Nighthawks
This is a lovely bit of fun. Courtesy of Jeremiah's Vanishing New York blog: a quest to track down the real site and inspiration for Edward Hopper's Nighthawks:
As the truth becomes clearer, I am finding it difficult to bear this idea that, outside of Hopper's imagination, there was no Nighthawks diner at all.Says the Art Institute of Chicago catalogue:
Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by "a restaurant on New York's Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet," but the image, with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative, has a timeless quality that transcends its particular locale... Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon... Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass. The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another.Writes Greg Cook in Visions of Isolation:
At the height of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, Hopper seemed an anachronism, but today he’s clearly part of the American Scene realism that includes documentary photography by Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore. And he comes into focus as godfather to the staged photos of Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, and Gregory Crewdson... In Edward Hopper’s world, everyone is lost in an unending rut of office overtime, rattling El trains, cheap fluorescent diners, and bad dates. Everything has fallen tensely quiet. And this anxious, itchy mood haunts even the urban landscapes — perhaps half his work — in which the only person around is you, the viewer. Here every man is an island...Women are the stars, usually in tight outfits or scantily clad, energizing canvases with their sexuality, their vulnerability, their unattainableness. Like the woman in the 1944 Morning in City, they appear alone, exhausted and sad, hardened by life, staring out the open windows of cheap hotel rooms.What's not to like? It also interests me that the characters in the painting are night hawks - predators - as opposed to night owls. The title is a contemporary colloquialism but the longer I stare at the painting the more the characters resemble perched birds - bright parrots in an aviary, or even vultures.