Nighthawks - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Content
Nighthawks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
10/10/15 15:20
Nighthawks
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the painting by Edward Hopper. For other uses, see Nighthawks (disambiguation).
Nighthawks is a 1942 oil on canvas
painting by Edward Hopper that portrays
people in a downtown diner late at night.
Nighthawks
It is Hopper's most famous work[1] and is
one of the most recognizable paintings in
American art.[2][3] Within months of its
completion, it was sold to the Art
Institute of Chicago for $3,000[4] and has
remained there ever since.
Contents
1 About the painting
1.1 Josephine Hopper's
notes on the painting
2 Ownership history
3 Searching for the location of
the restaurant
4 In popular culture
4.1 Painting and sculpture
4.2 Literature
4.3 Film
4.4 Music
4.5 Television
4.6 Scale model
4.7 Parodies
5 References
6 External links
Artist
Edward Hopper
Year
1942
Type
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
84.1 cm ! 152.4 cm (331⁄8 in ! 60 in)
Location
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
About the painting
Josephine Hopper's notes on the painting
Starting shortly after their marriage in 1924, Edward Hopper and his wife Josephine (Jo) kept a journal in
which he would, using a pencil, make a sketch-drawing of each of his paintings, along with a precise
description of certain technical details. Jo Hopper would then add additional information about the theme of
the painting.
A review of the page on which Nighthawks is entered shows (in Edward Hopper's handwriting) that the
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intended name of the work was actually Night Hawks and that the painting was completed on January 21,
1942.
Jo's handwritten notes about the painting give considerably more detail, including the possibility that the
painting's title may have had its origins as a reference to the beak-shaped nose of the man at the bar, or that
the appearance of one of the "nighthawks" was tweaked in order to relate to the original meaning of the
word:
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.[5]
In January 1942, Jo confirmed her preference for the name. In a letter to Edward's sister Marion she wrote,
"Ed has just finished a very fine picture--a lunch counter at night with 3 figures. Night Hawks would be a
fine name for it. E. posed for the two men in a mirror and I for the girl. He was about a month and half
working on it."[6]
Ownership history
Upon completing the canvas in the late winter of 1942, Hopper
placed it on display at Rehn's, the gallery at which his paintings were
normally placed for sale. It remained there for about a month. On St.
Patrick's Day, Edward and Jo Hopper attended the opening of an
exhibit of the paintings of Henri Rousseau at the Museum of Modern
Art, which had been organized by Daniel Catton Rich, the director of
the Art Institute of Chicago. Rich was in attendance, along with
Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art. Barr spoke
enthusiastically of Gas, which Hopper had painted a year earlier, and
"Jo told him he just had to go to Rehn's to see Nighthawks. In the
event it was Rich who went, pronounced Nighthawks 'fine as a
Homer', and soon arranged its purchase for Chicago."[7] The sale
price was $3,000. The painting has remained in the collection of the
Art Institute ever since.
Searching for the location of the restaurant
Invoice showing $1971 going to the
artist after commission and costs
The scene was supposedly inspired by a diner (since demolished) in
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Greenwich Village, Hopper's neighborhood in Manhattan. Hopper himself said the painting "was suggested
by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet." Additionally, he noted that "I simplified the
scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger."[8]
This reference has led Hopper aficionados to engage in a search for the location of the original diner. The
inspiration for this search has been summed up on the blog of one of these searchers: "I am finding it
extremely difficult to let go of the notion that the Nighthawks diner was a real diner, and not a total
composite built of grocery stores, hamburger joints, and bakeries all cobbled together in the painter's
imagination."[9]
The spot usually associated with the former location is a now-vacant lot known as Mulry Square at the
intersection of Seventh Avenue South, Greenwich Avenue and West 11th Street, about seven blocks west of
Hopper's studio on Washington Square. However, according to an article by Jeremiah Moss in The New
York Times, this cannot be the location of the diner that inspired the painting as a gas station occupied that
lot from the 1930s to the 1970s.[10]
Moss located a land-use map in a 1950s municipal atlas showing that "Sometime between the late '30s and
early '50s, a new diner appeared near Mulry Square." Specifically, the diner was located immediately to the
right of the gas station, "not in the empty northern lot, but on the southwest side, where Perry Street slants."
This map is not reproduced in the Times article but is shown on Moss's blog.[11]
Moss comes to the conclusion that Hopper should be taken at his word: the painting was merely "suggested"
by a real-life restaurant, he had "simplified the scene a great deal," and he "made the restaurant bigger." In
short, there probably never was a single real-life scene identical to the one that Hopper had created, and if
one did exist, there is no longer sufficient evidence to pin down the precise location. Moss concludes, "the
ultimate truth remains bitterly out of reach."[9]
In popular culture
Because it is so widely recognized, the diner scene in
Nighthawks has served as the model for many homages
and parodies.
