Certainly Hopper’s most iconic painting, arguably his masterpiece, Nighthawks is one of the most well-known works of the 20th century—a classic scene out of the “American Imagination,” to borrow from the title of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1995 Hopper retrospective. The piece was acquired shortly after its completion by the Art Institute of Chicago, where it remains today. Hopper’s scenes of city and country life—houses and gas stations, trains and movie theaters, bedrooms, and offices—present the realities of everyday America infused with a voyeuristic, psychological complexity. During a period where abstraction grew increasingly dominant, Hopper explored the creative potential of the Realist tradition.
Late at night, four solitary figures occupy a restaurant diner on a deserted street corner. Fluorescent light seeps out through the large plate-glass windows and stains the sidewalk an eerie, shadowy green. No door exists to welcome the viewer, who is made all too aware of their role as spectator, left out on the street.
Inside, although the man and woman face us, they avert their gaze. The woman holds a sandwich; the man, a cigarette. Their fingers, resting on the sleek cherry-wood countertop, appear almost to touch, but don’t. Seated alone, the other patron indulges his drink and coffee, seen only from behind; the white-uniformed counter attendant gazes out the window absentmindedly. Everyone in this disquieting scene is absorbed in their own inner worlds—a microcosm of the urban proximity to anonymity.
Hopper’s paintings are often interpreted as echoing the overwhelming isolation of modern life, especially working in the era of the Great Depression and WWII. In some ways this is due to his arrangement of space, which is vast but never empty, full of agency that acts upon or consumes its surroundings. Asked about this sense of alienation in Nighthawks, Hopper replied, “I didn’t see it as particularly lonely. I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger. Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”
Hopper was an avid movie-goer and theater patron, and his works have a distinctly cinematic staging, like set pieces. Because of this, one sometimes gets the feeling that something just happened, or is about to. Yet his paintings resist narrative. Within his highly orchestrated ambiguity (Hopper made 19 studies for Nighthawks) lurks a kind of foreboding, psychic tension. (...)
1. Nighthawks Explored Hopper’s Surrealist and Psychoanalytic Fascinations
Hopper’s early studies with Robert Henri, a Realist of the progressive Ashcan School, and his frequent trips to Paris to see the Impressionists influenced his style. Less well-known is Hopper’s affinity with Surrealism. In December 1936, he and Jo both visited the Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition, organized by Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art. Impressed by their use of color, he quipped that the Surrealists were better artists than they realized.
Hopper was a lifelong reader, so it’s not surprising the writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung piqued his interest. Their insights into dreams and the unconscious, which deeply influenced Surrealist imagery, permeated popular discourse around him. Hopper even conceded, “So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious, that it seems to me most of all of the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect.”
Giorgio de Chirico, Piazza d’Italia (1916). Image courtesy Axel Vervoordt.
Although Nighthawks and other works don’t reach the overtly fantastic renderings that defined Surrealists like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, Hopper’s realism here becomes fantasy. The sculptor George Segal captured this when he noted, “What I like about Hopper is how far poetically he went, away from the real world.” Nothing supernatural materializes, yet Nighthawks exudes a sense of mystery and suspense, recalling the kind of foreboding, vaguely sinister street scenes by Giorgio de Chirico—also admired by the Surrealists. The sense of solitude the viewer feels as a detached witness, trapped outside the diner, suggests the kind of suspended time often experienced in dreams. The figures, too, in their geometric rigidity and inscrutable expressions take on the perplexing, wooden one-dimensionality of dream “extras.”
Nighthawks also evokes one of Surrealism’s favorite concepts, the uncanny. According to Freud, this strange, not-quite-right feeling manifests in the transformation of something once-familiar into the threateningly foreign. Here the sprawling windows, while protective during the day, expose the figures’ vulnerability by night. In contrast, the dark, second-story windows of the adjacent building conceal the possibility of a threat lurking inside.
Art historian Margaret Iversen noted of Hopper’s work, “The uncanny return of the past is a sort of denatured nostalgia.” We can see this readily in Nighthawks, where a fondness for the classic American diner is degraded—formally, through thrusting diagonals, intense colors, contrasting light, and empty space—into an airless purgatory.
Nighthawks also evokes one of Surrealism’s favorite concepts, the uncanny. According to Freud, this strange, not-quite-right feeling manifests in the transformation of something once-familiar into the threateningly foreign. Here the sprawling windows, while protective during the day, expose the figures’ vulnerability by night. In contrast, the dark, second-story windows of the adjacent building conceal the possibility of a threat lurking inside.
Art historian Margaret Iversen noted of Hopper’s work, “The uncanny return of the past is a sort of denatured nostalgia.” We can see this readily in Nighthawks, where a fondness for the classic American diner is degraded—formally, through thrusting diagonals, intense colors, contrasting light, and empty space—into an airless purgatory.
by Bobby McGee, Artnet | Read more:
Images: Nighthawks/Edward Hopper; Piazza d’Italia/Giorgio de Chirico
