Instead of sitting comfortably at home with their families they are in an impersonal friendless late-night diner. There is a definite sense of isolation and loneliness about the people in the picture. The third diner sits alone around the corner of the bar.
Here we see a couple at the bar with their hands almost, but not quite, touching. As is the case in this work, Hopper often painted pictures which illustrated the loneliness of life with motel rooms and gas stations being the setting for some of his works. The three “nighthawks” are bathed in a swathe of fluorescent light which also lights up the corner of the deserted street. The diner is probably not an up-market establishment due to the fact that the advertisement above the window is for “Phillies” which is a brand of popular but cheap cigars, which were usually on sale at gas stations and convenience stores. There is a mood of despondency about this painting and this may be in part due to the fact that Hopper started this painting soon after Pearl Harbour was attacked by the Japanese and the whole of America, after the initial shock, was in a mood of hopelessness and misery after such a loss of American lives. The scene of his painting was inspired by one in Greenwich Village, Manhattan where Hopper lived for fifty four years.
The expression “nighthawk” is a word used to describe somebody who stays up late, often also termed a “night owl”. It was in 1942, at the age of sixty that Hopper painted today’s work of art, Nighthawks. He became very interested in the Realist art genre. Whilst in Paris he spent a lot of his time painting café and street scenes, a hobby he carried on with when he returned to New York. He managed to visit Europe on three occasions during which time he discovered and fell in love with works of Rembrandt and some of his contemporaries. In 1905 he went to work at an advertising agency where he was employed to design covers for trade magazines but he did not like this type of illustration work but like all of us, needed the money. At the age of seventeen he attended the New York Institute of Art and Design and remained there for six years. His parents encouraged this love and helped him develop his talent for drawing. He came from a middle-class background and was an able student at school where he developed a love of art from an early age. He was an outstanding American Realist and American Scene painter as well as a printmaker. For Hopper it was to be his most famous painting and one of the most recognisable in American art.Įdward Hopper was born in Nyack, on the Hudson River, in the state of New York in 1882. It is entitled Nighthawks and portrays three people sitting in a downtown diner. Today I have skipped almost four hundred and fifty years to look at a work of modern art by the American artist Edward Hooper. My Daily Art Display’s offering today is in complete contrast to Raphael’s Madonna which I gave you two days ago.
0 kommentar(er)