Painting and sculpture
Many artists have produced works that allude or respond
to Nighthawks. An early example is George Segal's
sculpture The Diner (1964–1966), made from parts of a
real diner with Segal's white plaster figures added, which
resembles Nighthawks in its sense of loneliness and
alienation as well as in its subject matter. Roger Brown,
one of the Chicago Imagists, included a view into a
corner cafe in his painting Puerto Rican Wedding
(1969), a stylized nighttime street scene.
Hopper influenced the Photorealists of the late 1960s
and early 1970s, including Ralph Goings, who evoked
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Roger Brown's Puerto Rican Wedding (1969).
Brown said that the café in the lower left corner of
this painting "isn't set up like an imitation of
Nighthawks, but still refers to it very much."[12]
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and early 1970s, including Ralph Goings, who evoked
Nighthawks, but still refers to it very much."[12]
Nighthawks in several paintings of diners. Richard Estes
painted a corner store in People's Flowers (1971), but in daylight, with the shop's large window reflecting
the street and sky.[13]
More direct visual quotations began to appear in the 1970s. Gottfried Helnwein's painting Boulevard of
Broken Dreams (1984) replaces the three patrons with American pop culture icons Humphrey Bogart,
Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, and the attendant with Elvis Presley.[14] According to Hopper scholar
Gail Levin, Helnwein connected the bleak mood of Nighthawks with 1950s American cinema and with "the
tragic fate of the decade's best-loved celebrities."[15] Greenwich Avenue (1986), one of several parodies
painted by Mark Kostabi, increases the painting's scale and uses a palette of garish electric colors; the human
figures are red and faceless. Nighthawks Revisited, a 1980 parody by Red Grooms, clutters the street scene
with pedestrians, cats and trash.[16] A 2005 Banksy parody shows a fat, shirtless soccer hooligan in Union
Flag boxers standing inebriated outside the diner, apparently having just smashed the diner window with a
nearby chair.[17]
Literature
Several writers have explored how the customers in Nighthawks came to be in a diner at night, or what will
happen next. Wolf Wondratschek's poem "Nighthawks: After Edward Hopper's Painting" imagines the man
and woman sitting together in the diner as an estranged couple: "I bet she wrote him a letter/ Whatever it
said, he's no longer the man / Who'd read her letters twice."[18] Joyce Carol Oates wrote interior monologues
for the figures in the painting in her poem "Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, 1942".[19] A special issue of Der
Spiegel included five brief dramatizations that built five different plots around the painting; one, by
screenwriter Christof Schlingensief, turned the scene into a chainsaw massacre. Erik Jendresen also wrote a
short story inspired by this painting.[20]
French writer Philippe Besson wrote a novel, published in 2002, called L'arrière-saison ("The Late Season")
imagining the lives of the characters in the painting.
The variant cover of Archie Comics #649 featured their take on the work, with Archie, Jughead and Hotdog
eating at Pop Tate's diner.
Film
Hopper was an avid moviegoer and critics have noted the resemblance of his paintings to film stills. Several
of his paintings suggest gangster films of the early 1930s such as Scarface and Little Caesar, a connection
that can be seen in the clothes of the customers in the diner. Nighthawks and works such as Night Shadows
(1921) anticipate the look of film noir whose development Hopper may have influenced.[21][22] Nighthawks
was briefly featured in the 1986 John Hughes comedy, Ferris Bueller's Day Off in the art gallery scene.
Hopper was an acknowledged influence on the film musical Pennies from Heaven (1981), in which director
Ken Adams recreated Nighthawks as a set.[23] Director Dario Argento went so far as to recreate the diner
and the patrons in Nighthawks as part of a set for his 1976 film Deep Red. Director Wim Wenders recreated
Nighthawks as the set for a film-within-a-film in The End of Violence (1997).[21] Wenders suggested that
Hopper's paintings appeal to filmmakers because "You can always tell where the camera is."[24] In
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is."[24]
Hopper's paintings appeal to filmmakers because "You can always tell where the camera
In
Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), two characters visit a café resembling the diner in a scene that illustrates their
solitude and despair.[25] Hard Candy (2005) acknowledged the debt by setting one scene at a "Nighthawks
Diner" where a character purchases a T-shirt with Nighthawks printed on it.[26] The painting was also briefly
used as a background for a scene in the animated film Heavy Traffic (1973) by director Ralph Bakshi.
Nighthawks also influenced the "future noir" look of Blade Runner; director Ridley Scott said "I was
constantly waving a reproduction of this painting under the noses of the production team to illustrate the
look and mood I was after".[27] In his review of Alex Proyas' Dark City, Roger Ebert noted that the film had
"store windows that owe something to Edward Hopper's Nighthawks."[28]
Nighthawks appeared in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.
