NOIR and NIGHTHAWKS by Edward Hopper

"Apparently, there was a period when every college dormitory in the country had on its walls a poster of Hopper's Nighthawks; it had become an icon. It is easy to understand its appeal. This is not just an image of big-city loneliness, but of existential loneliness: the sense that we have (perhaps overwhelmingly in late adolescence) of being on our own in the human condition. When we look at that dark New York street, we would expect the fluorescent-lit cafe to be welcoming, but it is not. There is no way to enter it, no door. The extreme brightness means that the people inside are held, exposed and vulnerable. They hunch their shoulders defensively. Hopper did not actually observe them, because he used himself as a model for both the seated men, as if he perceived men in this situation as clones. He modeled the woman, as he did all of his female characters, on his wife Jo. He was a difficult man, and Jo was far more emotionally involved with him than he with her; one of her methods of keeping him with her was to insist that only she would be his model.

"From Jo's diaries we learn that Hopper described this work as a painting of "three characters." The man behind the counter, though imprisoned in the triangle, is in fact free. He has a job, a home, he can come and go; he can look at the customers with a half-smile. It is the customers who are the nighthawks. Nighthawks are predators - but are the men there to prey on the woman, or has she come in to prey on the men? To my mind, the man and woman are a couple, as the position of their hands suggests, but they are a couple so lost in misery that they cannot communicate; they have nothing to give each other. I see the nighthawks of the picture not so much as birds of prey, but simply as birds: great winged creatures that should be free in the sky, but instead are shut in, dazed and miserable, with their heads constantly banging against the glass of the world's callousness. In his Last Poems, A. E. Housman (1859-1936) speaks of being "a stranger and afraid/In a world I never made." That was what Hopper felt - and what he conveys so bitterly." (From "Sister Wendy's American Masterpieces")

The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not: they must still
Wrest their neighbor to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's!
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury.
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.

Hopper sought out the mundane – be it in office buildings or shop windows – to highlight the extraordinary. Who knew an image of nighttime New Yorkers hunched over their coffee would capture the mood of the city better than any breathtaking skyline ever could?

The Art of the Matter

NO WAY OUT: Look closely; there’s no entrance to this diner. We as observers are shut out, and the figures are trapped within. The only door looks to be a service exit to the kitchen, so the only figure who can escape is the busboy, who is separated from the diners not only by the counter, but also by his white-clothed innocence and youth.
IT MOVES IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS: Hopper used angles to bring movement to his paintings. Notice the intersecting lines in “Nighthawks.” The base of the diner is angled to intersect with the angle of the street and the verticals of the window frames. Look at it another way, and the diner forms a wedge that’s like the bow of a ship running into the solid row of shop buildings.
TAKE MY WIFE, PLEASE: Hopper used his wife, artist Jo Nivison, as the model for most of his female figures, including the woman in “Nighthawks.” But Hopper wasn’t interested in making his figures seem individualistic. Rather, he refrained from giving them unique features, as to increase their anonymity.
SHEDDING SOME LIGHT: The bright light in the diner has the yellowish cast of fluorescent bulbs. Being artificial light, it changes the woman’s skin tone and reflects harshly off the silver of the coffee urns.