usually positioned solitary figures in nameless city interiors—lodge rooms, diners, places of work—bathed in uncompromising mild. In Nighthawks (1942), she famous, “a gaggle of strangers [is] assembled for just a few moments in an all-night restaurant… remoted and alienated from one another, speaking by neither contact nor look.” His Room in Brooklyn (1932) exhibits a lone girl gazing passively out a window, separated from the viewer by a shadow “barrier,” whereas Early Sunday Morning (1930) strips a metropolis avenue of life, leaving solely “forlorn solitude” within the cool morning mild.
If Hopper’s world is lonely, Tooker’s is claustrophobic. Utilizing egg tempera and meticulous planning, he constructed allegorical areas of bureaucratic or technological entrapment. In Panorama with Figures (1966), Meltzer describes “a geometrical collection of grids” containing “nearly equivalent female and male faces” with “dazed, numbed expression[s]… certainly one of humankind’s most persistent nightmares.” Authorities Bureau (1956) exhibits faceless petitioners and outsized clerk eyes staring “chilly[ly]… ignoring the ready folks.” For The Ready Room (1959), Tooker himself referred to as it “a type of purgatory—folks simply ready… not being one’s self… ready for one thing that may be higher—which by no means comes.”
“A type of purgatory—folks simply ready… not being one’s self… ready for one thing that may be higher—which by no means comes.” — George Tooker, on The Ready Room
Meltzer didn’t simply analyze different artists—she put her personal work on the examination desk. In Eleven Brides (1985), eleven emaciated ladies are “seemingly entombed” in womb-like membranes, their gestures passive and expressions uninteresting. And Who Speaks? (1987) presents three blind-eyed ladies with dangling arms: “It’s our personal duty to talk, to behave, to affect the destiny of humanity,” she wrote. Her Strolling Males prints (1987–89) characteristic clean, eyeless males shifting mechanically towards unknown locations, a “life’s countless treadmill” stripped of individuality.
Throughout all these examples, Meltzer recognized a toolkit of visible “gadgets” that talk alienation: the number of material that disconnects viewer and determine, physique language that alerts passivity, shade decisions that jar or chill, spatial relationships that crowd or isolate, distortion that dehumanizes, mild that exposes with out heat, repetition that erases individuality, and masks that cover or falsify id. These, she argued, “instantly set up a lack of particular person id” and switch human topics into emblems of a shared situation.
For Meltzer, such artwork doesn’t simply embellish—it diagnoses. Quoting thinker Herbert Marcuse, she reminded readers that “the reality of artwork lies on this: that the world actually is because it seems within the murals.” Within the worlds of Hopper, Tooker, and her personal canvases, the view is evident: ours is a society crowded but disconnected, illuminated but chilly, wherein too many dwell, as she put it, “alienated—from one another and from life itself.”
