Staying Up Much Too Late Edward Hopper's Nighthawks And the Dark Side of the American Psyche

Chapter One The Making of the Painting or How to Be a Stranger in Your Own Land Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Ralph Waldo Emerson 1. The Artist Edward Hopper beganNighthawksin December 1941, shortly after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. How difficult to imagine: like photographing a flower garden on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, not because a flower garden expressed certain feelings about the cataclysmic events of that morning, but because photographing flower gardens is your thing, is what you would have done anyway. While the country as a whole, pretty much overnight, committed itself to total war, "Ed," as his wife, Josephine "Jo" Hopper, recorded in her journal, "refused to take any interest in our very likely prospect of being bombed ... He's doing a new canvas and simply can't be interrupted." Come what may, devotion to a self-imposed task evokes the archetypal American hero: Think of John Wayne in John Ford's 1956 classic western,The Searchers, striding across an arid Texas landscape for seven long years in quest of Scar, the Comanche who kidnapped and ravished his niece. He has put all else aside, cares only about doing what he knows is one absolutely right thing to do. Or think of Raymond Chandler's obstinately moral private detective, Philip Marlowe, who takes on cases with little chance of payment---he may even refuse payment because he cannot be bought, committed as he is to the interests of his client (even when that so-called client hasn't actually hired him or attempts to halt his investigation). He gets a job done and done well because it is his duty, however ridiculous he seems when everyone else is for sale because that's the best way to get by. So the fifty-nine-year-old Hopper, World War or no World War, meticulously developed a scene based on a Greenwich Avenue restaurant that he spotted during one of his meandering strolls through lower Manhattan. He had labored in obscurity for some two decades following his graduation from the New York School of Art in 1906, supporting himself by illustrating advertisements, magazine articles, and movie posters. He despised this work and refused to do it more than three days per week to save time for his more personal artistic endeavors, but received scant attention for the few group shows he participated in. He was invited to contribute to the "Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Contemporary American Artists" in 1908, along with such up-and-comers as George Bellows and Rockwell Kent. But while the other artists displayed American views, Hopper---somewhat perversely, given the exhibition's stated theme---chose to display paintings inspired by a recent sojourn in Europe (mainly Paris), where he had traveled to visit museums and round out his education. He was duly ignored by the press. Not quite unjustly: The work was too derivative of French impressionism, which he greatly admired. Perhaps he needed the failure, the ensuing isolation, to keep to his own course, mature his style, and find his artistic identity. He made some notable breakthroughs. The massive (36;dp ;ts 72;dp near-masterpiece,Soir Bleu(1914), which portrays a voluptuous, heavily made-up prostitute surveying the customers in a Parisian cafe' through narrowed eyes. She might be a demon searching for a soul worth stealing, and presages Hopper's career-long fascination with the enticements of very shapely women.New York Corner(1913) shows a group of faceless men in black hats and overcoats milling in front of a corner saloon on a gray, wintry day, the ice blue silhouette of a factory in the distance. At once ordinary and desolate, the painting won him some early praise when exhibited inTheisen, Gordon is the author of 'Staying Up Much Too Late Edward Hopper's Nighthawks And the Dark Side of the American Psyche' with ISBN 9780312333423 and ISBN 0312333420.