Nighthawks

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Nighthawks
Edward Hopper , 1942
Oil on canvas
84.1 x 152.4 cm
Art Institute of Chicago , Chicago

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

Nighthawks (English, literally: " Nachtfalken ", analogously: "Nachtschwärmer") is an oil painting created in 1942 by the US painter Edward Hopper . The picture is considered to be Hopper's most famous work and is considered one of the most outstanding works of American painting. The 84.1 × 152.4 cm painting is now in the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, along with other works by Hopper .

Emergence

Hopper began working on Nighthawks just a few days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and the United States' entry into World War II the following day , at a time marked by dismay at the unexpected and Sudden entry into the war, a bleak mood and gloomy future prospects. Hopper himself did not let himself be infected by the ensuing war hysteria and in the following time devoted himself almost exclusively to his new project, which was completed after around one and a half months of work.

As Hopper noted in an interview two decades after the creation of the work, he was inspired by a restaurant at an intersection on New York's Greenwich Avenue in Greenwich Village , near which in Washington Square Park he had and lived his studio for decades. However, he tried to simplify and anonymize the impressions gained as much as possible in order to reproduce a typical American diner of the time according to his ideas and to prevent the model from being identified in Greenwich Avenue.

For the creation of the portrayed male figures, he modeled himself with the help of a mirror; for the woman depicted, he took his wife Josephine as a model (as with all female characters in his paintings). It was she who suggested the title Nighthawks for the picture , which Hopper immediately accepted.

Influences

John French Sloan : McSorley's Bar (1912); Typical image of the Ashcan School

Nighthawks is often seen as a decidedly American work and as typical and identity-forming for the painting of American realism . Above all, the socially critical group of artists at the Ashcan School , founded in 1908 , under whose founder Robert Henri Hopper studied painting and illustration for six years at the New York Institute of Art and Design , had a major influence on Hopper's pessimistic attitude towards urban change and the social changes that came with it Problems.

But influences that go beyond this can also be seen in Hopper's work. His tendency to depict contemporary motifs as well as to choose wide-angled formats and to experiment with light effects can be interpreted as the influence of French impressionism , which Hopper dealt intensively with during his four-year study visit in France from 1906 to 1910.

Image composition

In the cool, artificial light atmosphere of a bar, three guests are sitting, looking past each other, not talking and seemingly indulging in their own thoughts. The night owls sit at the surrounding counter, in the middle of which the white-uniformed waiter works. Whether the woman, whose left hand points to the smoking man on her right, and he are a couple, or whether they want to get to know each other, remains open. The other man, sitting alone, is a part of his back, also he with a hat.

Like the bow of a ship, the acute angle of the green and blue illuminated night café slides from the right into a dark, deserted street corner. This green-blue in the original has a power that outshines all other colors. It stands in clear contrast to the surrounding night. The play of colors moves between yellow, green, brown and red contrasts. Strict geometric shapes are broken up by two coffee machines, the salt and pepper shakers and cups. The cigar advertising (Phillies) on the facade surface has a similar function. Existing sketches for the finished picture show Hopper's meticulous planning of the painting.

interpretation

An old commercial building on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village , similar to the building in the background.

Scenes of loneliness and emptiness embedded in an urban context can be found in many of Hopper's works. In Nighthawks he used architecture and light to heighten this perception, which makes the painting appear to be the most impressive implementation of this motif. On the other hand, the numerous interpretations of his works, which emphasized the aspect of loneliness, prompted Hopper to state that "the matter of loneliness is exaggerated".

The minimalist architecture of the diner protruding in the foreground emphasizes the simple and desolate atmosphere of the picture. Because the entrance and exit of the diner are not visible, the people seem to be locked in by the curved glass front. The building in the semi-darkness in the background of the picture was designed by Hopper as a two-story commercial building, as it was typical for New York City in the 19th century. When designing the house facade, he used one of his earlier works, the painting Early Sunday Morning from 1930 , which shows an almost identical-looking building in full width and in the foreground. While in the more recent picture a skyscraper in the background in the upper right corner only subtly suggests an impending urban transformation, this transformation seems to have progressed much further in the picture taken twelve years later.

The lighting of the scene also reinforces the prevailing mood of the picture. The brightly lit night café is in stark contrast to the surrounding dark intersection. Fluorescent lamps had only been in use since the early 1940s, so the painting also illustrates the beginning of the triumphant advance of this new invention. Against the background of government blackout measures in American cities during the Second World War to protect against enemy attacks, the glaring nighttime lighting makes the diner appear exposed and endangered on the one hand, and on the other hand this can also be interpreted as the artist's deliberate disregard for freedom-restricting war regulations.

reception

In the fine arts

Nighthawks has been copied and cited countless times. One of the earliest examples of this is George Segal's sculpture The Diner (1964–1966), which depicts a similar scene, but with white plaster sculptures. Numerous influences from Hopper's paintings can also be seen in the works of the photorealists of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Ralph Goings or Richard Estes ( People's Flowers , 1971).

There are also numerous variations of the picture in which figures or objects have been removed, exchanged or added. The best-known variation of Nighthawks is probably the painting Boulevard of Broken Dreams by the Austro-American artist Gottfried Helnwein , in which the original characters have been exchanged for icons of American pop culture ( Humphrey Bogart , James Dean , Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley ). In Mark Kostabi's painting Greenwich Avenue (1986), the characters are replaced by white, faceless figures, and the colors are much colder than in the original. In Red Grooms ' vivid and colorful adaptation of the picture ( Nighthawks Revisited , 1980), the street in front of the diner is full of pedestrians, cats and trash. The American painter Sophie Matisse created a version in 2001 that shows the night café without people. British street artist Banksy added a rampaging football hooligan to the picture .

