Is Edward Hopper's 'Nighthawks' diner located in... a movie?
For more than 80 years, people have been looking for Edward Hopper's diner, and the general consensus is that it was a figment of Hopper’s imagination. “That diner from Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks? It never existed,” read one Gawker headline from 2010. Jeremiah Moss, who created the blog “Vanishing New York,” lamented that the diner probably “never existed.”
Hopper himself was vague, writing that the diner was located in Greenwich Village “where two streets meet.” That hardly pinpoints it. Slowly, the existence of the diner has morphed into a more fictional location; a mashup of Hopper’s imagination, existing locales, and even images from film and fiction. Hemingway’s short story “The Killers,” published in 1927 and a favorite of Hopper’s, has been cited as an inspiration.
It turns out these assessments are both right and wrong. Hopper’s diner did exist, in a studio backlot in 1940. Many Hopper scholars have said he was a realist, that he started with "facts." Only this time the "fact" happened to be an image from a movie.
A single shot in the proto-noir “Stranger on the Third Floor” predates Hopper’s painting by two years and contains so many similar details it is impossible not to say it is the inspiration for Hopper’s diner.
The plot of the movie is simple and a diner plays an important role. There was a murder at this diner witnessed by a newspaper reporter named Michael Ward (John McGuire). Ward begins to reconsider his testimony that put the accused man in jail. As he replays the trial in his head, he stops to consider the diner where the murder took place.
As Ward rounds the corner of Jack’s All Night Coffee Pot, he walks down the sidewalk, just a few steps, lost in thought, and then stops in front of the diner before he crosses the street.
And there it is.
Like any good artist, Hopper remodeled the place to make it his own.
The black and white was colorized, so to speak, and there is a bothersome lamppost on the corner, as well as a fire hydrant. The interior of the diner is more cluttered and the windows are smaller. There is an “Open All Night” sign in the shape of a coffeepot obscuring the windows Hopper decided to include in the painting. The canvas canopy makes way for the Phillies cigar ad that runs across the top of the windows.
This is the diner in "Nighthawks:" This is street and the sidewalk in "Nighthawks."
The point of view is almost identical to Hopper’s. The spatial aspects of the windows are the same, particularly the back window that faces the street around the corner. The curve and width of the sidewalk is unmistakable. Hopper copied the diamond-like reflections off the windows that dropped onto the concrete sidewalk. The vertical rectangle window in the door in the movie, off to the right of the screen, has turned into the vertical rectangular orange door in the back of Hopper's painting, and the curve of the edge of the wide sidewalk is precisely the same. The width of the empty street behind the reporter is the same width as the street in the painting. The shadowing of the curb on the opposite side of the street is also mimicked almost exactly in the painting. There is the door between the two display windows in the shop across the street, which Hopper moved a bit to the left. It is all there. There's even a soda jerk wearing a paper cap.
The idea that Hopper would have seen “Stranger on the Third Floor” is not farfetched. He was known to have found refuge in the movies. "When I don't feel in the mood for painting," he once said, "I go to the movies for a week or more. I go on a regular movie binge."
He must have wandered in the Rialto theater (located on Broadway) in New York to see this modest film, directed by Boris Ingster. The film was photographed by Nicholas Musuraca, who photographed several noir masterpieces, including the great "Out of the Past."). Hopper must have found the lighting schemes in these black and white films — the films that would become known as film noir — exciting and even evocative of his own work.
Artists find inspiration anywhere and anyplace they can, and it doesn't tax the imagination to envision Hopper, as an artist with a keen eye, sitting up in his seat as that diner loomed behind the actor. Hopper could have even returned to this movie many times to study the image. (He would have to; this was before video.)
There are other clues.
Before the reporter goes around the corner, he walks by a window on the other side of the street and inside we can see two men, in fedoras and suits, drinking coffee at the counter.
Further in the back, not surprisingly, is a coffee urn. But just above the urn, right in front of the brim of the hat, there is an ad for something costing 5 cents.
Another clue can be found in the sketches Hopper made as he prepared the painting.
This sketch, nothing more than a few lines, clearly indicates a double door placed in the same place where there is a double door in the movie diner — a detail that did not make it into the final version of the painting.
Another sketch shows the smaller, squarer windows that are also seen in the movie.
In an article published in The Los Angeles Times in 2013, Carter Foster, the Whitney Museum’s curator of drawings who put together the show "Hopper Drawing," which included the above sketches for "Nighthawks," Foster is quoted as saying: "In some of the drawings, you feel like you're moving through a succession of spatial representations that seem like snapshots or film stills. Hopper went to a lot of movies, and I'm sure there was influence both ways."
It was more than just pride of ownership that must have caused Hopper to evade the real inspiration for the painting. It’s also important to think of what the critics of the time would have thought if they had known the inspiration for the painting. When “Nighthawks” appeared, Hopper was 58 years old and one of the most famous of all American painters. Admitting he had taken an image from a movie and turned it into art would have turned up noses in the relatively small art community at the time. So he made up a place that vaguely existed “where two streets meet.” It also certainly leads one to wonder why no one went out and took a photo of the diner as it existed in 1942. A diner that unique wouldn’t have been hard to find in Greenwich Village. Hopper’s painting was almost instantly famous so the curiosity would have been immediate.
Happily, we’re not so snobby today. It’s safe to say that even though the inspiration was almost certainly this little movie, it does not diminish the stature of the painting one bit.