Edward Hop­per’s Nighthawks (1942) does­n’t just evoke a cer­tain stripe of mid-cen­tu­ry, after-hours, big-city Amer­i­can lone­li­ness; it has more or less come to stand for the feel­ing itself. But as with most images that passed so ful­ly into the realm of icon­hood, we all too eas­i­ly for­get that the paint­ing did­n’t sim­ply emerge com­plete, ready to embed itself in the zeit­geist. Robin Cem­balest at ART­news has a post on how Edward Hop­per “sto­ry­board­ed” Nighthawks, find­ing and sketch­ing out mod­els for those three melan­cholic cus­tomers (one of whom you can see in an ear­ly ren­der­ing above), that whole­some young atten­dant in white, and the all-night din­er (which you can see come togeth­er in chalk on paper below) in which they find refuge.

These “19 stud­ies for Nighthawks,” writes Cem­balest, “reveal how Hop­per chore­o­graphed his voyeuris­tic scene of the night­time con­ver­gence of the man, a cou­ple, and a serv­er in the eerie Deco din­er, refin­ing every nuance of the coun­ter­top, the fig­ures, the archi­tec­ture, and the effects of the flu­o­res­cent light­ing.”

In each sketch, more pieces have fall­en into place: a din­er assumes their posi­tion, the light finds its angle, the per­spec­tive shifts to that of an out­sider on the dark­ened street. Cem­balest quotes Whit­ney cura­tor Carter Fos­ter describ­ing the final prod­uct as a “mar­velous demon­stra­tion of both extreme speci­fici­ty and near abstract com­po­si­tion­al sum­ma­tion on the same sur­face beguil­ing­ly [which] reflects how empir­i­cal obser­va­tion and imag­i­na­tion coex­ist­ed in Hopper’s head.”

Despite how many ele­ments of the real world Hop­per stud­ied to cre­ate Nighthawks, it ulti­mate­ly depicts no real place. The painter him­self posed for the male fig­ures, and his wife mod­eled for the female. As for the locale, seen in the final draw­ing just above, Cem­balest notes that “after years of research and schol­ar­ship, experts have deter­mined that Nighthawks was not inspired by one spe­cif­ic din­er. Rather, it was a com­pos­ite of wedge-shaped inter­sec­tions around Green­wich Avenue. Its curv­ing prow seems part­ly inspired by the Flat­iron Build­ing.” In a way, it almost seemed too real­is­ti­cal­ly New York to actu­al­ly exist in New York. Hop­per paint­ed a dis­til­la­tion of a sense of Amer­i­can place, and like many Amer­i­can places, I’ve nev­er quite known whether I’d love to drop in at the Nighthawks din­er (though I’d have to find a front door first), or whether I should count myself lucky that life has­n’t rel­e­gat­ed me to it. You can learn more about the fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry­board­ing of Nighthawks at Art News and see many more sketch­es. Speak­ing of the sketch­es, they come cour­tesy of The Whit­ney Muse­um of Amer­i­can Art.

via ART­News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Painters Paint­ing: The Defin­i­tive Doc­u­men­tary Por­trait of the New York Art World (1940–1970)

Jack­son Pol­lock 51: Short Film Cap­tures the Painter Cre­at­ing Abstract Expres­sion­ist Art

William S. Bur­roughs Shows You How to Make “Shot­gun Art”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.