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Nighthawks is a 1942 painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner late at night. It is considered Hopper's most famous painting, as well as one of the most recognizable in American art. It is currently in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
About the paintingNighthawks may be Hopper's take on the term 'night owl' used to describe someone who stays up late. The scene was inspired by a diner (since demolished) in Greenwich Village, Hopper's home neighborhood in Manhattan. The now-vacant lot is known as Mulry Square, at the intersection of Seventh Avenue South, Greenwich Avenue, and West 11th Street.
Hopper began painting it immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. After this event there was a widespread feeling of gloominess across the country, a feeling that is portrayed in the painting. The urban street is empty outside the diner, and inside none of the three patrons is apparently looking or talking to the others; all are lost in their own thoughts. Two are a couple, while the third is a man sitting alone, with his back to the viewer. The couple's noses resemble beaks, perhaps a reference to the title. The diner's sole attendant, looking up from his work, appears to be peering out the window past the customers. His age is indeterminate.
The corner of the diner is curved; curved glass connects the large expanse of glass on its two sides. Weather is understood to be warm, based on clothing worn by the patrons. No overcoats are in evidence; the woman's blouse is short-sleeved
. Across the street are what appear to be open windows on the second story. The light from the restaurant floods out onto the street outside, and a sliver of light casts its way into one of the windows.
This portrayal of modern urban life as empty or lonely is a common theme throughout Hopper's work. It is sharply outlined by the fact that the man with his back to us appears more lonely because of the couple sitting next to him. If one looks closely, it becomes apparent that there is no way out of the bar area, as the three walls of the counter form a triangle that traps the attendant. It is also notable that the diner has no visible door leading to the outside, which illustrates the idea of confinement and entrapment. Hopper denied that he had intended to communicate this in Nighthawks, but he admitted that "unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city." At the time of the painting, fluorescent lights had just been developed, perhaps contributing to why the diner is casting such an eerie glow upon the almost pitch black outside world. An advertisement for Phillies cigars is featured on top of the diner.
Influence on popular culturePainting and sculptureRoger Brown's Puerto Rican Wedding (1969). Brown said that the café in the lower left corner of this painting "isn't set up like an imitation of Nighthawks, but still refers to it very much."
Many artists have produced works that allude or respond to Nighthawks. An early example is George Segal's sculpture The Diner (1964-66), made from parts of a real diner with Segal's white plaster figures added, which resembles Nighthawks in its sense of loneliness and alienation, as well as in its subject matter. Roger Brown, one of the Chicago Imagists, included a view into a corner cafe in his painting Puerto Rican Wedding (1969), a stylized nighttime street scene. Hopper influenced the Photorealists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Ralph Goings, who evoked Nighthawks in several paintings of diners. Another Photorealist, Richard Estes, painted a corner store in ''People's Flowers'' (1971), but in daylight, with the shop's large window reflecting the street and sky.
More direct visual quotations began to appear in the 1970s. Perhaps the best known is Gottfried Helnwein's painting Boulevard of Broken Dreams (1984), widely sold as a poster, which replaces the three diner patrons with American pop culture icons Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean, and the attendant with Elvis Presley. According to Hopper scholar Gail Levin, Helnwein connected the bleak mood of Nighthawks with 1950s American cinema and with "the tragic fate of the decade's best-loved celebrities."[Levin, 109-110.] Greenwich Avenue (1986), one of several versions of Nighthawks painted by Mark Kostabi, increases the painting's scale and uses a palette of garish electric colors; the human figures are red and faceless. Nighthawks Revisited, a 1980 parody by Red Grooms, clutters the street scene with pedestrians, cats, and trash, while a canvas by the British graffiti artist Banksy adds a man in Union Flag boxer shorts who has just thrown a chair at the diner window.
FilmHopper was an avid moviegoer, and critics have noted the resemblance of his paintings to film stills. Several of his paintings suggest gangster films of the early 1930s such as Scarface and Little Caesar, a connection that can be seen in the clothes of the customers in Nighthawks. Nighthawks and other works such as Night Shadows (1921) also anticipate the look of film noir, whose development Hopper may have influenced.[ first1 = Gerd .][ first = Erika .]
