ART HISTORY - Edward Hopper - Nighthawks - 1942
Listen to the Story: 7 minutes
Audio-only: (best on mobile)
Description:
n 1942 the American painter Edward Hopper completed this painting “Nighthawks”.
We see four people in a diner, while we are looking from outside in. It appears to be late in the evening, and the diner seems to be a beacon of light in a lonely desolate world.
Hopper said that this painting was inspired by “a restaurant on New York’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet”. The image however, has a universal quality. Hopper himself said that in Nighthawks he was painting the “loneliness of a large city”. He has denied however, that he put symbols of human isolation in his paintings on purpose.