Music
Tom Waits's album Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) features Nighthawks-inspired lyrics.[29]
The video for Voice of the Beehive's song "Monsters and Angels", from Honey Lingers, is set in a
diner reminiscent of the one in Nighthawks, with the band-members portraying waitstaff and patrons.
The band's web site said they "went with Edward Hopper's classic painting, Nighthawks, as a visual
guide."[30]
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's 2013 single "Night Café" was influenced by Nighthawks and
mentions Hopper by name. Seven of his paintings are referenced in the lyrics.[31]
Television
The television series CSI: Crime Scene
Investigation placed its characters in a version of
the painting.[32]
In the That '70s Show episode "Drive In," a scene
ends with Red and Kitty Foreman sitting in a diner
named "Phillies", when Kitty states that the
moment seems familiar. The camera zooms out
showing Nighthawks with Red and Kitty wearing
the suit and red dress, respectively, of the man and
woman sitting together.[33]
In the TV show Dead Like Me (Season 1 Episode 12 - "Nighthawks") The painting is
discussed in a diner by the two lead actors while
they are looking at an image of it in a book of art.
An establishing shot from "Homer vs. the
There are two customers in the diner who
Eighteenth Amendment", one of several references
resemble the woman in the red dress and her
to Nighthawks in the animated TV series The
partner from the painting and the final scene of the
Simpsons
show echoes the composition of the painting.
In the "Mike Tyson Mysteries" episode "Night
Moves" (Season one Episode nine) the ending credits play over a variation on the painting featuring
the characters of the show.
In 2015 an American Family Insurance commercial featuring Jennifer Hudson was set in a diner with
characters taken from the painting.
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The Turner Classic Movies channel paid homage to the painting in one of its introduction sequences,
reflecting the station's focus on films from the golden age of Hollywood
The TV show "Fresh Off the Boat" Season 2 poster features the title family in Nighthawks with the
girl using chopsticks[34]
Scale model
Electronic Theatre Controls (ETC) in Middleton, Wisconsin pays tribute to Nighthawks with an entirely
scale model representation of the scene in their lobby. The lunch counter is used as the receptionist's desk.
A number of model railroaders, most notably John Armstrong, have recreated the scene on their layouts.[35]
Parodies
Nighthawks has been widely referenced and parodied in popular culture. Versions of it have appeared on
posters, T-shirts and greeting cards as well as in comic books and advertisements.[36] Typically, these
parodies—like Helnwein's Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which became a popular poster[15]—retain the
diner and the highly recognizable diagonal composition but replace the patrons and attendant with other
characters: animals, Santa Claus and his reindeer, or the cast of The Adventures of Tintin or Peanuts.[37]
One parody of Nighthawks even inspired a parody of its own. Michael Bedard's painting Window
Shopping (1989), part of his Sitting Ducks series of posters, replaces the figures in the diner with
ducks and shows a crocodile outside eying the ducks in anticipation. Poverino Peppino parodied this
image in Boulevard of Broken Ducks (1993), in which a contented crocodile lies on the counter while
four ducks stand outside in the rain.[38]
At the end of most episodes of the animated series The Tick, Tick and Arthur are shown in a setting
similar to Nighthawks.
The opening shot of the VeggieTales Silly Song compilation The End of Silliness? is similar to the
painting, but the building is an ice cream parlor.
In 2014, Sirius Radio host Howard Stern, featured a parody on his website entitled Wack Pack
Diner.[39] It was displayed after the passing of Eric the Actor, one of Stern's longtime featured guest
personalities.
References
Notes
1. Ian Chilvers and Harold Osborne (Eds.), The Oxford Dictionary of Art Oxford University Press, 1997 (second
edition), p. 273, ISBN 0-19-860084-4 "The central theme of his work is the loneliness of city life, generally
expressed through one or two figures in a spare setting - his best-known work, Nighthawks, has an unusually large
'cast' with four."
2. Hopper's Nighthawks (http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/hoppers-nighthawks.html), Smarthistory video, accessed
April 29, 2013.
3. Brooks, Katherine (2012-07-22). "Happy Birthday, Edward Hopper!". The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com,
Inc. Retrieved 2013-05-05.
4. The sale was recorded by Josephine Hopper as follows, in volume II, p. 95 of her and Edward's journal of his art:
"May 13, '42: Chicago Art Institute - 3,000 + return of Compartment C in exchange as part payment. 1,000 - 1/3 =
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5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
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"May 13, '42: Chicago Art Institute - 3,000 + return of Compartment C in exchange as part payment. 1,000 - 1/3 =
2,000." See Deborah Lyons, Edward Hopper: A Journal of His Work. New York: Whitney Museum of American
Art, 1997, p. 63.
