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Parul Bhandari’s The Art of Solitude considers Amrita Sher-Gil, Edvard Munch and Edward Hopper through paintings of women together, a deserted street and an anxious figure among a crowd. Published on May 5, 2020, during the first months of COVID-19 lockdowns, the essay argues that these artists felt “more relevant now than ever before.” That is a pandemic-era interpretation, not a measurable claim that their importance had objectively increased.
What Bhandari means by the art of solitude
Bhandari begins with a question about the value of isolation and interaction. Her answer takes shape through four works: Sher-Gil’s Three Girls (1935), Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning (1930), and Munch’s Evening on Karl Johan Street (1892) and The Scream (1893). The paintings do not depict one uniform experience. Solitude can register as pressure within domestic life, the quiet of an unpeopled city, or estrangement among people.
The essay’s pandemic frame helps explain its urgency, but it does not exhaust the paintings. Each work belongs to its own historical and artistic context; the connections to lockdown, distancing and uncertainty are Bhandari’s interpretive bridge to 2020.
Amrita Sher-Gil: uncertainty among three women
Three Girls (1935)
Bhandari treats Three Girls as a turning point after Sher-Gil moved to India. The women appear together, but their shared space does not erase their individual states. Bhandari reads them through uncertainty, resignation, anxiety and self-reliance, and connects that reading to the domestic burdens women faced during lockdown.
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This is an interpretation rather than a definitive key to the painting. It also complicates the notion that solitude requires physical separation: people can share a room or household and still experience private worry or isolation. The work’s group setting therefore makes the essay’s opening tension between isolation and interaction visible.
Edward Hopper: urban stillness and economic unease
Early Sunday Morning (1930)
Hopper’s painting presents an empty New York street. Bhandari connects its small-business setting to economic crisis, making the quiet feel more than merely peaceful: an absent crowd can suggest interruption and uncertainty about livelihoods.
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The Whitney Museum of American Art’s teacher guide offers a broader account of Hopper’s visual language: “Hopper’s isolated figures, estranged couples, and stark rooms imbue his images with a deep sense of mystery, loneliness, and solitude.” The description helps place the street scene within a larger body of work, while remaining the Whitney’s characterization rather than a statement by Hopper. Read the Whitney’s Edward Hopper teacher guide.
Edvard Munch: alienation in a crowd and anxiety before the world
Evening on Karl Johan Street (1892)
In Bhandari’s reading, the individual in Evening on Karl Johan Street experiences angst within a crowd. Unlike Hopper’s empty street, Munch’s scene places people together; the tension comes from feeling apart despite their presence. The contrast shows why solitude in these paintings is not simply a count of how many figures appear.
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The Scream (1893)
Bhandari connects The Scream to modern anxiety and considers an ecological reading through the painting’s title and fiery sky. This is one possible interpretive frame, not a settled explanation of the work. Together with the crowded street scene, it extends the essay’s question from loneliness between people to distress that seems to encompass the world around them.
Solitude is not equally available to everyone
Calling solitude universal can conceal the social conditions that shape who gets to be alone, and whether seclusion is experienced as chosen refuge or imposed constraint. The Agnes Etherington Art Centre’s 2021–2022 exhibition Studies in Solitude examined seventeenth-century Dutch images of seclusion in relation to piety, moral judgement, gender and access to privacy. Its framing asked who has been permitted the luxury of solitude. The exhibition is over, but that question remains a useful caution when reading Bhandari’s pandemic-era examples.
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The exhibition description also noted that it “broadened the lens on female power to consider images of strong women using their minds and bodies to test the boundaries of gender hierarchies.” This historical context does not determine the meaning of Sher-Gil’s painting; it underscores that solitude and privacy carry different meanings across social positions and periods. Explore the Agnes Etherington Art Centre’s Studies in Solitude exhibition text.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How the four paintings make different kinds of solitude visible
| Work | Social setting | Kind of solitude in Bhandari’s reading |
|---|---|---|
| Amrita Sher-Gil, Three Girls (1935) | Three women together | Domestic and existential pressure, with anxiety and self-reliance |
| Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning (1930) | An empty New York street | Urban quiet associated with economic uncertainty |
| Edvard Munch, Evening on Karl Johan Street (1892) | An individual among a crowd | Angst and alienation despite proximity to others |
| Edvard Munch, The Scream (1893) | A figure against a fiery sky | Modern anxiety, including Bhandari’s possible ecological interpretation |
The comparison clarifies the essay’s central idea: solitude is not one visual motif or single emotional state. It may arise inside a group, in a city emptied of its usual activity, or in an encounter with a crowd that offers no sense of connection. Bhandari’s 2020 argument invites readers to look again at those distinctions through the disruptions of lockdown, without claiming that the paintings mean only what that moment made visible.
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