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Nighthawks - Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia 10/10/15 15:20 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 Nighthawks painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people in a downtown diner late at night. 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 Artist Edward Hopper Year 1942 1 About the painting Type Oil on canvas 1.1 Josephine Hopper's Dimensions 84.1 cm ! 152.4 cm ( 1 in ! 60 in) notes on the painting 33 ⁄8 2 Ownership history 3 Searching for the location of Location Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nighthawks Página 1 de 8 Nighthawks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 10/10/15 15:20 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nighthawks Página 2 de 8 Nighthawks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 10/10/15 15:20 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. Roger Brown's Puerto Rican Wedding (1969). Brown said that the café in the lower left corner of Hopper influenced the Photorealists of the late 1960s this painting "isn't set up like an imitation of and early 1970s, including Ralph Goings, who evoked Nighthawks, but still refers to it very much."[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nighthawks Página 3 de 8 Nighthawks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 10/10/15 15:20 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.
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