Nighthawks

Nighthawks

Edward Hopper, 1942

Oil on canvas

84.1 × 152.4 cm, 33.1 × 60 in

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Nighthawks (1942) is a painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner late at night. It is not only Hopper's most famous painting, but one of the most recognizable in American art. It is currently in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

"Nighthawk" may be Hopper's take on the term "Night Owl", used to describe someone who stays up especially late. The scene was inspired by a diner (since demolished) in Greenwich Village, Hopper's home neighborhood in Manhattan. Hopper began painting it immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor. After this event there was a large feeling of gloominess over the country, a feeling that is portrayed in the painting. The urban street is empty outside the diner, and inside none of the three patrons is apparently looking or talking to the others but instead is lost in their own thoughts. Two are a couple, while the third is a man sitting alone, with his back to the viewer. The couple's noses resemble beaks, perhaps a reference to the title. The diner's sole attendant, looking up from his work, appears to be peering out the window past the customers. His age is ambiguous.

The corner of the eating establishment is curved; curved glass connects the large expanse of glass on its two sides. Weather is understood to be warm, based on clothing worn by the patrons. No overcoats are in evidence; the woman's blouse is short sleeved. Across the street are what looks like may be open windows on the second story. The light from the restaurant floods out onto the street outside, and a sliver of light casts its way into one of the windows.

This portrayal of modern urban life as empty or lonely is a common theme throughout Hopper's work. This is sharply outlined by the fact that the man with his back to us appears more lonely because of the couple sitting next to him. If one looks closely, it becomes apparent that there is no way out of the bar area, as the three walls of the counter form a triangle which traps the attendant. It is also notable that the diner has no visible door leading to the outside, which illustrates the idea of confinement and entrapment. Hopper denied that he had intended to communicate this in Nighthawks, but he admitted that "unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city." At the time of the painting, fluorescent lights had just been developed, perhaps contributing to why the diner is casting such an eerie glow upon the almost pitch black outside world. An advertisement for Phillies cigars is featured on top of the diner.

The conclusion can also be made that Hopper painted the emptiness of an urban city. This conclusion can be substantiated by the observation that three-quarters of the painting is empty and has no sign of human life in it.

Painting and sculpture

Roger Brown's Puerto Rican Wedding (1969). Brown said that the café in the lower left corner of this painting "isn't set up like an imitation of Nighthawks, but still refers to it very much."^[1]

Many artists have produced works that allude or respond to Nighthawks. An early example is George Segal's sculpture The Diner (1964-66), made from parts of a real diner with Segal's white plaster figures added, which resembles Nighthawks in its sense of loneliness and alienation as well as in its subject matter. Roger Brown, one of the Chicago Imagists, included a view into a corner cafe in his painting Puerto Rican Wedding (1969), a stylized nighttime street scene. Hopper influenced the Photorealists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Ralph Goings, who evoked Nighthawks in several paintings of diners. Another Photorealist, Richard Estes, painted a corner store in People's Flowers (1971), but in daylight, with the shop's large window reflecting the street and sky.^[2]

More direct visual quotations began to appear in the 1970s. Perhaps the best known is Gottfried Helnwein's painting Boulevard of Broken Dreams (1987), widely sold as a poster, which replaces the three diner patrons with American pop culture icons Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean, and the attendant with Elvis Presley. According to Hopper scholar Gail Levin, Helnwein connected the bleak mood of Nighthawks with 1950s American cinema and with "the tragic fate of the decade's best-loved celebrities."^[3] Greenwich Avenue (1986), one of several versions of Nighthawks painted by Mark Kostabi, increases the painting's scale and uses a palette of garish electric colors; the human figures are red and faceless. Nighthawks Revisited, a 1980 parody by Red Grooms, clutters the street scene with pedestrians, cats, and trash,^[4] while a canvas by the British graffiti artist Banksy adds a man in Union Flag boxer shorts who has just thrown a chair at the diner window.^[5]

