Hope you had a great week! I ask you do one activity at week at minimum. This can be the doodle of the day, the challenge of the week, or reading about the piece of art. Feel free to visit the art website as many days a week as you would like though for fun. I will have a new post for you each day. [email protected] What do you see? What do you think is happening? What do you wonder?
From the AIC: Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by “a restaurant on New York’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet,” but the image—with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative—has a timeless, universal quality that transcends its particular locale. One of the best-known images of twentieth-century art, the painting depicts an all-night diner in which three customers, all lost in their own thoughts, have congregated. Hopper’s understanding of the expressive possibilities of light playing on simplified shapes gives the painting its beauty. Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner. Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass. The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another. (The red-haired woman was actually modeled by the artist’s wife, Jo.) Hopper denied that he purposefully infused this or any other of his paintings with symbols of human isolation and urban emptiness, but he acknowledged that in Nighthawks “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Laura Wittneben TufteK-5 art teacher at Whittier and Longfellow Elementary Archives
May 2020
Categories |