The period picture The Sting, which takes place in the 1930s, has a night time scene in a diner with a strong resemblance to Nighthawks . Hopper was an acknowledged influence on the film musical Pennies from Heaven (1981), in which director Ken Adams recreated Nighthawks as a set. The German film director Wim Wenders recreated Nighthawks as the set for a film-within-a-film in The End of Violence (1997);[ first = Avis .] In Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), two characters visit a café resembling the Nighthawks diner in a scene that illustrates their solitude and despair. Hard Candy (2005), whose visual style suggests a Hopper painting, acknowledged the debt by setting one scene at a "Nighthawks Diner", where a character purchases a T-shirt with Nighthawks printed on it.Nighthawks also influenced the "future noir" look of the movie Blade Runner; director Ridley Scott said "I was constantly waving a reproduction of this painting under the noses of the production team to illustrate the look and mood I was after". Joyce Carol Oates wrote interior monologues for the figures in the painting in her poem "Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, 1942". A special issue of Der Spiegel included five brief dramatizations that build five different plots around the painting; one, by screenwriter Christof Schlingensief, turned the scene into a chainsaw massacre. Erik Jendresen also wrote a short story inspired by this painting.
MusicTom Waits's album Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) features Nighthawks-inspired lyrics. The cover art is a photograph of Waits in a diner.
Popular references and parodiesNighthawks is referenced in the movie Hard Candy. The diner at which Hayley meets Jeff is called "Nighthawks". She then has him purchase her a shirt with the original painting of Nighthawks on it.
The film Pennies from Heaven, features a scene reproducing the painting, with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters' characters as the couple at the counter. Turner Classic Movies uses the clip in their "Open All Night" interstitial, with a neon TCM logo attached the corner of the building.
Nighthawks has been widely referenced and parodied in popular culture. Versions of it have appeared on posters, T-shirts, and greeting cards, as well as in comic books and advertisements. Typically, these parodies -- like Helnwein's Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which became a popular poster
Another parody of Nighthawks was done by Stephen Pastis, creator of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine. The title of his third collection of strips is called "Nighthogs" (in reference to the character Pig from the strip). The cover also parodies the painting by featuring all of the patrons at the diner being replaced by the
One parody of Nighthawks even inspired a parody of its own. Michael Bedard's painting Window Shopping (1989), part of his Sitting Ducks series of posters, replaces the figures in the diner with ducks and shows a crocodile outside eying the ducks in anticipation. Poverino Peppino parodied this image in Boulevard of Broken Ducks (1993), in which a contented crocodile lies on the counter while four ducks stand outside in the rain.
The Mission, Kansas coffeehouse Nighthawks, noted for staying open as late as 3 a.m., is ostensibly named after the painting.
Graffiti artist Banksy has also created a parody of this painting in which a fat, shirtless soccer hooligan with boxers of the Union Jack and a beer can on his hand stands inebriated outside the diner. It is assumed that one of the two upside-down chairs near the man has been thrown at the window, smashing it and therefore destroying the sense of claustrophobia associated with Hopper's painting. The parody is not in the stencil style familiar to Banksy, however, its image holds the same sense of humor as Banksy's other work.
In the ''That '70s Show episode "Drive In" a scene ends with Red and Kitty Foreman sitting in a diner when Kitty states that the moment seems familiar. The camera zooms out showing Nighthawks with Red and Kitty wearing the suit and red dress, respectively, of the man and woman sitting together.
The 1998 VeggieTales episode, "The End of Silliness?", takes place in a cafe parodying that painting.
On a 2009 episode of Who wants to be a Millionaire? it was featured in a question, regarding what cigar brand was advertised across the top of the building. The woman stopped on the question, receiving 250,000 dollars.
The painting is one of the artworks brought to life in the 2009 film Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.
Bibliography refbegin
- Cook, Greg, "Visions of Isolation: Edward Hopper at the MFA", Boston Phoenix, May 4, 2007, p.22, Arts and Entertainment.
- Spring, Justin, The Essential Edward Hopper, Wonderland Press, 1998
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Copyright Citations
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