American painter Edward Hopper once said, "Maybe I am not very human--what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house." Indeed, Hopper's canvases delineate a new physics of Modern public space, in which the zones between people are not charged with responsiveness (affection, animosity, attraction) but with absolute indifference. Whether alone or grouped, Hopper's solitary figures bespeak Modern metropolitan conditions with a clarity...