No Exit: “Nighthawks” by Edward Hopper. [View all]

[CTyankee]

“Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”
--Edward Hopper
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1942. Art Institute of Chicago

Nighthawks was painted in 1942 at the point of America’s entrance into World War II. It was a time of heightened anxiety over a coming world conflict and the beginning of an uncertain recovery from a Great Depression that was still an overhang in people’s minds.

It is possible that Hopper had read W.H.Auden’s eerie poem, “September 1, 1939“ published two years before Hopper painted this work. Auden seems to articulate the mood and feel of Nighthawks, as in this passage

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade...
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night...

Nighthawks reshaped what painting looked like in America, and created a visual language for a “way of seeing” middle-class existence and its underlying darkest fears and doubts. No wonder then that it has been incessantly reproduced (and often parodied). It becomes difficult to view this painting with fresh eyes.

Is the oft made comparison of Nighthawks to film noir inevitable? The male imagery of noir-ish settings and lighting in the work is certainly easy to comprehend. There is the dark wood of the bar and bar stools. Two of the men are in the suits and wearing the iconic fedoras of that era, recalling (or presaging?) the often haunted male private investigator, and a “Lady in red” image for the woman. Her long red hair, red lipstick and low cut red dress does resonate with our understanding of the film style. She rather idly fingers the matches that will light her companion’s cigarette. A fat stogie appears in the “Phillies” cigar advertisement above the diner. The counterman appears busier but may also be apprehensive about the man sitting alone holding a glass. The viewer gets a bit of this unease...is he there to rob the diner? Does he have a gun?



The people in this painting appear to be sealed into this glass encased existence...no door is shown for them to leave...only the swinging door leading to the kitchen....it suggests a kind of endless loop and no way for anyone to leave the diner.

However, a converse meaning emerges: the light of the diner, spilling out on the street below, holds back the darkness and provides a sanctuary against that ultimate night in a world without God or spiritual solace. A bulwark against despair. The contrast of dead space around the diner is not negative space. It is integral to the painting’s essence.

It is said that Hopper himself was influenced in this painting by reading Hemingway’s “The Killers,” a story about men who plot the killing of another man they meet in a bar. Despite their murderous intent, the deed is never carried out.

That short story has the sense of something about to happen, and it never does. In a way, Hopper's paintings seem like that. So that enables writers and filmmakers–fiction writers and poets, and other artists, perhaps –to project their own imagination onto the painting.

Interpretations about Nighthawks’s meaning have evolved. The first great essay about Hopper, by Alfred Barr, dates from the 1930s, and did not discuss loneliness as a defining theme in the work. Rather, Barr discusses Hopper as a painter of light and architecture. But today, Hopper is almost always identified with the tag of loneliness.

What might explain this shift in interpretation is the appearance of David Riesman's groundbreaking book The Lonely Crowd in 1950. The book argues that American society had become “other directed" in its change from being production oriented to being consumer oriented, resulting in increasing wealth but also in a deep and abiding loneliness in our national psyche and specifically located in an alienated urban dynamo. Nighthawks becomes a kind of visible identification of Reisman’s thesis and what comes to mind when we use the term “Hopperesque” to describe a modern work of art. Hopper did not want this fine a point put on his work, saying "The loneliness thing is overdone." Art historian Carol Troyan revises this view further in her catalogue essay on the artist, saying that that Hopper is perhaps best seen as the painter of solitude and serenity.

Gale Levin, who wrote five books on Hopper, points to Night Cafe by Vincent Van Gogh as a possible influence for Nighthawks. I very much see the connection even if others do not. There is despair in Van Gogh’s work although red and green dominate there, while deep red, yellow and brown dominate in the more desolate Nighthawks. And in contrast to Hopper’s signature raking light effects, Van Gogh introduces disquiet in Night Cafe with his jittery overhead (gas?) lights. There are disconsolate drinkers here who are practically insensate, flopped over on their tables. The mood is not good. Van Gogh, who regularly drank there, knew it well.

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The Night Cafe. 1888. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

Art critic Peter Schjeldahl has an interesting take on Hopper‘s less than great artistic technique

“...Hopper painted with reproducibility on his mind, as a new function and fate of images in his time. This is part of what makes him modern—and persistently misunderstood, by detractors, as merely an illustrator. If “Nighthawks” is an illustration, a kick in the head is a lullaby.”

John Updike observed, "Hopper is always on the verge of telling a story." If so what's the story? Hopper gives you the last word on Nighthawks meaning. He presents the scene. It is up to you to imagine the conclusion.

NOTE: The location of the diner in Nighthawks has been identified on Greenwich Avenue in lower Manhattan, a street closed off in the 1960s to make way for the construction of the Twin Towers.

How Hopperesque.