Even the everyday, of course, can be monumental. At the Art Institute of Chicago hangs the almost-mythic Nighthawks. This is Edward Hopper's iconic and immense painting of three patrons and a counterman seen in artificial yellow light in a diner in the shadowed emptiness of a summery New York night. I did not know from reproductions how large this painting was, but on seeing it for the first time in person, I was struck by its immensity and how fresh and awe-inspiring the original would be.
t’s a rare painting that conjures stillness – Monet's water lily paintings, perhaps, manage it as well – though for Hopper, the color of stillness was somehow an essential part of his palette.
Where the sculptors of the Laocoön captured the doom of man somehow offending the gods – don't mess with destiny – and rendered the mythic palpably human (if heroic in scale), Hopper portrayed the silent figures of daily life, yet somehow imbued them with the dignity, the grace, even, of something mythic in our nature. They may not have to worry about the wrath of gods, and perhaps must contend instead with the wayward distances of others, but they sit and chat as if they were somehow noble still, seated far from Olympus and yet, because of Hopper, nevertheless near to eternity.
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