#404 Nighthawks and Automats: Edward Hopper’s New York

Within the New York City of Edward Hopper's imagination, the skyscrapers have vanished, the sidewalks are mysteriously wide and all the diners and Chop Suey restaurants are sparsely populated with well-dressed lonely people.

In this art-filled episode of the Bowery Boys, Tom and Greg look at Hopper's life, influence and specific fascination with the city, inspired by the recent show Edward Hopper's New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Hopper, a native of the Hudson River town of Nyack, painted New York City for over half a decade. In reality, the city experienced Prohibition and the Jazz Age, two world wars and the arrival of automobiles. But not in Hopper's world.

In his most famous work Nighthawks (1942), figures from a dreamlike film appear trapped in an aquarium-shaped diner. But Hopper has captured something else in this iconic painting: fear and paranoia. No wonder he's considered a huge influence on Hollywood film noir and detective stories.

Hopper painted New York from his studio overlooking Washington Square Park, and both he and his wife Josephine Nivison Hopper would become true fixtures of the Greenwich Village scene.

PLUS: Tom visits the Edward Hopper House in Nyack, New York, to talk the artist's early life with executive director Kathleen Motes Bennewitz. And Greg finds some of the hidden puzzles in Hopper's paintings thanks to American art historian Rena Tobey.

Visit the website for more pictures and other interesting information from this episode.

Other Bowery Boys episodes related to this one:

-- The Armory Show of 1913
-- Jane Jacobs: Saving Greenwich Village
-- New York University:  A School For The Metropolis
-- Tragic Muse: The Life of Audrey Munson