Nighthawks (1942), by Edward Hopper
"Nighthawks" may be Hopper's take on the term night owl used to describe someone who stays up late. The scene was inspired by a diner (since demolished) in Greenwich Village, Hopper's home neighborhood in Manhattan. The now-vacant lot is known as Mulry Square, at the intersection of Seventh Avenue South, Greenwich Avenue, and West 11th Street.Hopper began painting it immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor. After this event there was a widespread feeling of gloominess across the country, a feeling that is portrayed in the painting. The urban street is empty outside the diner, and inside none of the three patrons is apparently looking or talking to the others; all are lost in their own thoughts. Two are a couple, while the third is a man sitting alone, with his back to the viewer. The couple's noses resemble beaks, perhaps a reference to the title. The diner's sole attendant, looking up from his work, appears to be peering out the window past the customers. His age is indeterminate.The corner of the diner is curved; curved glass connects the large expanse of glass on its two sides. Weather is understood to be warm, based on clothing worn by the patrons. No overcoats are in evidence; the woman's blouse is short-sleeved. Across the street are what appear to be open windows on the second story. The light from the restaurant floods out onto the street outside, and a sliver of light casts its way into one of the windows.This portrayal of modern urban life as empty or lonely is a common theme throughout Hopper's work. It is sharply outlined by the fact that the man with his back to us appears more lonely because of the couple sitting next to him. If one looks closely, it becomes apparent that there is no way out of the bar area, as the three walls of the counter form a triangle that traps the attendant. It is also notable that the diner has no visible door leading to the outside, which illustrates the idea of confinement and entrapment. Hopper denied that he had intended to communicate this in Nighthawks, but he admitted that "unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city." At the time of the painting, fluorescent lights had just been developed, perhaps contributing to why the diner is casting such an eerie glow upon the almost pitch black outside world. An advertisement for Phillies cigars is featured on top of the diner.The conclusion can also be drawn that Hopper painted the emptiness pervading the city. This conclusion can be substantiated by the observation that three-quarters of the painting is empty and has no sign of human life in it.
Influence on popular culture
There are certain paintings and sculpture throughout art history, and recently from 20th century modernism like Auguste Rodin's The Thinker, Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali, Edvard Munch's The Scream, Grant Wood's American Gothic, Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth and a few others that seem to have a life of their own outside the world of art museums as cultural icons. Deeply rooted in the public imagination, these paintings and sculptures inspire parody, emulation, satire, and admiration.
Painting and sculpture
Many artists have produced works that allude or respond to Nighthawks. An early example is George Segal's sculpture The Diner (1964-66), 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. Hopper influenced the Photorealists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Ralph Goings, who evoked Nighthawks in several paintings of diners. Another Photorealist, 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.
Gottfried Helnwein - Boulevard of Broken Dreams
More direct visual quotations began to appear in the 1970s. Perhaps the best known is Gottfried Helnwein's painting Boulevard of Broken Dreams (1984), widely sold as a poster, which replaces the three diner patrons with American pop culture icons Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean, and the attendant with Elvis Presley. 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."
ON LANGUAGE; DROP THE GUN, LOUIE
The New York TimesArts01. June 1990by William Safire
IN THE WASHINGTON bureau of The New York Times hangs a framed poster titled ''Boulevard of Broken Dreams.'' It is a painting by Gottfried Helnwein - inspired by the nostalgia and realism in Edward Hopper's painting ''Nighthawks'' - of four legendary people in a dreary diner at night.
Working behind the counter is Elvis Presley; sitting on one stool by himself, coat collar turned up, with a white mug of coffee at hand, is an unshaven James Dean; Marilyn Monroe, blond head tossed back in provocative laughter, is seated close to Humphrey Bogart, wearing a bow tie as Rick in ''Casablanca,'' staring glumly at a glass in front of him. All dead too soon, but their images shimmer in the shared, broken dreams of our national memory.
AMERICA THE LONELY: ARTIST EDWARD HOPPER
The Washington Post20. September 2007by Glenn Dixon
EDWARD HOPPER is too easily taken for granted: taciturn Yankee poet of shadow and light, capable of converting a New England manse into a Fortress of Solitude; voyeuristic stage designer of lonely apartments, a frustrated voluptuary; auteur of the diner reverie "Nighthawks," which not long ago was probably better known via Gottfried Helnwein's travesty "Boulevard of Broken Dreams."
FEAR OF THE CITY 1882-1967: EDWARD HOPPER AND THE DISCOURSE OF ANTI-URBANISM
Social & Cultural GeographyVol. 3, No. 2, 2002by Tom Slater
Nighthawks is one of the most famous paintings in the history of American art, full of the anti-urban messages which pervade American public discourse. It has received numerous adaptations, underscoring its in uence and the sympathetic response of the public to the ‘nocturnal urban disquiet’ it communicates (Levin 1995b: 115). Among the more famous of these is the 1987 poster of the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein (see Figure 3). This parody is interesting for the characters that Helnwein chooses to occupy the diner in place of Hopper’s anonymous Figures.
James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley are American icons whose private lives — were as tragic as their public lives were remarkable, and all four of them can be seen to embody the Hopper theme mentioned earlier, of ‘private lives of quiet despair lived within the public arena’ (Lyons 1995: xiii). It says much about the mood of Nighthawks that these celebrities all had lonely lives and tragic deaths, and were isolated from the world around them through their adulation and status.
