Edward Hopper "Nighthawks", 1942

Nighthawks is one of the few pictures about which the taciturn painter Edward Hopper ever spoke. Nighthawks, he said, was his vision of a street at night: not necessarily something especially lonely - a restaurant in Greenwich Avenue at the junction between two roads. "I simplified the scene and made the restaurant bigger. Unconsciously, probably, I painted the loneliness of a big city...." Critics have compared the atmosphere of Nighthawks with that of some of Ernest Hemingway's short stories, which Hopper loved. In March 1927, when Hopper discovered Hemingway's story "The Killers" in Schribner's Magazine - for which the artist occasionally worked as an illustrator - he wrote: "It is refreshing to stumble upon such an honest piece of work in an American magazine, after wading through the endless stodge of which most of our modern literature consists. In this story, no concessions are made to popular taste, there is no deviating from the truth, no contrived happy end." The two people at the bar do not have much to say to each other. The man with the face of a predatory bird - the nighthawk himself - might be a real good-for-nothing straight out of a film noir, as embodied by the laconic figure of Humphrey Bogart. (He too had to do with a strange bird: Dashiel Hammet's Maltese Falcon.) This man, his hat drawn, true to style, deep over his face, holds a cigarette in his right hand. Unintentionally almost, he touches the left hand of the woman, who is scrutinizing the fingernails of her right hand. Or is she holding a scrap of paper with a telephone number? At any moment she might toss it away. The barkeeper - is he really the barkeeper, or just a waiter who happens to be washing up? - seems to have made some harmless remark as he is in the habit of doing to entertain his customers: "It's been a long day," maybe, or "Been working late this evening, huh?" Something that requires no answer. Then there is another man, a lone wolf, who weighs his glass (of whiskey?) thoughtfully in his hand. This is Hopper's "silent witness." How does it go on from there? That remains an open question. In Hopper's work, as in Hemingway's story, there is no real solution, and certainly not some bogus ending. Edward Hopper is one of the most important Realists of the 20th century, and not only in the U.S.A. He never had to go in search of specifically American themes. They were part of him. What moved him was the condition humaine, the make-up of people in his country and in the age in which he lived. W. Sch.