She is amazed to find herself in the Hirshhorn—
amidst works that are the last word, for now,
in contemporary post-post-postmodernity—
its many iterations of installation,
abstracted or deconstructed.
This woman, star of the one and only
representational piece in the show,
resides, for some reason, at the end.
Walk past her, and you are out the door.
She has bared her body, or rather Hopper has.
He has adorned her only in black shoes.
She gazes, reflectively, out a window,
seeking, perhaps, to observe the tourists
smarming the National Mall
or the National Gallery.
Or maybe she yearns uphill
for the SAAM or the Phillips.
No doubt she regrets
that the Corcoran
is gone.
Hopper famously declared he desired
to paint sunlight on the side of a building,
but the painted sunlight we see here
has only penetrated a window
to shine on the beige of the woman’s skin,
the blue of the chair,
the mottled red of the table cloth,
and the bright green of the carpet.
The colors here are complimentary
and complementary, too,
but we cannot tell how the woman
feels about that;
her hair falls over most of her face,
granting us only a glimpse
of the tip of her nose.
What she feels
is beyond what we see.
Does her position
as the odd living end
of a display of contemporaneity mean
“the last shall be first”
and that 1926 will endure forever
or, perhaps,
if we enter by means of the exit,
come again?