Alyson's Art Appreciation instructor assigned a writing piece that inspired her to think, if you'll excuse the cliche, outside the box. Students were encouraged to choose three different, yet similar, pieces of artwork and discuss their similarites and differences. Alyson, whose ambition is to become a museum curator, chose three pieces of artwork and compared them to a Hemingway short story. When we discussed her idea, she asked if it was too far-fetched. "No way," I said. "Your instructor is going to appreciate the creative thought here!" The following is Alyson's response to the assignment. Please enjoy! Then pick up a Hemingway short story or two! And seek out some artwork by the talented artists Alyson documents in her blog.
To curate is to sort through and organize items, namely art, to compose a coherent and consequential collection. However, art extends beyond renaissance paintings, life-sized topiaries, and marble statues. We curate our own lives every day by coordinating our closets, fine tuning our social media feeds, and categorizing our bookshelves to perfection. Often, we curate our shelves to make our favorite stories, the ones that stick with us, the most prominent and accessible. A short story that has stuck with me is “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemmingway. The tale follows an older waiter as he journeys from his clean, well-lit café to a less pleasant bodega, back to his empty home where he will not be able to sleep. The theme of this story is the nada, or nothingness, which gets into our heads and makes us feel isolated even in the presence of hope. Hemmingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is a timeless piece whose universal themes are reflected in the selected art pieces.
“Well-Lighted Place” begins in a Spanish café, while two waiters, one older and lonely, one younger and impatient, stand behind the bar to speculate on the life of a lonely deaf man who cannot hear the younger waiter’s mocking. The older waiter empathizes with the man— neither wants to go home— and implores his colleague “you do not understand. This is a clean and pleasant café. It is well lit. The light is very good.” Nighthawks, an oil painting by American artist Edward Hopper, portrays urban America in the 1940s (fig 1). Although painted in 1942, Nighthawks transcends era and depicts an unanimously American image. Three figures sit, and one employee works the counter in an otherwise empty diner at a terrible hour in the morning, or night. None of them speak to one another; they exist in the same space together, but they are alone. This is the clean, well-lighted place that Hemmingway’s waiter reveres. The bright, unnatural fluorescent lights tint the diner a shade of yellow and infuse a clinical atmosphere, rather than a warm and welcoming one, but it contrasts the foreboding greens and blues that wait outside for the patrons. The only visible door leads deep into the bowels of the diner, so no one can leave, even if they wanted to. If the party is aware of entrapment in their own solitude, it does not show. In the same way, Hemmingway’s waiter wants a clean, well-lighted place in which to be lonely.
The stubborn younger waiter kicks the deaf man out, closes the café down early, and goes home to his wife. The older waiter, not ready to go home, reaches a bodega, a Spanish winery. The barman does not humor his observation that “the light is very bright and pleasant, but the bar is un-polished.” The Night Café by Vincent van Gogh is far from clean and pleasant (fig 2). The bar scene depicts shuffled tables, disheveled people, and empty glasses and bottles strewn around the room. Van Gogh’s impasto style makes the intrepid brushstrokes of oil paint rise from the canvas. The hanging light fixtures, which emit a dim orange light mingled with a sickly shade of green, radiate turbulence in an unsettling way. The grimy unfriendly environment of an unkempt bar is one that Van Gogh was familiar with in 1888. His command of color is stimulating in that he chose the complimentary colors red and green to paint the walls of his café. The way they clash incurs an unsettled feeling in the viewer. While most of the patrons are slumped over their own tables, a man in a white suit shoots an ominous glare in the viewer’s direction. The ambiance of the piece is hostile, just as Hemmingway’s waiter feels he does not belong in the bodega.
Once he reflects that it is no use staying at the bodega, the older waiter decides he will go home. However, he knows he will not be able to fall asleep until morning breaks. He convinces himself “it’s probably only insomnia,” but it is more than a medical condition that keeps him from sleeping at night. The older waiter cannot sleep because he is clouded with restlessness and fear of the dark— the unknown— the nothingness. On his way to the bodega, the waiter prays to nothing: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name.” Plegarias Bajo el Discurso, translated as Prayers Under the Discourse, was painted by José Vivenes, a contemporary Venezuelan artist. Produced in 2014, the painting depicts a figure with hands clasped tightly together in a sign of prayer. We are not able to identify the person, or whether they are male or female, because the heavy, scrabbled brushstrokes that make up the background have marred the subject’s face in inky black marks. The only discerning features are folded hands, a chin, and an ear. The background splits horizontally, with the lower portion composed of enthusiastic shades of red, orange, and yellow, while the upper portion, the part that meets the figure’s head, is white as if prayer is a supplier of peace amid fire. While this may be for the subject of Vivenes’ painting, Hemmingway’s waiter does not receive such serenity when he prays to nada.
The thread among these three paintings and “Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is the pervasive nothingness that harbors hopelessness. Nighthawks depicts the nada that awaits the customers if they were to leave the diner. The Night Café depicts the meaninglessness of the drunk patrons. Prayer Under the Discourse depicts an attempt to run from the emptiness by finding solace in God. These works do more than mirror Hemmingway’s short story. They affirm that the narrative is more than just a story— it is life.
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Fig. 1. Hopper, Edward. Nighthawks. 1942. Google Arts and Culture, www.artsandculture.google.com/asset/nighthawks/6AEKkO_F-9wicw.
Fig 2. Vincent Van Gogh. The Night Café. 1888. Yale University Art Gallery, www.artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/12507.
Fig. 3. José Vivenes. Plegarias Bajo el Discurso (Prayers under the discourse). 2014. The Venezuelan American Endowment for the Arts,www.vaearts.org/US/archives/portfolio-items/jose-vivenes.
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway by
Hopper by
Publication Date: 1994-06-01
