Edward Hopper: Night Becomes You

Edward Hopper - Night Windows - 1928 - Oil on canvas - 29 x 34" (73.7 x 86.4 cm) - Gift of John Hay Whitney - Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York (click photo for larger image)Many of Edward Hopper’s (1882–1967) most admired paintings are night scenes. An enthusiast of both movies and the theater, he adapted the device of highlighting a scene against a dark background, providing the viewer with a sense of sitting in a darkened theater waiting for the drama to unfold. By staging his pictures in darkness, Hopper, was able to illuminate the most important features while obscuring extraneous detail. Hopper’s approach to all of his works is cinematic. His canvas become a movie screen. The unidentified woman in “Night Windows” is unaware of the viewer’s gaze. She quietly attends to the personal details of her life, while we watch and wait for something to happen. “The painting exposes the voyeuristic opportunities of the modern American city, and the contradiction it offers between access to the intimate lives of strangers and urban loneliness and isolation.” Isolation was a recurring theme in Hopper’s work.