Chad Taylor

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.

L.H.O.O.Q



"New research has found that the Mona Lisa’s famed smile is almost certainly ‘forced’ – raising the intriguing possibility that Leonardo deliberately portrayed her that way."

"Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci's muse for Mona Lisa may have suffered from hypothyroidism, according to an Indian-origin scientist who studied the features of the world-famous portrait. Mandeep R Mehra, from Brigham and Women's Hospital in the US, summarised the possible medical conditions visible in the portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the woman pictured in Mona Lisa, and proposed his own interpretations."

"For centuries, art historians have been troubled by Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile - but, according to one doctor, her cholesterol levels were more worrying. For Dr Vito Franco, from Palermo University, she shows clear signs of a build-up of fatty acids under the skin, caused by too much cholesterol. He also suggests there seems to be a lipoma, or benign fatty-tissue tumour, in her right eye."
-- BBC, 2010

"Recently, it has been speculated that Mona Lisa's famous smile is caused by facial muscle contracture and/or synkinesis after Bell's palsy with incomplete nerval regeneration."
-- Klinikum der Universität Düsseldorf. (article in German)

"It is believed, however, that the Mona Lisa does not smile; she wears an expression common to people who have lost their front teeth. A close-up of the lip area shows a scar that is not unlike that left by the application of blunt force. The changes evident in the perioral area are such that occur when the anterior teeth are lost. The scar under the lower lip of the Mona Lisa is similar to that created, when, as a result of force, the incisal edges of the teeth have pierced the face with a penetrating wound."
-- Journal of Forensic Sciences, 1992

"Why is she looking so sad? . . . She married at the end of 1488 when she came to Milan but she had a big problem. She married her cousin, a beautiful man but he was a drinker, and he had problems with impotence."
-- The Age, 2004

"Researchers studying 3-D images of the “Mona Lisa” say she was probably either pregnant or had just given birth when she sat for Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th-century masterpiece. "
-- Associated Press Sept. 27, 2006

"People have long been fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Her enigmatic smile has been the subject of debate for centuries, even leading Sigmund Freud to speculate that the painting was actually da Vinci's self-portrait."
-- Medhunters.com

"The Mona Lisa originally had eyebrows, according to a French art expert who has analysed Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece with a special camera."
-- Telegraph, 2009

"University of Illinois researchers last year used facial-recognition software to analyze the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile. They concluded the model was happy, with touches of disgust, fear and anger, at least as Leonardo da Vinci painted her, the Champaign (Ill.) News-Gazette reported Tuesday."
-- Physorg.com, 2006

"For centuries, artists, historians and tourists have been fascinated by Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile. Now it seems that the power of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece comes in part from an unlikely source: random noise in our visual systems."
-- New Scientist 2004

"What put that smile on the Mona Lisa's face? S-E-X! She was a 16th century hooker!"
-- Weekly World News, 1991

"A male apprentice, longtime companion and possible lover of Leonardo da Vinci was the main influence and a model for the Mona Lisa painting, an Italian researcher said."
-- CBC, 2011

"An Italian researcher says the key to solving the enigmas of Mona Lisa lies in her eyes. Silvano Vinceti claims he has found the letter "S" in the woman's left eye, the letter "L" in her right eye, and the number "72" under the arched bridge in the backdrop of Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting. According to the researcher, the symbols open up new leads to identifying the model, dating the painting, and attesting to Leonardo's interest in religion and mysticism."
-- CBS News, 2011

"On the basis of subjective (thirty-two participants estimated painter–model constellations) as well as objective data (analysis of trajectories between landmarks of both paintings), we revealed that both versions differ slightly in perspective. We reconstructed the original studio setting and found evidence that the disparity between both paintings mimics human binocular disparity. This points to the possibility that the two Giocondas together might represent the first stereoscopic image in world history."
-- Claus-Christian Carbon, Vera M Hesslinger Perception, 2013

"The Mona Lisa was based not just on a Florentine merchant’s wife but also on Leonardo da Vinci’s male apprentice and probable gay lover, an Italian art detective claims. Silvano Vinceti said the portrait, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris, is an “androgynous” amalgam of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy merchant from Tuscany, and Gian Giacomo Caprotti, better known by his nickname, Salai."
-- Nick Squires (in Rome)  The Telegraph 21 April 2016

"Perhaps the Mona Lisa had syphilis... If the Mona Lisa is a portrait of someone with a sexually transmitted disease, these hints of death and illness suddenly make sense. As for her half-smile, it becomes a wry acknowledgement that sex can make you sick. This macabre message fits well with Sigmund Freud's analysis of Leonardo. Freud argued in his 1910 book Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood that the polymath researcher who not only painted but also filled notebooks with his scientific studies was repelled by sex. Leonardo was homosexual, he says, but afraid of intercourse with men or women. Instead, he "sublimated" sexuality into research."
-- Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, 2017

Addendum:

"A spring-propelled car that Leonardo da Vinci conceived five centuries ago could have paved the way for the Mars rovers, researchers say."
-- ABC News, 2004