Edward Hopper
‚Nighthawks‘

Key Pieces series

Our Key Piece of the week is none other than the legendary Nighthawks by American painter Edward Hopper.

1. Nighthawks was created in 1942 by painter Edward Hopper and is one of the most recognizable American artwork.
2. Hopper’s wife Josephine who was an Art Historian kept a journal in which many details concerning the painting and its origins are written in.
3. The scene was supposedly inspired by a diner in Greenwich Village „where two streets meet.“ Yet no clear location has been found and the restaurant is most probably an amalgam of several American diners.
4. It instantly was a classic as Daniel Catton Rich, director of the Art Institute of Chicago said it was „fine as Homer“ when seeing it the first time the work was exhibited.
5. The Art Institute of Chicago directly bought the painting for $3’000 in 1942. The painting has remained in the collection of the Art Institute ever since.
6. Edward and his wife Josephine both modeled for the painting. Her for the woman and him for the two men in the mirror.
7. It was inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s short story entitled The Killers.
8. Although many Art Historians interpret Nighthawks as a piece depicting wartime isolation, according to Hopper he was „painting the loneliness of a large city.“
9. Nighthawks has been celebrated many times by artists. George Segal’s The Diner, Roger Brown’s Puerto Rican Wedding and Banksy’s Nighthawks are prime examples of this.
10. It is as well a current theme within the pop culture and appears in movies such as Batman: Year One, Scarface, TV show The Simpsons, inspired Tom Waits’s album Nighthawks at the Diner and was cited in The Adventures of Tintin.

Edward Hopper, 1942, Oil on canvas, 84.1 cm × 152.4 cm (33 1⁄8 in × 60 in)

Banksy, Nighthawks, 2005