Skip to main content

What Makes Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks a Great Painting?: A Video Essay

“Even though you may live in one of the most crowded and busy cities on Earth, it is still possible to feel entirely alone.” Though hardly a novel sentiment, this nevertheless makes for a highly suitable entrée into a video essay on Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Its creator is gallerist and Youtuber James Payne, whose channel Great Art Explained has already taken on the likes of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych, and Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Nighthawks, safe to say, makes a more immediate impression on us 21st-century urbanites than any of those works, whatever our individual degrees of alienation. But why?

Hopper painted what he knew, and especially so in the case of his single best-known work. Though the diner Nighthawks takes as its setting exists nowhere in New York, the artist had spent his entire adult life in the city, an immersion that allowed him to create a street-corner scene that feels realer than real.

But the emotion exuded by that diner’s patrons must run deeper than the standard urban malaise. Eighteen years into a bitter and dysfunctional marriage, the inspiration for all the “disconnected and unhappy couples he portrays time and again in his paintings,” Hopper knew intimately more than one kind of human loneliness. He himself acted as model for all three of Nighthawks‘ male figures, in fact, and his wife Josephine posed for the female one.

“It was down to Jo that Edward became a success,” says Payne, “a fact he never thanked her for.” An artist in her own right, she got Hopper his first solo show in 1924, when he was 42. Up to then he’d worked as a magazine illustrator, but even by the time of Nighthawks in 1942, he clearly hadn’t forgotten the misery of his day job. Nor had he discarded what it gave him: “along with the preparation skills he picked up, it also helped to hone his storytelling abilities.” An avid moviegoer, he “planned Nighthawks like a filmmaker, storyboarding the painting ahead of its creation.” Filmmakers have responded to Hopper’s cinematic painting with tributes of their own: Herbert Ross re-created the diner in Pennies from Heaven, as did Wim Wenders in The End of Violence, evoking Hopper’s “world of loneliness, anguish, and quiet isolation.” Ironic, then, that so many in Nighthawks‘ generations of appreciators have felt less alone while regarding it.

Related Content:

Seven Videos Explain How Edward Hopper’s Paintings Expressed American Loneliness and Alienation

How Edward Hopper “Storyboarded” His Iconic Painting Nighthawks

Edward Hopper’s Iconic Painting Nighthawks Explained in a 7-Minute Video Introduction

10 Paintings by Edward Hopper, the Most Cinematic American Painter of All, Turned into Animated GIFs

How Edward Hopper’s Paintings Inspired the Creepy Suspense of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks: The 2020 Edition

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

What Makes Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks a Great Painting?: A Video Essay is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3zFbZse
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more