In the literature

Numerous authors dealt with the painting and tried to describe how the dinner scene in Nighthawks could come about or how the scene could develop further. The German writer Wolf Wondratschek described in his poem Nighthawks - based on Edward Hopper's picture from the lyric book Lied von der Liebe - the mood of the scene and portrayed the two people at the back bar as an estranged couple. Also in Peter Handke's story The Short Letter at the long farewell there are clear reminiscences of Hopper's painting. In her poem Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, 1942, the American writer Joyce Carol Oates wrote inner monologues for the characters from the painting. In his novel Postseason (2003), the French writer Philippe Besson tells the fictional story of the people depicted in Nighthawks .

In a special edition of the magazine Der Spiegel from 1994, the five scriptwriters Jürgen Egger , Sherry Hormann , Christoph Schlingensief , Günter Schütter and Matthias Seelig each wrote short scripts that take the painting scene as a dramaturgical starting point and then tell. Schlingensief's adaptation turns the scene into a chainsaw massacre of prominent German film critics and producers.

Richard Ford , American writer, main exponent of dirty realism , in his novel Canada from 2012, has a desolate, lonely escape place on the Canadian border designed by a painter like a scene from the school of nighthawks . (German edition: Canada, Hanser, Berlin 2012, p. 322 f.)

In film and television

Hopper, who was known as an avid moviegoer, has a proven record of drawing many ideas for his images from the films of the time, especially the gangster films that were very popular in the 1930s . Many of his pictures also resemble film stills (photographs of scenes on a film set) in terms of structure and design . But Hopper's works also had a major impact on film history. It is often assumed that the aesthetics of his pictures, and especially of Nighthawks, anticipated and influenced the stylistic development of Film Noir from the early 1940s .

Numerous films show influences from or allusions to Hoppers Nighthawks , such as Wim Wenders film At the End of Violence , Ridley Scott's Blade Runner , Glengarry Glen Ross , Hard Candy , Nachts im Museum 2 , The Equalizer or Dario Argentos Rosso - Color of Death .

Among other things, in the television series CSI: On the trail of the perpetrators , The Wild Seventies , Dead Like Me - As good as dead , The Simpsons or Family Guy, there are scenes in which the actors of the series re-enact the dinner scene from Nighthawks .

In music

The title of the album Nighthawks at the Diner by Tom Waits , like the lyrics of the songs on it, refers to Hopper's painting. The album cover shows Waits sitting in a diner.

The music video for the song "Monsters and Angels" by the group Voice of the Beehive shows a dinner scene that is very similar to Hopper's Nighthawks .

The cover of the album The Blue Jukebox by Chris Rea is similar to and was inspired by Hopper's painting.

The name of the German nu-jazz formation Nighthawks also goes back to Hopper's picture.

literature

  • Edward Hopper: Nighthawks . In: The Art Institute of Chicago (Ed.): American Art . 2008, p. 64 f . ( Full text (PDF; 3.7 MB) [accessed January 30, 2011]).
  • Claus Clüver: (Re) Writing Edward Hopper . In: Manfred Schmeling, Monika Schmitz-Emans (Ed.): The visual memory of literature . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1999, ISBN 3-8260-1643-2 , p. 141-165 .
  • Gail Levin: Edward Hopper - An Intimate Portrait . List, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-471-78062-9 , pp. 348-357 .
  • Gerd Gemünden: Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination . University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1998, ISBN 0-472-10947-2 , pp. 1-42 .
  • Erika Doss: Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, and Film Noir . In: Texas A&M University (Ed.): Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities . Vol. 2, No. 2 , 1983, p. 14-36 .
Fiction

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Art Institute of Chicago: American Art. 2008, p. 64.
  2. ^ A b Levin: Edward Hopper - An intimate portrait. 1998, p. 349.
  3. ^ Doss: Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, and Film Noir. 1983, p. 21.
  4. ↑ Art Institute of Chicago: American Art. 2008, p. 64 f.
  5. ^ "The loneliness thing is overdone". http://www.edwardhopper.net/ , accessed September 9, 2013.
  6. ^ Edward Hopper: Early Sunday Morning (1930). In: artcyclopedia.com. Retrieved January 30, 2011 .
  7. ^ Doss: Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, and Film Noir. 1983, pp. 22, 26.
  8. ^ Gottfried Helnwein: Boulevard of Broken Dreams II (1984). In: helnwein.com. Archived from the original on July 4, 2009 ; Retrieved January 30, 2011 .
  9. ^ Mark Kostabi: Greenwich Avenue (1986). In: artnet.com. Retrieved February 8, 2011 .
  10. ↑ Red Grooms: Nighthawks Revisited (1980). In: artknowledgenews.com. Retrieved February 8, 2011 .
  11. ^ Sophie Matisse: Nighthawks (2001). In: artnet.com. Retrieved January 30, 2011 .
  12. ↑ Banksy Crude Oils: Are you using that chair (2005). In: artofthestate.co.uk. Retrieved January 30, 2011 .
  13. ↑ Gemünden: Framed Visions. 1998, pp. 1-24.
  14. ↑ Jürgen Egger, Sherry Hormann, Christoph Schlingensief, Günter Schütter and Matthias Seelig: The night is ours . In: Spiegel Special . No. 12 , 1994, pp. 125–131 ( full text [accessed January 30, 2011]).
  15. ^ Doss: Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, and Film Noir. 1983, pp. 21-33.
  16. ↑ Gemünden: Framed Visions. 1998, pp. 9-12.
  17. ↑ Tweet by Chris Rea from February 27, 2017 (English), twitter.com, accessed on March 12, 2019.