Dusty Art

My prior Art posts can be found HERE.

How do we move away from being a civilization that produces art that causes comments like, “my five year old could make this,” back to being one that creates beauty and inspires deep questions? We must reject modernity and embrace tradition.

Let’s study art history together.

Nighthawks

Artist	Edward Hopper
Year	1942
Medium	Oil on canvas
Movement	American realism
Dimensions	84 cm × 152 cm (33.1 in × 60.0 in)
Location	Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

I really like this painting. I prefer realism, especially realism with a message to relay. My reaction to Nighthawks (which upon investigation turned out to be the widely accepted interpretation) was that it is a portrayal of loneliness. Four well-dressed people, inside a well-lit diner, and yet there’s a feeling of sadness over the whole thing. Despite being together, they all seem to be alone, and the world beyond the diner is dark. Something about the whole thing seems to communicate that this is not how humans are supposed to live.

(via wiki)

Nighthawks is a 1942 oil on canvas painting by the American artist Edward Hopper that portrays four people in a downtown diner late at night as viewed through the diner’s large glass window. The light coming from the diner illuminates a darkened and deserted urban streetscape.

The painting has been described as Hopper’s best-known work and is one of the most recognizable paintings in American art. Classified as part of the American Realism movement, within months of its completion, it was sold to the Art Institute of Chicago for $3,000.

About the painting

It has been suggested that Hopper was inspired by a short story of Ernest Hemingway‘s, either “The Killers” (1927), which Hopper greatly admired, or the more philosophical “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933). In response to a query on loneliness and emptiness in the painting, Hopper outlined that he “didn’t see it as particularly lonely”. He said, “Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”

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 use a pencil, make a sketch-drawing of each of his paintings, along with a detailed description of specific 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 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 counter or that the appearance of one of the “nighthawks” was tweaked 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 5¢ 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.

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.”

If you’re an introvert, I encourage you to weaponize your knowledge of this painting – in whatever way seems best to you – against your extroverted friends and family who want to drag you away from the comforts of home that God intended for you, into the bleak urban loneliness of socialization. I mean, it probably won’t work, but the authority of art can’t hurt your efforts.