See Deborah Lyons, Edward Hopper: A Journal of His Work. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997,
p. 63
Jo Hopper, letter to Marion Hopper, January 22, 1942. Quoted in Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate
Biography. New York: Rizzoli, 2007, p. 349.
Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography. New York: Rizzoli, 2007, pp. 351-2, citing Jo Hopper's diary
entry for March 17, 1942.
Hopper, interview with Katharine Kuh, in The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists. 1962. Reprinted,
New York: Da Capo Press, 2000, p. 134.
Jeremiah Moss (2010-06-10). "Jeremiah's Vanishing New York: Finding Nighthawks, Coda". Jeremiah's Vanishing
New York. Retrieved 2013-03-04.
Moss, Jeremiah (July 5, 2010). "Nighthawks State of Mind". The New York Times. Retrieved May 22, 2013.
Moss, Jeremiah (June 9, 2010). "Finding Nighthawks, Part 3". Jeremiah's Vanishing New York (blog). Retrieved
May 18, 2014.
Levin, 111–112.
Levin, Gail (1995), "Edward Hopper: His Legacy for Artists", in Lyons, Deborah; Weinberg, Adam D., Edward
Hopper and the American Imagination, New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 109–115, ISBN 0-393-31329-8
"Boulevard of Broken Dreams II". Helnwein.com. 2013-10-15. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
Levin, 109–110.
Levin, 116–123.
Jury, Louise (October 14, 2005), "Rats to the Arts Establishment", The Independent
Gemünden, 2–5, 15; quotation translated from the German by Gemünden.
Updike, John (2005), Still Looking: Essays on American Art, New York: Knopf, p. 181, ISBN 1-4000-4418-9. The
Oates poem appears in the anthology Hirsch, Edward, ed. (1994), Transforming Vision: Writers on Art, Chicago,
Illinois: Art Institute of Chicago, ISBN 0-8212-2126-4
Gemünden, 5–6.
Gemünden, Gerd (1998), Framed Vsions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and
Austrian Imagination, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 9–12, ISBN 0-472-10947-2
Doss, Erika (1983), "Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, and Film Noir" (PDF), Post Script: Essays in Film and the
Humanities 2 (2): 14–36
Doss, 36.
Berman, Avis (2007), "Hopper", Smithsonian 38 (4): 4
Arouet, Carole (2001), "Glengarry Glen Ross ou l’autopsie de l’image modèle de l’économie américaine" (PDF), La
Voix du Regard (14)
Chambers, Bill, "Hard Candy (2006), The King (2006)", Film Freak Central, retrieved 2007-08-05
Sammon, Paul M. (1996), Future Noir: the Making of Blade Runner, New York: HarperPrism, p. 74, ISBN 0-06105314-7
"Dark City". ebertfest.com.
Thiesen, 10; Reynolds, E25.
"The Beehive – Voice of the Beehive Online – Biography". Retrieved 20 August 2010.
"Premiere: OMD, 'Night Café' (Vile Electrodes 'B-Side the C-Side' Remix)". Slicing Up Eyeballs. 5 August 2013.
Retrieved 25 September 2013.
Theisen, Gordon (2006), Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the
American Psyche, New York: Thomas Dunne Books, p. 10, ISBN 0-312-33342-0
Reynolds, E25. The episode is #108, "Drive In".
Slezak, Michael (2015-09-11). "Fresh Off the Boat's Season 2 Poster: The Huangs Give Us an Art-Attack".
"And Now for Something Completely Different". O Gauge Railroading On-Line Forum. Retrieved 18 September
2015.
Levin, 125–126. Reynolds, Christopher (September 23, 2006), "Lives of a Diner", Los Angeles Times: E25
Levin, 125–126; Thiesen, 10.
Müller, Beate (1997), "Introduction", Parody: Dimensions and Perspectives, Rodopi, ISBN 904200181X
"The Official Site of Howard Stern - HowardStern.com". Howard Stern.
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Bibliography
Cook, Greg, "Visions of Isolation: Edward Hopper at the MFA"
(http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid39115.aspx), Boston Phoenix, May 4, 2007, p. 22, Arts and
Entertainment.
Spring, Justin, The Essential Edward Hopper, Wonderland Press, 1998
External links
Nighthawks (http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/111628) at The Art Institute of Chicago
Sister Wendy's American Masterpieces discussion of Nighthawks at The Artchive.
(http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/hopper/nighthwk.jpg.html)
Jeremiah Moss (7 June 2010). "Finding Nighthawks". Jeremiah's Vanishing New York.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nighthawks&oldid=681692154"
Categories: 1942 paintings American paintings Lunch counters Modern paintings
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Nighthawks
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the painting by Edward Hopper. For other uses, see Nighthawks (disambiguation).
