Nighthawks

Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. Gallery 262 at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the number on the label is 1942.51.

Start with the thing most people never notice, and once you notice it you cannot stop. There is no door. Look along the glass, all the way round the corner and down the near side. There is no way into that diner and no way out of it. The four people inside are sealed in a glass box, and the painting will not tell you how they got there.

That glass is the second thing. It is one enormous curved sheet with no frame and no visible edge, which real diners in nineteen forty two did not have, because nobody could make plate glass bend like that cheaply. He invented it, so that nothing would interrupt your view and nothing would let you in.

Now the street. It is empty. Not quiet, empty. No cars, no passers by, no litter, no dog. The shops opposite are shut and their windows are dark. The only light in the whole picture comes from inside that room, and it spills out onto the pavement in a hard flat sheet, because the diner is lit by fluorescent tubes, which were new then. Hopper is one of the first painters to notice what fluorescent light does to a face at two in the morning, which is nothing kind.

Look at the people. The couple's hands are nearly touching and are not. Neither of them is looking at the other. The man with his back to you is a shape, a hat and a shoulder, and you will never see his face. The server is bent, busy, the only one doing anything. Four people in a lit room and not one connection between them.

Hopper finished it weeks after Pearl Harbor. People have read the war into it ever since, and he denied it flatly. He said he was probably painting the loneliness of a large city, and then added, unconsciously. His wife Josephine, who posed for the woman, kept the notebooks, and her entry for this painting says the man is a sinister figure and the whole thing suggests night, and nothing more.

So do not look for a story. There is not one. That is what the missing door is for. You are outside on an empty street at two in the morning, looking at people you cannot reach and will never know, and the painting has arranged, very carefully, for you to stay out there.