Edward Hopper Nighthawks
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Edward Hopper's world was New York, and he understood that city, more than most people. He understood that even though you may live in  one of the most crowded and busy cities on earth, it is still possible to feel entirely alone. 

Nighthawks in its historical context

This painting was completed on January the 21st 1942, just weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II. 

That's not to say the war was a direct influence, but the feeling of dread, many Americans had surely infused the painting. Afraid of air raid attacks, New York had blackout drills and lights were dimmed in public spaces. Streets emptied, and Hopper's city was effectively dark... and silent. 

"The route was past miles of tenements, giving the passengers a glimpse into every window, all the tenement dwellers got in return, was a  feeling of being close to the passing parade".  

Edward Hopper took the elevated El-train to work for decades. In his forties he was a failure who couldn't sell a painting. He hated his job as a magazine illustrator, but he needed the money. His paintings were mostly ignored by critics, while his fellow artists enjoyed success and fame. But hopper was convinced of his talent, and even when he was broke, he only accepted illustration work three days a week.

As he said:

"Illustration really didn't interest me, I was forced into it, by an effort to make some money, that's all".

The rest of the week he painted extraordinary images. He spent his entire adult life in New York City. Most of it in a small walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village. Eventually, his wife Jo would move in, but It was not a happy marriage. They argued a lot, and it was explosive, at times violent and extremely codependent.

They would sometimes not talk to each other for days, and spent much of their marriage in silence. We see this reflected in the disconnected and unhappy couples he portrays time and again in his paintings. Couples who may share the same space, but inhabit different worlds.

Then, in 1924, at the age of 42, he had his first sellout show, promptly gave up his illustration, and devoted his life exclusively to art. He married Jo in 1924, the same year he got his solo show. They were both in their 40s when they   married, and they would stay together for 43 years. Before they married, Jo was a moderately successful artist, and it was her who introduced him to curators at the Brooklyn museum, who bought one of his paintings and launched his career.  It was down to Jo that Edward became a success, a fact he never thanked her for. In fact, Edward, a gloomy and silent figure, would spend their marriage constantly belittling and denigrating his wife and her artistic talents. Jo would respond with verbal assaults of her own. She was possessive and jealous and refused to allow other women to pose for him.  She was the model for each one of his paintings, including "Girlie Show" when she was 60 years old.

Their unhappy marriage almost certainly contributed to the artists depicting figures who seem emotionally unresolved. In Hopper's paintings, couples are not communicating, touching or displaying any affection. Relationships are ambiguous, characters do not interact with each other. They are disconnected, both from themselves, and from us. Jo and Edward Hopper loved the theater and movies, and nighthawks suggest to us a scene on an illuminated stage, as if we are watching in a darkened theater.

His compositions were often influenced by set design, stage lighting and the kind of aggressive cropping and angles we see in cinema. With Hopper's work, it is important to focus on the preparation. Finding the right subject crippled him with anxiety. Once he decided, there followed months of research, preparation, and mostly sketching.

Analyzing Hopper's Nighthawks

There are 19 surviving sketches for Nighthawks, but he would have done many more. Hopper would use life drawings to establish a visual understanding, and then relied on his subconscious to refine the final composition of his paintings.   We know from Jo's notes on the painting, that she posed for the woman, and Edward posed for the three men. He dismissed his years spent illustrating magazines, but along with the preparation skills he picked up, it also helped to hone his storytelling abilities. He planned Nighthawks like a film director. Story boarding the painting ahead of its creation, he prepared props, the position of hands, the distance of the couple, the clothes - and everything was documented by Jo.

Then he worked out the angle of the diner's window, and its position in the street like an architect. Hopper uses strong diagonal lines for the diner, that converge off-screen and suggest a space outside the painting. But also lead the eye to the right. No matter which side of the painting you look at first, the clever use of perspective, pulls your eyes towards the four figures in the diner.

He uses color to achieve this too. Darker tones of red and green outside the diner, stand out against the bright yellow interior, causing our gaze to shift from the exterior to the interior. There is no life outside the diner and what details there are, are minimal. We see a cash register across the way, in an otherwise deserted store. We see an ad above the diner, but the buildings around are devoid of life. This is a world shut down. The large window, not only creates a barrier between the viewer and the characters, but also emphasizes the silence inside the diner, and adds a voyeuristic touch. The characters are trapped, like specimens in a jar.

Windows, and looking through them, feature in so many of Hopper's works. And we are often looking at an angle. Although he was often grouped with the "American realist painters", he once said: "I think I am still an impressionist".