Film

Hopper was an avid moviegoer, and critics have noted the resemblance of his paintings to film stills. Several of his paintings suggest gangster films of the early 1930s such as Scarface and Little Caesar, a connection that can be seen in the clothes of the customers in Nighthawks. Nighthawks and other works such as Night Shadows (1921) also anticipate the look of film noir, whose development Hopper may have influenced.^[6][7]

Hopper was an acknowledged influence on the film musical Pennies from Heaven (1981), in which director Ken Adams recreated Nighthawks as a set.^[8] The German film director Wim Wenders recreated Nighthawks as the set for a film-within-a-film in The End of Violence (1997);^[6] Wenders has suggested that Hopper's paintings appeal to filmmakers because "You can always tell where the camera is."^[9] In Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), two characters visit a café resembling the Nighthawks diner in a scene that illustrates their solitude and despair.^[10] Hard Candy (2005), whose visual style suggests a Hopper painting, acknowledged the debt by setting one scene at a "Nighthawks Diner", where a character purchases a T-shirt with Nighthawks printed on it.^[11] Nighthawks also influenced the "future noir" look of the movie Blade Runner; director Ridley Scott said "I was constantly waving a reproduction of this painting under the noses of the production team to illustrate the look and mood I was after".^[12]

Noted surrealist horror film director Dario Argento went so far as to recreate the diner and the patrons in Nighthawks as part of a set for his 1976 film Deep Red (aka Profondo Rosso).

Literature

Several writers have explored how the customers in Nighthawks came to be in a diner at night, or what will happen next. Wolf Wondratschek's poem "Nighthawks: After Edward Hopper's Painting" imagines the man and woman sitting together in the diner as an estranged couple: "I bet she wrote him a letter/ Whatever it said, he's no longer the man / Who'd read her letters twice."^[13] Joyce Carol Oates wrote interior monologues for the figures in the painting in her poem "Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, 1942".^[14] A special issue of Der Spiegel included five brief dramatizations that build five different plots around the painting; one, by screenwriter Christof Schlingensief, turned the scene into a chainsaw massacre.^[15]

Music

Tom Waits's album Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) features Nighthawks-inspired lyrics.^[16] The cover art is a photograph of Waits in a diner.

Popular references and parodies

An establishing shot from "Homer vs. The Eighteenth Amendment", one of several references to Nighthawks in the animated TV series The Simpsons.

Nighthawks has been widely referenced and parodied in popular culture. Versions of it have appeared on posters, T-shirts, and greeting cards, as well as in comic books and advertisements.^[17] Typically, these parodies -- like Helnwein's Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which became a popular poster^[18] -- retain the diner and the highly recognizable diagonal composition of Nighthawks, but replace the patrons and attendant with other characters: animals, Santa Claus and his reindeer, or the cast of Tintin or Peanuts.^[19] The television series That '70s Show,^[20] Dead Like Me,^[21] and The Simpsons^[22] have all placed their own characters in versions of Nighthawks. Comic book characters who have appeared in Nighthawks-inspired diners include the Human Torch, Batman's Commissioner Gordon, Spider Jerusalem, and The Tick.^[23]

One parody of Nighthawks even inspired a parody of its own. Michael Bedard's painting Window Shopping (1989), part of his Sitting Ducks series of posters, replaces the figures in the diner with ducks and shows a crocodile outside eyeing the ducks in anticipation. Poverino Peppino parodied this image in Boulevard of Broken Ducks (1993), in which a contented crocodile lies on the counter while four ducks stand outside in the rain.^[24]

Notes

Bibliography

• Cook, Greg, "Visions of Isolation: Edward Hopper at the MFA", Boston Phoenix, May 4, 2007, p.22, Arts and Entertainment.
• Spring, Justin, The Essential Edward Hopper, Wonderland Press, 1998

External links

• Nighthawks at The Art Institute of Chicago.
• Sister Wendy's American Masterpieces discussion of Nighthawks at The Artchive.
• "Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the American Psyche" by Gordon Theisen

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