Writer Bob Greene came across
a real-life reconstruction of Edward Hopper's
Nighthawks on the streets of New York.
But what was this strange tableau doing on New York’s streets on a radiant midsummer afternoon? Before me stood a stage-set-like replica of the diner, its front wall and window frame constructed of wood but with no glass pane, its counter a life-size version of Hopper’s brushstroke image right down to the stools, the twin metal coffee urns, and an actor dressed in white like the counterman in the painting, poised to serve some java.
I quickly learned that this was part of a four-day off-site exhibit by the Whitney Museum of American Art to honor Hopper’s work. People lined up waiting for their chance to sit on the stools and pose as though they were part of the painting while their friends took photos of them through the make-believe window with the “Only 5¢, Phillies, America’s No. 1 Cigar” sign above it.
Although I was familiar with the painting, it was many years after my last art-appreciation course that I began to understand why the work strikes such a chord. Bob Greene explains:
A diner late at night, with few customers and a sole employee putting in his hours, embodies a quiet drama all its own, which is what makes Hopper’s painting pack its lasting power. The dialogue—or lack of it—within the four walls is left to the imagination, rendering it somehow more profound than anything a soundtrack might reveal...
In the 1942 painting, the world outside the diner might as well not have existed. The emptiness on Hopper’s streets emphasized the closed universe within the establishment’s walls.
The characters reek of the loneliness in the urban environment (the artist said that a restaurant in Greenwich Village was its inspiration), but I would take that bleakness today, where there are no all-night diners in the big city, let alone ones with huge plate-glass windows.
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