The ideas of one artist in particular, Gustav Caillebotte, were a major influence and are rarely discussed. His works often feature the window motif, but we can also see his influence on Hopper's loose brush work, his use of saturated color, his urban settings - and his perspectives. Like the Impressionists, Hopper was obsessed by light. The year before Hopper painted Nighthawks, "Café terrace at Night" by Vincent van Gogh, was exhibited in New York, which we know Hopper saw and admired. Both scenes are lit by artificial light - gas lamps in van Gogh's case. In hopper's diner, the light source is neon light, a relatively new thing in the 1940s, which gives it an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner. The nighttime setting is melancholic and enhances the emotional content of the work, suggesting danger or uneasiness.

Hopper often portrayed a specific time of day in his paintings, and nighttime seems a particular time of anxiety for him, from early on in his career. If you are looking for a door to welcome us in, to go in or out, there just isn't one: the diner is hermetically sealed, effectively keeping the viewer at bay. We can only stare in from the outside. The door we see, probably leads to the kitchen.

What genuinely interested Hopper was emotions and interpersonal relationships. He was drawn to the lives of people, he'd seen through the windows on the El-train, in offices and in restaurants and apartments. The characters are in their own worlds. As is usual with Hopper, there is no sign of conversation among them. Tension somehow radiates from them. He specialized in these open-ended narratives, which demand the active role of the viewer in completing the story. He plays with our expectations, with our unconscious mind.

This unrelated image, painted two years before Nighthawks, is a radically different subject, but there is still a sense of foreboding, a feeling that the story will continue outside the frame. 

Couples and their lack of emotional interaction, was a theme in Hopper's work, and this would   increase as he got older and his relationship with Jo became more distant. The couple is physically close, yet psychologically miles apart. Are they even a couple? At first, we think their hands are touching, but they are not. Her coffee cup is steaming, his is stone-cold. Perhaps suggesting he has been waiting a while for her. The title of the painting came from Jo, who described this character as having a hawk beaked nose. He is holding an unlit cigarette, which in Hopper's original sketch, was in the woman's hand. The isolation of the solitary man with his back to us, is accentuated by the couple. A closer look shows us that he is holding a glass with his right hand, and he has a newspaper folded flat underneath his left. The front page, no doubt full of news of the war. It is unclear who this random glass is for. Maybe it's for us? Along with everyone else, the waiter is not conversing or even making eye contact with anyone else. He is just staring out of the window.

Ever since he painted Nighthawks, people have tried to work out the exact location of the real diner, following hints the artist gave in various interviews. People spent months trudging around New York unsuccessfully. That's because the   diner never was in New York. It was always in the same place - inside Edward Hopper's head.

Hopper was a fan of Ernest Hemingway's short story "The Killers" from 1927, which is considered an inspiration for Nighthawks. It tells the story of two thugs, who enter a diner searching for their next victim. The classic 1946 movie version, was in turn inspired by Hopper's Nighthawks. The quintessentially American artist loved cinema, and cinema, that quintessentially American art form, loved Hopper. He often went to the cinema alone at night searching for inspiration. Film-noir was a primary influence, and we can see this in what many consider to be the first film-noir, released one year before he completed Nighthawks. It is said that while shooting "Force of Evil", the director took the cinematographer to an exhibition of Edward Hopper's works, and said that he wanted the picture to look like those paintings. Hopper said that even his early works, may have been influenced by German Expressionist cinema he saw in Paris. When it comes to the filmmakers themselves, Hopper is arguably the most influential artist of all time. A new generation of filmmakers would pay homage to Hopper's use of high contrast lighting, his American settings of anonymous apartments, diners and bars, by his extreme cropping and decentralized framing. But in particular, they would be inspired by the characters he painted. Characters, waiting for their stories to be told.

"Nighthawks" itself was faithfully recreated for the movies, with the diner becoming a shortcut to emotional dysfunction. Nighthawks, like the best movie, is not just about composition and style, it is a masterwork that in a single frame can suggest to us a narrative, that stretches far beyond the picture plane.

Hopper said:

"It's probably a reflection of my own - I may  say loneliness - I don't know".

With Nighthawks, Edward Hopper captures a world of loneliness, isolation and quiet anguish. The painting, an immediate success, was bought by the Art Institute of Chicago, where it still is today. Hopper, the quiet man of American painting, projected an "every man" image, but he was a complicated and troubled man. He was an intellectual, who struggled to find inspiration, and grappled with meaning. His works took months of preparation and hard work, and he only produced   about five paintings a year. Sometimes less. 

He often felt like an outsider himself. At six foot five, he was an exceptionally tall man, and by the age of 12 he was already six feet tall. A fact that certainly contributed to his growing sense of isolation and loneliness. Painfully shy, he was a loner from an early age. This continued into adulthood, and he was deeply introverted and uncomfortable in social situations. When he married Jo, it would seem that his years of loneliness were over. But as many people discover, you can be in a relationship, and still be utterly alone.

Hopper's paintings demonstrate to us, that these feelings are normal. That loneliness or feelings of isolation are commonplace. Ironically, his paintings show us - that actually we are not alone.

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