Nighthawks is a 1942 oil on canvas
painting by Edward Hopper that portrays
people in a downtown diner late at night.
Nighthawks
It is Hopper's most famous work[1] and is
one of the most recognizable paintings in
American art.[2][3] Within months of its
completion, it was sold to the Art
Institute of Chicago for $3,000[4] and has
remained there ever since.
Contents
1 About the painting
1.1 Josephine Hopper's
notes on the painting
2 Ownership history
3 Searching for the location of
the restaurant
4 In popular culture
4.1 Painting and sculpture
4.2 Literature
4.3 Film
4.4 Music
4.5 Television
4.6 Scale model
4.7 Parodies
5 References
6 External links
Artist
Edward Hopper
Year
1942
Type
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
84.1 cm ! 152.4 cm (331⁄8 in ! 60 in)
Location
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
About the painting
Josephine Hopper's notes on the painting
Starting shortly after their marriage in 1924, Edward Hopper and his wife Josephine (Jo) kept a journal in
which he would, using a pencil, make a sketch-drawing of each of his paintings, along with a precise
description of certain technical details. Jo Hopper would then add additional information about the theme of
the painting.
A review of the page on which Nighthawks is entered shows (in Edward Hopper's handwriting) that the
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intended name of the work was actually Night Hawks and that the painting was completed on January 21,
1942.
Jo's handwritten notes about the painting give considerably more detail, including the possibility that the
painting's title may have had its origins as a reference to the beak-shaped nose of the man at the bar, or that
the appearance of one of the "nighthawks" was tweaked in order to relate to the original meaning of the
word:
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.[5]
In January 1942, Jo confirmed her preference for the name. In a letter to Edward's sister Marion she wrote,
"Ed has just finished a very fine picture--a lunch counter at night with 3 figures. Night Hawks would be a
fine name for it. E. posed for the two men in a mirror and I for the girl. He was about a month and half
working on it."[6]
Ownership history
Upon completing the canvas in the late winter of 1942, Hopper
placed it on display at Rehn's, the gallery at which his paintings were
normally placed for sale. It remained there for about a month. On St.
Patrick's Day, Edward and Jo Hopper attended the opening of an
exhibit of the paintings of Henri Rousseau at the Museum of Modern
Art, which had been organized by Daniel Catton Rich, the director of
the Art Institute of Chicago. Rich was in attendance, along with
Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art. Barr spoke
enthusiastically of Gas, which Hopper had painted a year earlier, and
"Jo told him he just had to go to Rehn's to see Nighthawks. In the
event it was Rich who went, pronounced Nighthawks 'fine as a
Homer', and soon arranged its purchase for Chicago."[7] The sale
price was $3,000. The painting has remained in the collection of the
Art Institute ever since.
Searching for the location of the restaurant
Invoice showing $1971 going to the
artist after commission and costs
The scene was supposedly inspired by a diner (since demolished) in
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Greenwich Village, Hopper's neighborhood in Manhattan. Hopper himself said the painting "was suggested
by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet." Additionally, he noted that "I simplified the
scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger."[8]
This reference has led Hopper aficionados to engage in a search for the location of the original diner. The
inspiration for this search has been summed up on the blog of one of these searchers: "I am finding it
extremely difficult to let go of the notion that the Nighthawks diner was a real diner, and not a total
composite built of grocery stores, hamburger joints, and bakeries all cobbled together in the painter's
imagination."[9]
The spot usually associated with the former location is a now-vacant lot known as Mulry Square at the
intersection of Seventh Avenue South, Greenwich Avenue and West 11th Street, about seven blocks west of
Hopper's studio on Washington Square. However, according to an article by Jeremiah Moss in The New
York Times, this cannot be the location of the diner that inspired the painting as a gas station occupied that
lot from the 1930s to the 1970s.[10]
Moss located a land-use map in a 1950s municipal atlas showing that "Sometime between the late '30s and
early '50s, a new diner appeared near Mulry Square." Specifically, the diner was located immediately to the
right of the gas station, "not in the empty northern lot, but on the southwest side, where Perry Street slants."
This map is not reproduced in the Times article but is shown on Moss's blog.[11]
Moss comes to the conclusion that Hopper should be taken at his word: the painting was merely "suggested"
by a real-life restaurant, he had "simplified the scene a great deal," and he "made the restaurant bigger." In
short, there probably never was a single real-life scene identical to the one that Hopper had created, and if
one did exist, there is no longer sufficient evidence to pin down the precise location. Moss concludes, "the
ultimate truth remains bitterly out of reach."[9]
In popular culture
Because it is so widely recognized, the diner scene in
Nighthawks has served as the model for many homages
and parodies.
