Nighthawks by Edward Hopper: Great Art Explained

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.  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 out,  and Hopper's city was effectively dark. . .

and silent. [Newsreel] "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 pretty much 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. Hopper's voice: "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. 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. Jo Hopper: "it seems to me  that women are the ones that show the gratitude". 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 every single 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 theatre  and movies, and nighthawks suggest to us a scene on an illuminated stage, as if  we are watching in a darkened theatre. 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 matter crippled him  with anxiety. Once he decided, there followed months of research, preparation, and mostly sketching. 

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. Storyboarding 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 colour 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 exterior to 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 emphasises 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 was a major influence and is 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  colour, his urban settings - and his perspectives. Like the Impressionists, Hopper was obsessed by  light. The year before Hopper painted Nighthawks, "Cafe terrace at Nigh"t 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 night-time 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 night-time 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 - there just isn't one - to go in or out - 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 really 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 conversa tion  amongst them. Tension somehow radiates from them.

He specialised 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 matter, 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 more distant. The couple are 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 without success. 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 in search of 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 in search of 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: "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 "everyman" 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 foot 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.