EDWARD HOPPER'S LAND OF THE LONER
The Chronicle ReviewNovember 9, 2007by Michael Dirda
As for the parodies and pastiches of "Nighthawks," there is no end, though the most famous remains the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" (1987), in which the four figures in the painting bear the faces of James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley.
CIVILIZATION: 'BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS'
United Press International (Washington)28. May 2003by Lou Marano
And what of the "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"? Constance Bennett sang it in the 1933 musical version of the movie "Moulin Rouge." I don't think I've heard the song in 40 years. Jazz pianist and vocalist Diana Krall has a highly regarded revival in her 1995 "All for You" album.
Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein used the title for his parody of Edward Hopper's 1942 painting "Nighthawks," substituting James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley for Hopper's isolated diner patrons. Krall told interviewer Vivien Goldman that when she was a kid she had a reproduction of Helnwein's painting on her wall.
DOES EDWARD HOPPER REALLY EPITOMISE AMERICAN CULTURE?
The IndependentLondon22. August 1995by Sheila Johnston
Edward Hopper and the American Experience at the Whitney Museum of American Art until 15 October
The show sets out the main evidence for its claim in a multimedia exhibit planted squarely in the middle of the exhibition space. A half- hour presentation compares Hopper's work with film stills and clips, photographs and canvasses by other painters. Audiences gasp at some of the juxtapositions - for example, Nighthawks with Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Gottfried Helnwein's popular spoof poster, and the diner scene in Herbert Ross's Hollywood version of Pennies from Heaven. The visual rhymes are unmistakable.
DEEP RED
Slant MagazineFilm ReviewMay 2, 2001by Ed Gonzalez
Just before Helga is killed, Marcus is seen having a conversation with his alcoholic best friend, Carlo (Gabriele Lavia). The men discuss politics, music and human survival before the grotesque statue of a Greek God hovering above a fountain. Marcus walks past the bar where he works as a performer, which Argento purposefully and eerily models after Helnwein's "Nighthawks" (a.k.a. "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams"). It's no coincidence that Argento chooses the Helnwein painting to emulate. Not unlike the painting's famous stars (Marilyn Monroe, James Dean), Argento's characters resemble ghosts.
STAYING UP MUCH TOO LATE
The Midnight PalaceBook Review: Staying Up Much Too Late ...Book Review: Staying Up Much Too Late ... PDF Print E-mailWritten by Gary Sweeney
Nighthawks is the epitome of the subtle misery that Hopper captured so well. The painting has spawned many imitations, notably Gottfried Helnwein’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Helnwein’s interpretation places Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and James Dean inside the diner. Even in this, the subjects are those who died much too soon. The pain of the artist is evident. Perhaps that was Theisen’s main intention – to showcase Hopper as the embodiment of pain in the early part of the 20th century.
ALONE, TOGETHER: EXAMINING THE WORK OF EDWARD HOPPER
ARTS Editorthe archives23. April. 2007by Christopher Graffeo
For the first time in over twenty-five years, an American museum will be mounting a major retrospective of the full oeuvre of painter and printmaker Edward Hopper (1882-1967). The exhibition—which opens May 6th at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—occupies the awkward stance of surveying and attempting to commemorate an artist whose celebrity is far less contested than his quality. Notwithstanding, Edward Hopper will be a valuable exhibition whose potential to offer visitors a critical education will likely outshine the artist's personal accomplishments.
In this sense, Nighthawks is not an accomplished painting: it is an accomplishment. For members of a younger generation, Nighthawks is an iconographic image and idea that has rippled through situations as disparate as parodies on The Simpsons to regular recreations in cinematic scenes and Gottfried Helnwein's painted homage that replaces Hopper's figures with images of Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Elvis Presley. The painting has a cultural identity that lives as much in its recreation as it does in its original imprint, and there is a whole other Textual nexus of objects that have been produced as the direct results of independent artists experiencing the Text of the original Nighthawks for themselves. — Nighthawks might be more widely recognizable in America than most of the works by Pablo Picasso or even Jackson Pollock because its transparent subjectivity speaks directly to the American experience, its ambiguity encourages every viewer to identify personally with the painting, and it has evolved into a meta-object of American culture. No one knows what, exactly, those people in the diner are thinking, but they don't have to ask either. They are sad. They are lonely. They are desperate and depraved and they cling to one another and to some mysterious strand of waning hope that we all have, at one point, clung to ourselves.
Hunting Nighthawks: On the Road with Edward Hopper
Chicago writer Kevin Grandfieldvisited 47 US cities where Edward Hopper paintings hung in public museums and asked people, "Do you feel Americans are isolated as Hopper portrayed us?" What he heard, learned, and experienced
"Do you know what a ground swell is?" I asked.
She pursed her lips and shook her head. "No idea. Did Hopper live on the water?" — "He and his wife had a place on Cape Cod."
TODAY I LEARNED: HELNWEIN'D
barnowllearned.blogspot.com2007
The Austrian-Irish artist Gottfried Helnwein did the memorable album cover for the Scorpions 1982 Blackout LP. That I knew. What I learned was, he also did that 1987 satire of the Edward Hopper painting Nighthawks. Helnwein included Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Elvis Presley in his and called it Boulevard of Broken Dreams. It became a popular poster. The Scorps' cover also adorned many a dorm wall. And that is indeed a self-portrait, NOT the teutonic mustachio'd rhythm guitarist Rudy Schenker in the picture, although he does do the imitation in the video!