Painting and sculpture
Many artists have produced works that allude or respond
to Nighthawks. An early example is George Segal's
sculpture The Diner (1964–1966), made from parts of a
real diner with Segal's white plaster figures added, which
resembles Nighthawks in its sense of loneliness and
alienation as well as in its subject matter. Roger Brown,
one of the Chicago Imagists, included a view into a
corner cafe in his painting Puerto Rican Wedding
(1969), a stylized nighttime street scene.
Hopper influenced the Photorealists of the late 1960s
and early 1970s, including Ralph Goings, who evoked
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Roger Brown's Puerto Rican Wedding (1969).
Brown said that the café in the lower left corner of
this painting "isn't set up like an imitation of
Nighthawks, but still refers to it very much."[12]
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and early 1970s, including Ralph Goings, who evoked
Nighthawks, but still refers to it very much."[12]
Nighthawks in several paintings of diners. Richard Estes
painted a corner store in People's Flowers (1971), but in daylight, with the shop's large window reflecting
the street and sky.[13]
More direct visual quotations began to appear in the 1970s. Gottfried Helnwein's painting Boulevard of
Broken Dreams (1984) replaces the three patrons with American pop culture icons Humphrey Bogart,
Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, and the attendant with Elvis Presley.[14] According to Hopper scholar
Gail Levin, Helnwein connected the bleak mood of Nighthawks with 1950s American cinema and with "the
tragic fate of the decade's best-loved celebrities."[15] Greenwich Avenue (1986), one of several parodies
painted by Mark Kostabi, increases the painting's scale and uses a palette of garish electric colors; the human
figures are red and faceless. Nighthawks Revisited, a 1980 parody by Red Grooms, clutters the street scene
with pedestrians, cats and trash.[16] A 2005 Banksy parody shows a fat, shirtless soccer hooligan in Union
Flag boxers standing inebriated outside the diner, apparently having just smashed the diner window with a
nearby chair.[17]
Literature
Several writers have explored how the customers in Nighthawks came to be in a diner at night, or what will
happen next. Wolf Wondratschek's poem "Nighthawks: After Edward Hopper's Painting" imagines the man
and woman sitting together in the diner as an estranged couple: "I bet she wrote him a letter/ Whatever it
said, he's no longer the man / Who'd read her letters twice."[18] Joyce Carol Oates wrote interior monologues
for the figures in the painting in her poem "Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, 1942".[19] A special issue of Der
Spiegel included five brief dramatizations that built five different plots around the painting; one, by
screenwriter Christof Schlingensief, turned the scene into a chainsaw massacre. Erik Jendresen also wrote a
short story inspired by this painting.[20]
French writer Philippe Besson wrote a novel, published in 2002, called L'arrière-saison ("The Late Season")
imagining the lives of the characters in the painting.
The variant cover of Archie Comics #649 featured their take on the work, with Archie, Jughead and Hotdog
eating at Pop Tate's diner.
Film
Hopper was an avid moviegoer and critics have noted the resemblance of his paintings to film stills. Several
of his paintings suggest gangster films of the early 1930s such as Scarface and Little Caesar, a connection
that can be seen in the clothes of the customers in the diner. Nighthawks and works such as Night Shadows
(1921) anticipate the look of film noir whose development Hopper may have influenced.[21][22] Nighthawks
was briefly featured in the 1986 John Hughes comedy, Ferris Bueller's Day Off in the art gallery scene.
Hopper was an acknowledged influence on the film musical Pennies from Heaven (1981), in which director
Ken Adams recreated Nighthawks as a set.[23] Director Dario Argento went so far as to recreate the diner
and the patrons in Nighthawks as part of a set for his 1976 film Deep Red. Director Wim Wenders recreated
Nighthawks as the set for a film-within-a-film in The End of Violence (1997).[21] Wenders suggested that
Hopper's paintings appeal to filmmakers because "You can always tell where the camera is."[24] In
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is."[24]
Hopper's paintings appeal to filmmakers because "You can always tell where the camera
In
Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), two characters visit a café resembling the diner in a scene that illustrates their
solitude and despair.[25] Hard Candy (2005) acknowledged the debt by setting one scene at a "Nighthawks
Diner" where a character purchases a T-shirt with Nighthawks printed on it.[26] The painting was also briefly
used as a background for a scene in the animated film Heavy Traffic (1973) by director Ralph Bakshi.
Nighthawks also influenced the "future noir" look of Blade Runner; director Ridley Scott said "I was
constantly waving a reproduction of this painting under the noses of the production team to illustrate the
look and mood I was after".[27] In his review of Alex Proyas' Dark City, Roger Ebert noted that the film had
"store windows that owe something to Edward Hopper's Nighthawks."[28]
Nighthawks appeared in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.
