[ART] Decoding A Modern American Masterpiece 🎨

Three people sit at a diner in the middle of the night, two men in dark suit and hat and a redhead woman in red blouse. All three seem to be enclosed in their own world. The painter himself, Edward Hopper (1982-1967) posed in a mirror for the two men, while his wife Jo posed for the woman. Three coffee cups stand on the bar counter next to the figures. Behind the counter, the bartender works while saying something to one of the men who holds a cigarette in his hand. He doesn't seem to listen. The woman eats a sandwich which she holds in her left hand while her right arm rests on the counter so that she almost touches the man's hand by her side. The room is brightly illuminated by fluorescent lamps in the ceiling and the background wall is light yellow with one of Hopper's many closed doors on the far right.

The iconic painting Nighthawks (1942) is typical for Hopper in its lack of a horizon and with the moods of solitude and desolation. The sharp artificial light provides a sense of unreality or a dream in the middle of an ambient darkness poignant shadows on the street outside the diner. The green artificial light on the sidewalk reinforces the phantasmal feeling. Diagonal perspective lines from the bar and the large window point to an illuminated cash register in the shop across the street. Money is what controls people's activity during the day. In his art, Hopper is a sharp critic of materialism and commercialism in American society and, in extension, modern western civilization. The essence of the painting is actually the lack of horizon and the pursuit towards such an absence by the perspective lines.

There is a hidden drama in Nighthawks that is difficult to pinpoint. Some critics have noted that a latent violence rests in the image and that what is portrayed is people who are outsiders of society. There might be something to it, because Hopper was inspired by Hemingway's novel The Killers about two torpedoes entering a Chicago restaurant in the late 1920s with the intent to kill a boxer. When the novel was published in a magazine in 1927, Hopper wrote an enthusiastic letter to the editor. 

But ultimately Nighthawks is about individuals who seek something other than the American dream of success and wealth, whether legally or illegally. This 'something else' is characterized by expectation, quiet anxiety and resignation. Something is about to happen, something that never happens. The people wait in the existential night. The possibility of movement exists, but the characters seem immobilized, solidified in a pose. The meeting between the horizontal line and the perspective line will never happen.

 @SteemSwede