No Exit: “Nighthawks” by Edward Hopper.
“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.
= new reply since forum marked as read
it seems a bit strange to have a cash register in an open space, seen from the street. Kinda makes you wonder. A rock thru the window, grab and go...if there is anything in it, but still...
what did you make of the film noir thing? Hopper's stuff came earlier than film noir (which originated in German Expressionism) so if anything, film noir kinda copied Nighthawks...am I right here...
intrigued with seeing them in person. I carry a little pocket magnifier to get closer to brushstrokes, altho in some museums I have been gently tapped on the shoulder by museum guards and told to put it away and back off from the picture (I've set off alarms briefly by leaning in too closely 
).
It wasn't Greenwich St. downtown. It was Greenwich Ave. in the West Village, near where he lived. And while there was a diner there he used as reference, the glass triangle shape it taken from the iconic Flat Iron Bldg.
At the Whitney's Hopper show a few years ago, they showed the various subjects he used for this painting.
They did this during the show.
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I lived in Greenwich Village years ago
more of a tight comparison:
"Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good."
It's definitely interesting to think about the importance of that street portion of the canvas: there's a temptation to think of it as 'negative space' and a frame, providing balance in a rule-of-thirds kind of way, but it's much more than that. Now that you mention it, the absence of humanity in that huge portion of the painting--a bouquet (?) and the cash register in windows, but otherwise nothing, no person, no vehicle, no benches, litter, newspaper racks, trash cans, nothing--is sort of jarring...
As always, thank you for the thoughtful and thought-provoking thread! 
my brain wouldn't twist that far. 
I saw you comment on the urns in a different subthread, and I'd never really paid attention to them. It's interesting how large and prominent they are, and how this cafe doesn't obviously serve anything else - I guess coffee made the world go around even then. (I also notice that one of the urns is empty and the other nearly so; the solitary dangerous man might erupt when the coffee runs out, or at least that's how it would play out if Clint Eastwood directed a movie version of Nighthawks... 
)
and yes, I see the comparison with Van Gogh. 
Super to see you, gf!
Consider your love passed on to my two favorite guys!
whatever the intent. Thanks for these.
See how many DUers you can spot:
on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and I got to see it.. I was so thrilled.
I think I bought a poster, its probably still wrapped up in a poster tube, inside my closet.
Always wondered if there is a connection between the two hopper paintings.
My favorite Hopper.
Great thread.
Edit to add: I never saw Nighthawks as "dark." Musicians hang out at places like that after the show. or at Waffle House if playing in the boonies in the South. It gave me more of a feeling of comfort that, even late at night, you can go somewhere like that and get some eggs and toast.
The waiter/coffee slinger just looks like he's telling the lone dude he'll be right there, and the woman seems to be contemplating whether to light a fire with this dude she's seeing or not.
Funny how everyone has their own interpretation. But then, I have no clue as to the artist's intent or mindset at the time, as others would.
such as the one I posted. I film my character and others in action.
I had to create a character (or avatar) to move around and interact in the world. People there create the backgrounds and all the content. I am just a traveller. Some creations are as unsophisticated as lollipops and rainbows. Others are so elaborate you would believe you are in the actual places. Vassar College once had a scale copy of the Sistine Chapel in SL. You could actually walk around the place as if you were in the real thing. When people build stuff like that, it is truly artful.
Another wonderful build involved a Van Gogh exhibit that was interactive. One could sit in the paintings. It was a virtual Van Gogh Museum that recreated scenes in Arles and from the paintings. Something impossible to recreate in real life.
It is an entirely novel art form. I have really participated in some amazing art events in SL. Last year, I participated in a collaborative work which was part of a larger exhibition being held in the main exhibition hall of Moscow’s Manege Museum. Russian Constructivist Art 1914-1924. When I say I participate, I mean I was provided a costume which allowed me to be part of the artwork.
You would probably like SL. It is a very intense art environment. Sadly, the art is not permanent. So I try and film it if I can. 
The poem by Oates was in a textbook I use. I was able to get permission from the publisher to use it (educational use). Her piece is actually titled "Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942." The diner was in a build where the owner of the place was selling xmas trees! And yes real money exchanged for virtual trees. Clearly, tree seller also loved Hopper as she copied the diner and made it possible to sit at the counter just like the painting. All I did was provide some bodies in costume. And that Sexy voice. Ha!
There are indeed many layers to Hopper's paimntings.
I want to add that the location of the diner has been debated for years, with no consensus.
The reason is a composite he used several locations. One was the intersection of Greenwich and 7th Ave South (not near the WTC) which has sharp angled streets unlike NY's normal grid.
But a revelation of the recent Whitney Museum's Hopper show was that he also used the famous Flat Iron Building as reference.
They had this display in that building when the exhibit was going on.
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