Second Open Viewing

The inherent irony of the painting is that it is the picture of loneliness, while portraying four people trapped together, clearly not alone. The diner is bright and almost an unnatural glow, especially for the late night. Most of Hopper's work would capture this sort of ghostly, melancholy dialogue between the man made world and man's more intangible possessions; emotion and qualities of life. Hoppers onto-historical world introduced the fluorescent lighting that would dominate urban establishments like this one, as well as many other leaps in technology which on a larger scale (bombs and such) wrecked havoc on the world. While Fluorescent light is far from the destructive capabilities of the weapons of horror that Hopper's world gave birth to, in a way, it is part of the urbanization that left so many people in one concentrated place feeling so alone, so dehumanized.



Also, upon closer viewing, the windows on the building in the back corner appear similar to the ones in Early Sunday Morning, showing not only a theme running through Hopper's work of this era, but perhaps a comment on the night versus the morning, the nighthawks versus the empty streets.


Note the brownish, two story building with the green awning and windows. It's a slice out of Early Sunday Morning.







We could easily be glancing out the back windows of the diner, seeing the view of Early Sunday Morning.

Speaking of windows, it is interesting how Hopper treats them like they dilute or distort reality. We can't really see through the two layers of windows to the building behind the couple. Nor can we use the windows to see any reflection of the single man, whose face remains a mystery to the viewer. The shadow on his back is proportionate to the shadow to light ratio of the whole painting, or so I think. Also, one last observation about Hopper's insights into the lonely urban world: the streets are always clean. This seems especially odd, due to the rampant smoking and littering of the early 20th century, not to mention an inefficient department of waste management. What kind of alternative dream-verse of Greenwich Village was Hopper seeing? It certainly was just as lonely as the real thing.

I'm not really sure how to proceed with a performance guide, since it is more for a musical work than a painting, although I would recommend for recreations of Hopper's work to paint in an extremely isolated setting, and to not talk to anyone until the work is done. With that, I will end here and resume with the Meta-Critique.