Many of you will have read the article, ‘Time to Breathe’ by Andrew Stephens in the Spectrum section of The Age on 28 March. Stephens provides an informed and illuminating historical discussion of artworks that have emerged ‘out of contagion’. Crises often result in a re-imagining of the world in which we live and many iconic works have been created in the context of crisis. Edward Hopper’s masterpiece – Nighthawks – is one such work. It remains not only one of the most recognisable, but also one of the most relatable paintings in 20th century American art.
Nighthawks, completed in 1942, captures the paradox of loneliness in urban life. The painting was Hopper’s response to one of the greatest crises of his generation: the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the entrance of the United States into World War II. Hopper enjoyed walking the streets of New York, but the experience must have been remarkably different during those grim months that followed. Fearing attack by the Nazis, New Yorkers were subject to blackout drills and dimmed lights in public spaces. Hopper’s walks were taken around a city literally and figuratively darkened by crisis. He later recalled how this darkness inspired Nighthawks and how he imagined what it would be like to come across a brightly lit diner in the middle of the night, with people—the “nighthawks”—within.
There are many visual analyses of Nighthawks online. The Art Institute of Chicago focuses on: “Hopper’s understanding of the expressive possibilities of light playing on simplified shapes which gives the painting its beauty. Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner. 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”; while Artsper writes: “four supposed strangers sit around the counter of a late-night diner; physically close yet psychologically miles apart. The very essence of human vulnerability throbs like an exposed vein in Hopper’s masterpiece, capturing the all-consuming solitude of modern life. Even before smartphones took over any attempt at real human interaction, Hopper’s iconic painting reveals our inability to connect in the early 1940s”.
Hopper denied that he purposefully infused this or any other of his paintings with symbols of human isolation and urban emptiness, but later he did acknowledge that in Nighthawks “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”
Finally, Sally Kelly Oehler (Field-McCormick Chair and Curator of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago) writing on 20 March, poses the question: “So what happens if we explore Nighthawks through the lens of Hopper’s experience of a city under siege – whether through warfare or contagion? Does that influence how we read the painting? Perhaps Hopper saw this brightly lit diner not as a place of disconnection but as a beacon of light and hope against the darkness, a moment of finding community when everything outside seemed grim and unbearable. After all, he very purposefully included four figures, not just a lone figure as in many of his other paintings. What if Hopper’s compositional decisions spoke to some inner need for social connection in a time of fear and isolation?”
Oehler continues: “But the one thing we know for certain: these efforts are a means of speaking to one another, of creating understanding and connection through a shared language of art. Indeed, this is the promise of all art, not just Nighthawks. Art has the power to speak to us across time, across cultural moments, and in different moments of crisis and joy and fear and love—in other words, in all that makes us human—and bring us together. So whatever kind of darkness we find ourselves in, whether external or internal, this fact may offer the shining beacon of light and hope that we all need at this time”. https://www.artic.edu/articles/808/nighthawks-as-a-symbol-of-hope
If you are interested in exploring Hopper further, you might want to have a look at the short youtube video – ‘A Walking Tour of Edward Hopper’s New York’. In this, Carter Foster—the then curator of drawings at the Whitney and now deputy director of the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas—takes viewers on a jaunt through the West Village, stopping to comment on the street corners and lunch counters frequented by Edward Hopper, including his walk-up studio and the various storefront facades that inspired his famous painting Nighthawks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NipJsgYF6uc
And, thanks to Julie Stone who suggested we might also want to read the article by Jonathan Jones on 28 March in The Guardian: ‘We are all Edward Hopper paintings now: is he the artist of the coronavirus age?’: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/mar/27/we-are-all-edward-hopper-paintings-now-artist-coronavirus-age