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Nighthawks
I’m a conservative man. I think, as every conservative man before me has thought, that the next generation is gleefully breaking things it won’t know how to put back together, and that their kids will be less happy for it. Per Buckley, I want to stand athwart history and tweet “@History, Stop!”
So, like most people here on Ricochet, that’s what I do. But sometimes I want to escape, and sometimes I escape into art. One of my favorite refuges, favorite pieces of escapist art, is Nighthawks, perhaps the most recognized work by the great American artist Edward Hopper.
I love everything about this picture: the simplicity of the scene, the men’s attire (fedoras passed out of fashion before my time, but I do own a trench coat), the coffee urns hinting that a double-low-fat-hazelnut-macchiato is not on the menu (sorry, Jon Gabriel) – the fact that it’s 1942 and these are adults sitting in an adult place during a very adult time, undoubtedly thinking adult thoughts.
And it was a serious time. The world was tearing itself apart: the US had declared war on Japan, Germany had declared war on America, and we were within a couple of years of becoming the most efficient engine of industrialized warfare the world has ever known.
It is a serious picture. No one is on his or her smart phone. No one is taking a selfie.
Above all, it seems to me a picture of confidence, of people firm in their convictions. I read that into it because that’s my sense of the time: it was a decade when the adults were still in charge, when the machinery of culture was still firmly in the hands of men in suits.
It was a time when we knew who we were, we liked ourselves, and we weren’t ashamed of that.
Published in Culture
That is my favorite painting, and I have no idea why. You’ve suggested some good reasons. :)
Great post.
Wonderful subject, great insights into people who bequeathed us minds and spines…Thanks, @henryracette!
I live on Cape Cod where Hopper spent some time.
Corn Hill Beach in Truro, 1930
The Long Leg, 1935 (Provincetown):
What a perfect, perfect piece. Subject and tone. On this rainy, autumn day it pleases the senses like the leaves sifting down outside my window.
There are paintings, typically modern ‘art’, where the viewer realizes it’s not even worth the effort to figure out what the artist is saying/what’s it mean?
Paintings like this really draw the viewer in. It makes me want to go in there, find out what’s going on, talk to those people. It’s late (or early) but they aren’t at a club or bar – why?
It’s a terrific painting.
Obama had Hopper’s pictures in the WH.
The November issue of Model Railroader magazine features an O scale layout where the modeler (a Hopper fan) recreated some of Hopper’s paintings into the structures and scenes on his layout. Included are “Approaching a City”, “Second Story Sunlight”, and “New York Office”. An earlier 1989 issue featured a different layout that did incorporate “Nighthawks”.
For me personally, “Nighthawks” reminds me of when I was a teenager. My friends and I used to camp out a lot. Sometimes we’d wake up at three AM craving something to eat (from all the beer, not weed!). Although I preferred Krispy Kreme, we always went to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Downtown Boulevard because the KK was always packed with cops (I have a funny anecdote about it).
More often than not at the DD, there was this old guy who sat at the end of the counter muttering to himself. Every once in a while, he’d get loud and say the same thing over and over again: “Tombstone, Arizona. Barbershops are taking over the world.” Then he’d go back to muttering to himself. He wasn’t as quiet as the patrons in the painting “Nighthawks” suggests, but the image of people in an eating place late at night (or early morning) always stuck with me.
The man was not wrong about everything. Just almost everything.
And I’ve always thought the guys in the coffee shop were gangsters. Because it was supposed to be about a Hemingway story.
Supposed to be is probably putting it a bit strong. Hopper did like a Hemingway short story, The Killers, which was reprinted by Scribner’s with an illustration that contained a similar counter-worker-and-coffee-urn configuration. However, to the best of my knowledge, Hopper never referenced the story or the illustration. He did, however, make several references to the structure and layout of the diner, and I believe that was his primary inspiration.
(My impression is that Hopper was generally more interested in the interplay of structure and light than in the people he placed in his paintings.)
Those are both paintings of Truro on Cape Cod. Nice to think of these two masterpieces in the Oval Office.
I had a lady friend for about a year in the 1990’s who was in AA. After her meetings, which usually went pretty late, I used to pick her up and we’d either go to a nearby Denny’s or else a little farther to a little dive-diner where we would have coffee, pie, and we’d talk into the early morning.
I like to think that if someone was sitting in the parking lot of that dive-diner on one of those nights, it might have looked a little bit like Hopper’s painting.
Thanks for the memory, Henry.
Sure they are not discussing the Superman comic the bartender is handling behind the counter?
I love Hopper as well – and while there’s an underlying cultural confidence – or perhaps cohesion is a better word – there’s a sadness in all his works as well, and Nighthawks has that in spades. Everyone’s together and everyone’s alone.
This one is my favorite Hopper. When I was very little and on a fishing trip with my Dad, I remember stopping by a similar gas station, with a Wise Potato Chips owl in the window, somewhere in rural Pennsylvania.
I always liked it. It is dark but mellow not melancholy. I’m introverted so I like just a few people. Not a busy scene. It seems kinda quiet and intimate but in a friendly way. Strong lines indicate a strong, ordered universe.
People in those days were inundated with negative news non-stop. It was nice to be distracted by something peaceful and quiet for a moment.
I prefer more natural scenes.
Are you sure he’s not just musing about increasing the ethanol mandate for gasoline?
When I look at Nighthawks, I see a friendly, inviting, brightly lit, all-night coffee shop in an otherwise dark intimidating city.
He’s wondering how he could troll and offend the people living in them (honestly thought it was a photoshop).
That’s always been my impression too – the night time loneliness and quiet in it.
Much of the work in the noir genres emphasizes loneliness and self-imposed isolation, but this painting doesn’t — not to me, at any rate. The overwhelming impression I get is one of simplicity, clarity, and a matter of fact acceptance of what is.
As I said earlier, I’m probably projecting my own wishes into it.
That, of course, is a perfectly valid interpretation. But if you put the work alongside Hopper’s entire oeuvre, the loneliness compounds and accumulates. There’s an ache in the heart of his work, an unease he accentuated with the use of disparate vanishing points – nothing quite lines up. We don’t see it, but we feel it.
What has happened on the other side of the street from the diner? All those empty rooms on the second floor. No one in those apartments drew their shades to keep out the blaring light of the diner, or the sun that would rise in a few hours?
As a kid I played the board game Masterpiece. This painting was in the game . I was excited as a teen to see the painting at the Chicago Institute of Art. Walking through the museum I found all of the game’s paintings came from there (American Gothic, The Rock, St. George and the Dragon…) I love that museum!
Okay, I get it. You’re more of a gas-pipe-half-empty kinda guy.
[Note to self: Hold off on the Franz Marc — except maybe the blue ponies.]
“…it was a decade when the adults were still in charge”
After reading M. Stanton Evans’ “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy” (not to mention Venona) one could reasonably conclude it was the wrong adults in charge. Perhaps including that man and woman.
Good point.
I loved Wise potato chips, and the ones that came in that huge metal can (Charles Chips?). Do they even make them any more?
They still make both, the last time I checked.
This painting always reminds me of Film Noir Movies, even though it is in color. I can imagine the Nighthawks couple as being Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Sitting across the diner is Sterling Hayden, and the soda jerk is Robert Ryan.
I think some of Hopper’s appeal is that his subject matter is definitely oriented to the 1930’s and 40’s and it brings a sense of nostalgia.
Exactly. Double Indemnity. The Maltese Falcon. The Big Sleep.
If I could pick a time….