Music
Tom Waits's album Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) features Nighthawks-inspired lyrics.[29]
The video for Voice of the Beehive's song "Monsters and Angels", from Honey Lingers, is set in a
diner reminiscent of the one in Nighthawks, with the band-members portraying waitstaff and patrons.
The band's web site said they "went with Edward Hopper's classic painting, Nighthawks, as a visual
guide."[30]
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's 2013 single "Night Café" was influenced by Nighthawks and
mentions Hopper by name. Seven of his paintings are referenced in the lyrics.[31]
Television
The television series CSI: Crime Scene
Investigation placed its characters in a version of
the painting.[32]
In the That '70s Show episode "Drive In," a scene
ends with Red and Kitty Foreman sitting in a diner
named "Phillies", when Kitty states that the
moment seems familiar. The camera zooms out
showing Nighthawks with Red and Kitty wearing
the suit and red dress, respectively, of the man and
woman sitting together.[33]
In the TV show Dead Like Me (Season 1 Episode 12 - "Nighthawks") The painting is
discussed in a diner by the two lead actors while
they are looking at an image of it in a book of art.
An establishing shot from "Homer vs. the
There are two customers in the diner who
Eighteenth Amendment", one of several references
resemble the woman in the red dress and her
to Nighthawks in the animated TV series The
partner from the painting and the final scene of the
Simpsons
show echoes the composition of the painting.
In the "Mike Tyson Mysteries" episode "Night
Moves" (Season one Episode nine) the ending credits play over a variation on the painting featuring
the characters of the show.
In 2015 an American Family Insurance commercial featuring Jennifer Hudson was set in a diner with
characters taken from the painting.
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The Turner Classic Movies channel paid homage to the painting in one of its introduction sequences,
reflecting the station's focus on films from the golden age of Hollywood
The TV show "Fresh Off the Boat" Season 2 poster features the title family in Nighthawks with the
girl using chopsticks[34]
Scale model
Electronic Theatre Controls (ETC) in Middleton, Wisconsin pays tribute to Nighthawks with an entirely
scale model representation of the scene in their lobby. The lunch counter is used as the receptionist's desk.
A number of model railroaders, most notably John Armstrong, have recreated the scene on their layouts.[35]
Parodies
Nighthawks has been widely referenced and parodied in popular culture. Versions of it have appeared on
posters, T-shirts and greeting cards as well as in comic books and advertisements.[36] Typically, these
parodies—like Helnwein's Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which became a popular poster[15]—retain the
diner and the highly recognizable diagonal composition but replace the patrons and attendant with other
characters: animals, Santa Claus and his reindeer, or the cast of The Adventures of Tintin or Peanuts.[37]
One parody of Nighthawks even inspired a parody of its own. Michael Bedard's painting Window
Shopping (1989), part of his Sitting Ducks series of posters, replaces the figures in the diner with
ducks and shows a crocodile outside eying the ducks in anticipation. Poverino Peppino parodied this
image in Boulevard of Broken Ducks (1993), in which a contented crocodile lies on the counter while
four ducks stand outside in the rain.[38]
At the end of most episodes of the animated series The Tick, Tick and Arthur are shown in a setting
similar to Nighthawks.
The opening shot of the VeggieTales Silly Song compilation The End of Silliness? is similar to the
painting, but the building is an ice cream parlor.
In 2014, Sirius Radio host Howard Stern, featured a parody on his website entitled Wack Pack
Diner.[39] It was displayed after the passing of Eric the Actor, one of Stern's longtime featured guest
personalities.
References
Notes
1. Ian Chilvers and Harold Osborne (Eds.), The Oxford Dictionary of Art Oxford University Press, 1997 (second
edition), p. 273, ISBN 0-19-860084-4 "The central theme of his work is the loneliness of city life, generally
expressed through one or two figures in a spare setting - his best-known work, Nighthawks, has an unusually large
'cast' with four."
2. Hopper's Nighthawks (http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/hoppers-nighthawks.html), Smarthistory video, accessed
April 29, 2013.
3. Brooks, Katherine (2012-07-22). "Happy Birthday, Edward Hopper!". The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com,
Inc. Retrieved 2013-05-05.
4. The sale was recorded by Josephine Hopper as follows, in volume II, p. 95 of her and Edward's journal of his art:
"May 13, '42: Chicago Art Institute - 3,000 + return of Compartment C in exchange as part payment. 1,000 - 1/3 =
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5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
10/10/15 15:20
"May 13, '42: Chicago Art Institute - 3,000 + return of Compartment C in exchange as part payment. 1,000 - 1/3 =
2,000." See Deborah Lyons, Edward Hopper: A Journal of His Work. New York: Whitney Museum of American
Art, 1997, p. 63.
