Büro in einer Kleinstadt

By 1953 American cities were filling with new glass-walled office buildings, and Hopper set a single man high inside one of them. This was the only oil painting he finished that year. The man sits in his shirtsleeves in a bare concrete corner, one window in front of him and another beside his head, looking out over the rooftops and, it seems, not working at all. Hopper's wife called him simply the man in the concrete wall. There is no desk clutter, no telephone, no colleague, nothing to say what his job even is. The light falls hard and flat, and the man stays perfectly still inside his box of glass and stone.