As people around the world try to come to terms with the new reality that has suddenly presented itself as a nightmare we stand at the window like so many great artists of the past who communicated their feelings for the world beyond their windows – and, at times, their sense of detachment from it.
Who has never said: “It's nice to look out the windows."
An observation that plays a precise role but also because it contains a profound truth. We all know that the windows of a house were created to allow air and light to pass through, but it is also true that they ended up becoming real stages on which ostentation, mystery, fiction, hope of the world.
In the novels set in the Middle Ages they are blind, sinister or unreachable. In the poem they speak to the senses in an allusive way, and the eye becomes the window to the soul.
In common parlance they are often the protagonists of figurative locutions, for example: stare at the window; go out the door and come in through the window; eat this soup or jump out the window. The film industry would hardly have survived without windows: think of the gloved hand at the doorknob, of the curtains that flutter in the night revealing the escape route; to glass shattered by a fleeing criminal; to the silhouette that emerges against the curtain under the watchful gaze of the man stationed on the other side of the road.
The windows seem to exert a magnetic hold on things, and often turn into showcases where a sample of the life of those who live behind them is displayed; or they can be the places to turn your thoughts to infinity.
Who does not remember the school windows. In the spring an air full of flattery entered the classroom. In late autumn, the first signs of snow evoked the scent of Christmas trees and the lights on in the houses. The windows of the school attract and confine, promise and deny. They are glass plates on which the butterflies of youthful hopes mark the passing of the years with their heartbeat.
Windows seen at night are like frames in a film: animated snapshots. Often, however, in the history of art the windows have been not only a means of illuminating the subject, but the subject itself to allow the observer to embrace the painting with a single glance, Leonardo framed in the Cenacolo Jesus and the disciples standing beside him in a window and door.
Windows have also found a place in popular beliefs for a long time, such as knowing that if they are washed it will rain. But even a dirty glass has its advantages, because it allows us to discover how bright the colors of the outside world are when we leave the house. Often the windows of a house are dirty also because we want to see what is comfortable for us.
Today, however, the windows are the gaze to infinity, they are the banks of a river in flood, they are the insurmountable limit. Beyond the silence, the day that turns into night without being able to participate in it, the future that appears uncertain to us, life that bends over to tiredness. And only yesterday they were the windows to the world.
There are many artists who have been to the windows to let their gaze, their thoughts or their mood of the moment run away, here are three examples (source Christie's):
Every day for the last two decades of his life, Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) and his wife Marthe ate breakfast and lunch in the second-floor parlor of their modest villa, Le Bosquet (“The Grove”), overlooking the bay of Cannes. The couple bought the house in 1926, when the artist was nearly 60, and Bonnard created this painting the following year.
Carl Vilhelm Holsøe (1863-1935), like his contemporary Vilhelm Hammershøi, was known for his sparse, tranquil interiors reminiscent of introspection and timelessness. In contrast to Hammershøi, who often used a closed window to symbolically shut out the outside world, Holsøe features an open door in this painting with a full view of the sunny garden, inviting the outside.
After the death of his architect father, Ernst L. Freud – himself the fourth son of Sigmund Freud – in 1970, Lucian Freud (1922-2011) began to paint townhouses and factories. At Waste Ground, Paddington, created in the same year, Freud depicted the debris outside his studio window with the same painstaking scrutiny he applied to his nudes and portraits of him.
Cover image: Edward Hopper Room in Brooklyn, 1932
