Who was the artist most used during the pandemic to illustrate stories about isolation?

As Brighton-based film-maker Phil Grabsky suggests in his new film Hopper: An American Love Story (in cinemas nationwide from October 18), it’s not necessarily a true reflection of just what Hopper was all about. “I was slightly surprised and a bit alarmed by how many people I was chatting to at various galleries didn't really know who he was,” says Phil who is doing a Q&A about the film, plus screening, in Worthing’s Connaught Cinema on Thurs, Oct 27.

“I was saying that I was making a film about Edward Hopper and they were blank so I'm a bit unsure as to actually how well known he is, but certainly his art was used a great deal during the Covid epidemic. His work had a very interesting trajectory. He was a consummate movie goer and he was also a consummate theatre goer, and he was influenced by the movies to start with but then there comes a point when he was influencing the movies. The house in Psycho is 100 per cent a copy of a house that Hopper had painted and Hitchcock acknowledged that. He told his set builders to copy the house. And it's true that there is something very cinematic about Hopper. A lot of people see his works without knowing that they are by him. People know his New York paintings and the fact that they are often of individuals in offices or in an automat or maybe in a bedroom sitting on a bed and sometimes seen from the elevated train. You are looking down into people's rooms and you snatch a glimpse of a couple having an argument or an individual just sitting there and I think they really resonate with people on that primary level, just making people think of loneliness and isolation.

“People have that impression of him which has gathered steam, the impression that he was a curmudgeonly, miserable man but in a sense that is not fair. He was extremely well read. He was very cultured, went to a lot of theatres and movies and he thought a long time before painting what he was going to paint.”

And the point is that his paintings are multi textured, multi narrative works that so often reward much closer viewing: “He gives you an image that you think you understand immediately. You know what you're looking at but if you look closer, what you're actually seeing is a little bit surprising. There is a famous painting called Automat. It's a woman sitting at a table having a cup of coffee and you are viewing her from the other side of the table and there is an empty chair. And this gets used in images of loneliness and depression but that is actually not at all what it is saying. He's saying that this woman is enjoying a moment of solitude. He is making a social point that women can go out in the 1940s and 1950s, they can dress up and wear make-up and sit and have a coffee and that it is perfectly acceptable, that no longer will anybody assume that they're on the make or on the pull. People have seen this as being about the absent male. They think where is the male. They think she's been stood up. But what Hopper is saying is that she is perfectly happy, lost in her own thoughts and just having a cup of coffee...”