See Deborah Lyons, Edward Hopper: A Journal of His Work. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997,
p. 63
Jo Hopper, letter to Marion Hopper, January 22, 1942. Quoted in Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate
Biography. New York: Rizzoli, 2007, p. 349.
Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography. New York: Rizzoli, 2007, pp. 351-2, citing Jo Hopper's diary
entry for March 17, 1942.
Hopper, interview with Katharine Kuh, in The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists. 1962. Reprinted,
New York: Da Capo Press, 2000, p. 134.
Jeremiah Moss (2010-06-10). "Jeremiah's Vanishing New York: Finding Nighthawks, Coda". Jeremiah's Vanishing
New York. Retrieved 2013-03-04.
Moss, Jeremiah (July 5, 2010). "Nighthawks State of Mind". The New York Times. Retrieved May 22, 2013.
Moss, Jeremiah (June 9, 2010). "Finding Nighthawks, Part 3". Jeremiah's Vanishing New York (blog). Retrieved
May 18, 2014.
Levin, 111–112.
Levin, Gail (1995), "Edward Hopper: His Legacy for Artists", in Lyons, Deborah; Weinberg, Adam D., Edward
Hopper and the American Imagination, New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 109–115, ISBN 0-393-31329-8
"Boulevard of Broken Dreams II". Helnwein.com. 2013-10-15. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
Levin, 109–110.
Levin, 116–123.
Jury, Louise (October 14, 2005), "Rats to the Arts Establishment", The Independent
Gemünden, 2–5, 15; quotation translated from the German by Gemünden.
Updike, John (2005), Still Looking: Essays on American Art, New York: Knopf, p. 181, ISBN 1-4000-4418-9. The
Oates poem appears in the anthology Hirsch, Edward, ed. (1994), Transforming Vision: Writers on Art, Chicago,
Illinois: Art Institute of Chicago, ISBN 0-8212-2126-4
Gemünden, 5–6.
Gemünden, Gerd (1998), Framed Vsions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and
Austrian Imagination, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 9–12, ISBN 0-472-10947-2
Doss, Erika (1983), "Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, and Film Noir" (PDF), Post Script: Essays in Film and the
Humanities 2 (2): 14–36
Doss, 36.
Berman, Avis (2007), "Hopper", Smithsonian 38 (4): 4
Arouet, Carole (2001), "Glengarry Glen Ross ou l’autopsie de l’image modèle de l’économie américaine" (PDF), La
Voix du Regard (14)
Chambers, Bill, "Hard Candy (2006), The King (2006)", Film Freak Central, retrieved 2007-08-05
Sammon, Paul M. (1996), Future Noir: the Making of Blade Runner, New York: HarperPrism, p. 74, ISBN 0-06105314-7
"Dark City". ebertfest.com.
Thiesen, 10; Reynolds, E25.
"The Beehive – Voice of the Beehive Online – Biography". Retrieved 20 August 2010.
"Premiere: OMD, 'Night Café' (Vile Electrodes 'B-Side the C-Side' Remix)". Slicing Up Eyeballs. 5 August 2013.
Retrieved 25 September 2013.
Theisen, Gordon (2006), Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the
American Psyche, New York: Thomas Dunne Books, p. 10, ISBN 0-312-33342-0
Reynolds, E25. The episode is #108, "Drive In".
Slezak, Michael (2015-09-11). "Fresh Off the Boat's Season 2 Poster: The Huangs Give Us an Art-Attack".
"And Now for Something Completely Different". O Gauge Railroading On-Line Forum. Retrieved 18 September
2015.
Levin, 125–126. Reynolds, Christopher (September 23, 2006), "Lives of a Diner", Los Angeles Times: E25
Levin, 125–126; Thiesen, 10.
Müller, Beate (1997), "Introduction", Parody: Dimensions and Perspectives, Rodopi, ISBN 904200181X
"The Official Site of Howard Stern - HowardStern.com". Howard Stern.
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Bibliography
Cook, Greg, "Visions of Isolation: Edward Hopper at the MFA"
(http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid39115.aspx), Boston Phoenix, May 4, 2007, p. 22, Arts and
Entertainment.
Spring, Justin, The Essential Edward Hopper, Wonderland Press, 1998
External links
Nighthawks (http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/111628) at The Art Institute of Chicago
Sister Wendy's American Masterpieces discussion of Nighthawks at The Artchive.
(http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/hopper/nighthwk.jpg.html)
Jeremiah Moss (7 June 2010). "Finding Nighthawks". Jeremiah's Vanishing New York.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nighthawks&oldid=681692154"
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