Channel Hopper

Last night’s episode of Mad Men, A Night To Remember: the final shot. Don Draper drinking a solitary Heineken in the kitchenette of his office, having been told by his cuckolded wife, Betty, not to come home (“I don’t care what you do, I just don’t want you here”). Anyone else seeing the work of a very famous American painter here? A New York-born painter whose work, focused often on single, stoic, reflective figures in still lives, predominantly urban and artificially lit, dealt with the loneliness of modern existence? (I know his most important work was painted in the 1940s and 50s, but what’s a couple of decades between existentialists?)

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