Urban Emptiness

   Urban Empitness

This icons 1942 oil painting Nighthawks by Edward Hopper is one of the most famous American works of art of the 20th century. According to the artist, the painting is based on a real restaurant in Hopper's New York Greenwich Avenue, but its carefully constructed composition has universal quality.

It seems to be a scene taken straight out of a classic Hollywood film. The dark streets outside is contrasted with the florescent light illuminating the inside. The lady sitting at the bar between the barman on the right side and a man on the left side at the bar draw viewer attention. She looks like femme fatal with her red hair, red lipstick and evening dress from the popular Hollywood movie trend. Two professional looking men remind classic detective films too, wearing dark suits and hats being a staple costume of Humphrey Bogart.

Edward Hopper features these film character archetypes in the form of three night persons sitting at a counter in a late night diner, usually a straight-laced male private eye detective and a mysterious and seductive female fatal referenced to the popular Hollywood movie such as The Maltese Falcon, one of the most famous examples of classic Hollywood film and based on a detective novel by author Dashiell Hammett. Streetlights, night time settings, dark street, front empty dead space, man sitting alone looking down at the bar all together build sterility and mystery.

Depicted night dinner in which three customers lost in their own thoughts implies message lying beneath glamour that define America. Although some of his composition conveys sensuous imagery sexually charged, his men, and especially his women display a sense of distance. The male viewer might look at Hopper’s women as sexual objects, but hardly as a potential wife to bear. Hopper’s painting transforms reality to the modern experimental life and art with deep understanding light playing on simplified shapes. The four anonymous and uncommunicative night persons seem to be separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another. Loneliness of a large city, human isolation and urban emptiness show universal human condition with viewer participated. Despite its surface beauty, this world is one measured in cups of coffee with a deep desire, but ultimate inability, to connect with those around us.

References:

smarthistory.khanacademy.org/hoppers-nighthawks.html 

http://www.edwardhopper.net