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a famous painting
Nighthawks
Nighthawks is a 1942 painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner late at night. It is Hopper's most famous work and is one of the most recognisable paintings in American art. Within months of its completion, it was sold to the Art Institute of Chicago for $3,000, and has remained there ever since.
Starting shortly after their marriage in 1924, Edward Hopper and his wife, Josephine , kept a journal in which he would, using a pencil, make a sketch-drawing of each of his paintings, along with a precise description of certain details.
A review of the page on which ‘’Nighthawks’’ is entered shows that the intended name of the work was actually ‘’Night Hawks’’, and that the painting was completed on January 21, 1942.
Hopper's biographer, Gail Levin, speculates that Hopper may have been inspired by Vincent Van Gogh's "sinister Night Café",which was showing at a gallery in New York in January 1942.
The scene was supposedly inspired by a diner (since demolished) in Greenwich Village, Hopper's home neighborhood in Manhattan. Hopper himself said the painting "was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet." Additionally, he noted that "I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger."
This reference has led Hopper fans to engage in a search for the location of the original diner. The inspiration for this search has been summed up on the blog of one of these searchers: "I am finding it extremely difficult to let go of the notion that the Nighthawks diner was a real diner, and not a total composite built of grocery stores, hamburger joints, and bakeries all cobbled together in the painter's imagination."
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The spot most usually associated with the former location is a now-vacant lot known as Mulry Square, at the intersection of Seventh Avenue South, Greenwich Avenue, and West 11th Street, about seven blocks west of Hopper's studio on Washington Square.
However, according to a New York Times article by blogger Jeremiah Moss, this cannot be the location of the diner that inspired the painting, as a gas station occupied that lot from the 1930s to the 1970s
Nighthawks has been widely referenced and parodied in popular culture. Versions of it have appeared on posters, T-shirts, and greeting cards, as well as in comic books and advertisements.
The television series, Dead Like Me, The Simpsons, Rocko's Modern Life, Mad Men, and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation have all placed their own characters in versions of Nighthawks.
To find out more click here: The search for Nighthawks
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