Saturday, October 16, 2004

3:14 AM | On Edward Hopper

For Marie La Vina, who cares about such things



The first Edward Hopper painting I saw was, of course, Nighthawks. It's iconic, and it's everywhere. Sooner or later, anyone would have stumbled upon it, the way we do with, say, the Mona Lisa. I was a college student ... angst-ridden, and possessed with dreams of running away to the big city. It was always New York in those dreams. My movies informed me about this place of eternal flux, unforgiving and exciting at the same time, where creativity feeds on beautiful, dramatic loneliness. I was browsing through my painter-friend Krevo's postcard collection, and there it was. Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. It was the painting's subversive sadness that attracted me most -- the way its realism seems to spring out of a Saturday Evening Post Technicolor mold, which is to say that its grand, saturated colors almost invoked a kind of cheeriness ... and yet, there isn't really any. See the painting for yourself:







The always brilliant Sister Wendy talks about this masterpiece in her book American Masterpieces:

Apparently, there was a period when every college dormitory in the country had on its walls a poster of Hopper's Nighthawks; it had become an icon. It is easy to understand its appeal. This is not just an image of big-city loneliness, but of existential loneliness: the sense that we have (perhaps overwhelmingly in late adolescence) of being on our own in the human condition. When we look at that dark New York street, we would expect the fluorescent-lit cafe to be welcoming, but it is not. There is no way to enter it, no door. The extreme brightness means that the people inside are held, exposed and vulnerable. They hunch their shoulders defensively. Hopper did not actually observe them, because he used himself as a model for both the seated men, as if he perceived men in this situation as clones. He modeled the woman, as he did all of his female characters, on his wife Jo. He was a difficult man, and Jo was far more emotionally involved with him than he with her; one of her methods of keeping him with her was to insist that only she would be his model.



From Jo's diaries we learn that Hopper described this work as a painting of "three characters." The man behind the counter, though imprisoned in the triangle, is in fact free. He has a job, a home, he can come and go; he can look at the customers with a half-smile. It is the customers who are the nighthawks. Nighthawks are predators -- but are the men there to prey on the woman, or has she come in to prey on the men? To my mind, the man and woman are a couple, as the position of their hands suggests, but they are a couple so lost in misery that they cannot communicate; they have nothing to give each other. I see the nighthawks of the picture not so much as birds of prey, but simply as birds: great winged creatures that should be free in the sky, but instead are shut in, dazed and miserable, with their heads constantly banging against the glass of the world's callousness. In his Last Poems, A. E. Housman (1859-1936) speaks of being "a stranger and afraid/In a world I never made." That was what Hopper felt -- and what he conveys so bitterly.

See more of Hopper's works in this wonderful website.



[what painting changed your life?]

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

---

GO TO OLDER POSTS GO TO NEWER POSTS