Nighthawks by Edward Hopper

 

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/111628/nighthawks

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper

Shared by Sara Acebes:

Part one:

Look at the picture.

1.       What feelings come to your mind when you look at it?                            Explain your answer.

2.       Can you describe it? Think about the following:

·         the people inside

·         the time of the day

·         the colours

·         the sounds inside the diner

·         the smells in the diner.

3.       Where do you think this place is? Use modals of deduction.

4.       In your opinion, when was it painted? Explain your answer.

5.       How would you title it?

 

Part two:

1.       Think about the story behind the people in the picture. Choose one of these.

·         The man and the woman

·         the waiter

·         the man sitting backwards.

2.       In groups of two or three. Imagine you are in the diner, and you have the chance to talk to them. What would you like to ask them? Choose one of the options from exercise 1. (This activity will be your oral exam in the third term)

 

 About this artwork

Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by “a restaurant on New York’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet,” but the image—with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative—has a timeless, universal quality that transcends its particular locale. 

One of the best-known images of twentieth-century art, the painting depicts an all-night diner in which three customers, all lost in their own thoughts, have congregated. 

Hopper’s understanding of the expressive possibilities of light playing on simplified shapes gives the painting its beauty. Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner. 

Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass. 

The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another. (The red-haired woman was actually modeled by the artist’s wife, Jo.) Hopper denied that he purposefully infused this or any other of his paintings with symbols of human isolation and urban emptiness, but he acknowledged that in Nighthawks “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”

Nighthawks

Date: 1942

Artist: Edward Hopper American, 1882–1967