Nighthawks

Nighthawks, the 1942 canvas by Edward Hopper portraying isolated customers in a downtown diner late at night, is an emblematic work, one of the most recognizable painting in American art. I was fortunate to see it when the Art Institute of Chicago released it for a US tour and I visited it at Washington’s National Gallery twice in one week, and one more time a few days after that.


It’s a big painting, five feet across and two-and-half feet tall, a study in shadows and austere white. The diner is stark, stripped of decorations. There is one door, possibly to a restroom. The customer in the forefront does not seem to be fully there, his body melds with the darkness, and even the woman at far right is a mystery. Is she the girlfriend of the man next to her, part of a couple? The red dress she wears might be that of a prostitute, a predatory nighthawk. Or is she simply a tired worker? If Hopper knew, he never told.

In the 50s and 60s, according to art historian Sister Wendy Beckett’s American Masterpieces, every college dormitory in the country had a Nighthawks poster on its wall. Hopper’s work reflects the angst of the time; the customers, shoulders hunched, enwalled in themselves and neither speaking nor looking at one another, are icon of existential loneliness.

Almost weekly I see real-life versions of Nighthawks. The setting has not changed much though the diners have become fast-food places and the workers are no longer white-haired short-order cooks. Today, it’s minimum wage Latinos or Pakistanis. The clients are often single parents with children, a father and son, and when I see them I get the impression this is Dad’s night out with the kid. Maybe the parents are divorced and Mom has custody, so once or twice a week Dad takes his son to Subway. They eat in silence. Dad has a foot-long sandwich and the kid has a six-inch with meatballs. They don’t share bags of chips or drinks. They concentrate hard on their food and the kid makes sucking straw-in-an-empty-cup sounds. There are wadded up paper napkins—more on the kid’s side—and a cell phone next to Dad’s sandwich. Recently, in a mom-and-pop carry out, I saw an expensively dressed professional woman in tears and being comforted by her not yet ten-year-old daughter. No one paid any attention to the scene, and as I left the place I heard the woman say, “That bastard!”

I wonder what Hopper would have made of that scene…