Occasional Glimpses of the Sublime: Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (1942)

If I ever get to Chicago, the first thing on my list will be to see the iconic masterpiece of American art that is Edward Hopper’s oil on canvas, Nighthawks, housed at the Art Institute of Chicago. It has been there ever since the Institute bought the piece from the artist, for the sum of $3000, just a few months after its completion in 1942.

The picture shows a late-night, sparsely populated downtown diner, somewhere in New York. Many people have speculated and tried to work out where the diner actually was but it is far more likely to be a composite of various joints from around the artist’s home patch of Greenwich Village, Manhattan, cobbled together in Hopper’s imagination.
Hopper and his wife Jo kept meticulous notes about his work, and they provide a rare glimpse into this oft-unconsidered aspect of the artist’s life: the planning and thought behind a planned work. This excerpt, in Jo’s handwriting, describes Nighthawks:

“Night + brilliant interior of cheap restaurant. Bright items: cherry wood counter + tops of surrounding stools; light on metal tanks at rear right; brilliant streak of jade green tiles 3/4 across canvas--at base of glass of window curving at corner. Light walls, dull yellow ocre [sic] door into kitchen right.

Very good looking blond boy in white (coat, cap) inside counter. Girl in red blouse, brown hair eating sandwich. Man night hawk (beak) in dark suit, steel grey hat, black band, blue shirt (clean) holding cigarette. Other figure dark sinister back--at left. Light side walk outside pale greenish. Darkish red brick houses opposite. Sign across top of restaurant, dark--Phillies 5c cigar. Picture of cigar. Outside of shop dark, green. Note: bit of bright ceiling inside shop against dark of outside street--at edge of stretch of top of window”

The picture was clearly not thrown together. Yet for all this attention to detail, the finished artwork adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It exudes a sense of loneliness, of separation, of eery silence and thus disquiet. Who are these people? What stories of quiet desperation (since we somehow suspect that the protagonists are not of a happy and stable disposition) have brought them to this late-night rendezvous? Nighthawks allows the viewer’s imagination to fill in the blanks.