The Harsh Demands

         We have lost our innocence, our individualism, and our strict small-town morals to mechanization and industry, to the harsh demands of capital, to overcrowded yet lonely cities, to unrestrained lust, to a mobility that makes us strangers and transients.

Gordon Theisen
Staying Up Much Too Late -
Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and the Dark
Side of the American Psyche
2006

   https://indyweek.com/culture/art/carrboro-s-gordon-theisen-discusses-power-pessimism/

A Vast Emptiness

       The people in Chandler's fiction and Hopper's canvasses seem aware of a vast emptiness seeping into their lonely bones, as though they lacked the strength of will or faith in others to alter the sad, broken order of things.

excerpt from
The Hard Boiled Bard
Richard B. Woodward
The Guardian
2007

image
Scott Laumann
Raymond Chandler
                        https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/nov/28/usa.biography

Familiar and Strange

        Hopper depicts a world that is at the same time beautiful and sad, familiar and strange, inviting yet ultimately inaccessible. I think these polarities are at the centre of his work and may indicate why so many artists, including myself, are drawn to it, again and again.

Gregory Crewdson

image
Edward Hopper
sketch for Hotel Lobby

Hopper

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10026289316

By the Chance

       Yet we are enthralled by the modern world, and struck by the chance that there may be great beauty in this ugliness after all ...........

Gordon Theisen
from
Staying Up Much Too Late ; Edward Hopper's Nighthawks
and the Dark Side of the American Psyche
2006

   https://indyweek.com/culture/art/carrboro-s-gordon-theisen-discusses-power-pessimism/

Hopper Walking Tour

Whitney Museum of American Art
2013

Lone Souls

        Lone souls, empty sidewalks, baking brownstones, raking sunlight, the drugstore at 4 in the morning, usherettes, clerks, the solitary salesman, hotel rooms on sluggish afternoons, heat sizzling outside, misery shut up indoors. People and places and the human condition ; this is the genius (or cheap music) of Edward Hopper.

Laura Cumming
excerpt from
The Quiet American
The Guardian
2004

image
Conference at Night
Edward Hopper 1949

                     https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/may/30/art3

Hopper of the Lens - Robert Frank

He could almost be described as the Edward Hopper of the lens.

Fool Ourselves

We fool ourselves

into thinking we're strong

Then complain

 the rest of our lives

crippled by the consequences

Barry Gifford

image
Edward Hopper -
Nighthawks Sketch

Looking for Something

       But there is compassion - and a kind of hope. These frozen moments in a series of anonymous lives are fragments in a kind of mosaic mural of contemporary America. There is sadness and pain here. Yet none of his figures are victims. All of them are looking for something - looking out through windows, into themselves, probing the darkness, examining the worlds in their coffee cup.

Mike Gonzalez
excerpt from
Edward Hopper - All the Lonely People
Socialist Review 2004

image
Office in Small City - Edward Hopper
1953

                http://socialistreview.org.uk/286/edward-hopper-all-lonely-people

Conference at Night

        He turned iconic American spces such as diners, drugstores, hotel rooms, gas stations and movie theatres into spaces reflective of the artist's interior realm. Spaces of mood, feeling, contemplation of one's position in the world.

James Peacock
UK Independent
2017

image
Edward Hopper
Conference at Night
1949

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/edward-hopper-realism-painter-50-death-anniversary-urban-loneliness-art-a7744356.html

It is Often Night

       A letter beside a hotel bed or drinking in a bar. They gaze out of the window of a moving train or read a book in a hotel lobby. Their faces are vulnerable and introspective. They may have just left someone or been left. They are in search of work, sex, or company, adrift in transient places. It is often night, and through the window lie the darkness and threat of the open country or of a strange city.

Alain De Botton

The Pleasure of Sadness ; Edward Hopper

2004

                  https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-1-summer-2004/pleasures-sadness

Nighthawks 3D

Video created by
George Peaslee

Western Motel

      Under the artist's sardonic eye, woman and car are visibly conjoined. The Buick's animate, almost bestial, front end (whence it's power) seems an alien projection from her ample breast (or more charitably her desirous heart). Still, for all the clarity of that conjunction, the car is safely separated from her by an improbably large motel window.

excerpt from
Walter Wells
Hopper's Western Motel
Ether Magazine 2008

image
Western Motel - Edward Hopper 
1957

https://theetherblog.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/edward-hopper%E2%80%99s-western-motel-walter-wells/

Office at Night

images
Jerzy Palacz
from Visions of Reality 2013
based on Hopper's "Office at Night"

Trapped at Midnight

Here is a man trapped at midnight underneath the El

He sought the smoothest counter

And found it here in the almost empty street

Away from everything he has ever said

Now he has the silence they've insisted on

excerpt from

A Midnight Diner

David Ray

1970

image
George Peaslee in tribute
to Hopper's Nighthawks

Rather Than Hope

         Freedom is a form of rootlessness there, while experience teaches futility rather than hope, and people fail to make more than fleeting contact with one another or find a place in a society that guarantees every wish and whim is within easy reach but remains utterly unconcerned with their actual fate.

excerpt from
Staying Up Much Too Late ; Edward Hopper's Nighthawks
and the Dark Side of the American Psyche
Gordon Theisen
2007

top image
unknown

Do Not Speak

The place is the corner of empty and bleak

The time is night's most desolate hour

The scene is Al's Coffee Cup or the Hamburger Tower

The persons in this drama do not speak

excerpt from

Nighthawks

Samuel Yellen

1952

image

Nighthawks

Edward Hopper

1942

                http://www.paintersandpoets.com/2013/02/nighthawks-by-edward-hopper.html

To the Movies

                 When i don't feel in the mood for painting. I go to the movies for a week or more.

Edward Hopper

                         https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/apr/25/art

With His Gift

         ....... this more purely visual drama of light and shadow that keeps his art from falling into literary theatricalism. And it is the same luminist rigor together with his gift for a stark pictorial geometry which never engulfs it's themes but, on the contrary, delivers them to the eye with a beguiling and affecting modesty, that seperates Hopper from the multitude of inferior artists who essayed similar American subjects.....

excerpt from
Hilton Kramer
The Stacks
2014

image
unknown
Dissection of Hopper's Nighthawks

           https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-stacks-edward-hoppers-x-ray-vision?ref=scroll