Location: Art Institute of Chicago Building
Nighthawks by Edward Hopper is an American classic, which portrays people sitting in a downtown diner late at night. It is considered Hopper’s most famous painting, as well as one of the most recognizable in American art. Popular belief is that the scene was inspired by a diner (now demolished) in Greenwich Village which was Hopper’s home neighborhood in Manhattan. The now-vacant area is known as Mulry Square, at the intersection of Seventh Avenue South, Greenwich Avenue, and West 11th Street.
However while popular opinion favors Mulry Square, historical records show that a gas station occupied the lot in the early 1940s, not a diner.
There is a ton of interesting trivia surrounding Nighthawks. A Hemingway short story might have inspired it. Hopper biographer Gail Levin said, “Nighthawks was inspired by Hemingway’s short story ‘The Killers,’ which Hopper read in Scribner’smagazine and liked so much when it first came out, that he wrote a fan letter to Scribner’s. He said that this writer was so much better than the rest and it was unusual that it wasn’t sentimental or saccharin like so many stories. But that short story has the sense of something about to happen, and it never does. In a sense, Hopper’s paintings are just like that. So that enables writers and filmmakers–fiction writers and poets, and other artists, perhaps too–to project their own imagination…and the viewer in general.”
There is also a belief that Hopper was a bit inspired by Van Gogh’s “Cafe at Night” Coincidentally Café at Night was exhibited in New York in January of 1942, right when Hopper was working on Nighthawks.
To me its a quintessential classic celebrating American culture. Anyone who has been to New York will know that the popular “Diner” is fundamentally American in its ouvre and the panting captures is flawlessly. The flourescent light, the dark desolation outside and the lady in the red dress all create a sense of mystique. It’s like a prelude to something about to happen. A sense of expectation leaving a plethora of possibilities to our imagination. Then there is this sense of entrapment and solitude in a big city. As darkness falls we are all lonely, confined to our lives trapped within the walls of our rooms or bars downtown.
A statement on the inherent loneliness of urban living.
