| Artist: | Hopper, Edward |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Nighthawks | |
| Date of Work: | 1942 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | ||
| Movement: | American Scene Painting | |
| Medium: | oil on canvas | |
| Subject: a lonely diner that stays open all night, where one comes for a drink or a bite of food, sitting among strangers. Hopper is the painter of an urban poetry that comes out of a growing sense of isolation in the big city context. Places are treated like portraits, taking on a character. The mood is quiet and understated; nothing dramatic happens on the surface, but Hopper conveys a muffled subtext of alienation and unconscious desires that remind one of a film noir scene. The city street is dark and deserted; it seems that the whole world is asleep except for this one illuminated spot in the universe. Hopper evokes a mystery and a deep-level psychology in the everyday and mundane. Often he pictures a bend in the road, a dark space you cannot see all the way around, as if something is lurking just ouside the picture, just around the corner. It is a picture of the end of innocence. Style: representational and regional, but abstract in its subtleties and nuances. Not overtly detailed, he shows us just enough to get us hooked and wanting more. Simple and straightforward on the surface; complex and mysterious in its subtext. Context: American Scene Painting represented a return to a recognizable subject and representational style following the stock market crash of '29 and the Depression of the thirties. Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton are part of this movement, but Edward Hopper stands alone as a subtle painter of a kind of American-brand of existentialism: that feeling of being alone in the void. It is the quiet moment before the storm--WWII, which will once again wake up America from its isolationism as we get involved on the world stage. Post-war America is never quite the same as suburbia, malls, and TV come on the scene. Hopper's intensely quiet moment, in which time itself seems to stand still for an eternity, is the last moment before a mass market, pop culture Hyperreal takes over. What lies around that dark corner? MacDonald's "happy meal." | ||
