244       ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES
TOMÁŠ MURÁR
PRAGUE
Nighthawks in The Age of Anxiety
Interpretation of the painting by Edward Hopper
by means of the ‘Baroque Eclogue’
of Wystan Hugh Auden
Introduction
The American painter Edward Hopper (1882–1967)
painted the Nighthawks in 1942 in Manhattan, not far
from Washington Square.1 [1] After being exhibited in the
Art Institute in Chicago this painting became an iconic
depiction of American life and the American ‘psyche’, as
Gordon Theisen called his study on this painting.2 In spite
of its fame, Nighthawks continues to be a closed world
and before the historians, critics and art theorists the
opportunity is opening up of a more profound view on
the problems of this painting.3 Two years after Nighthawks
was exhibited, the English poet Wystan Hugh Auden
(1907–1973) began to write, in American exile, his long
poem The Age of Anxiety. A Baroque Eclogue,4 before begin-
ning regular visits to Europe once again. It is therefore
a kind of climax to his stay in the USA and its imaginary
conclusion. The poem was published for the first time in
1947 by the New York publishers A Random House Book and
a year later Auden received the Pulitzer Prize for it.
In the reading of this poem similar questions may
arise to those the interpreter may ask himself on examin-
ing Hopper’s painting Nighthawks. In it the observer can
see a quartet of people enclosed in an American diner,
in which is sealed the heterogeneous world of man as an
individual and beings as a unity in the environment. In
Auden’s poem The Age of Anxiety four people also meet up
in an American bar in the middle of the war on the night
of All Souls and they create, in an atmosphere of anxiety,
the world of poetic images of a distinctive world. Can this
be a matter of coincidence, or else the closeness of theme,
time and place as the principles of the creativity of two
artists? The similarity of the theme and the origin at the
same time in the same place is the starting-point for the
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
investigation and comparison of the two works of art in
this study.5
The basic idea of the submitted interpretation is,
therefore, that Auden creates in his poem the dimen-
sions latently present in Hopper’s painting and that the
‘Baroque eclogue’ may open up a hitherto uninvestigated
space in relation to Nighthawks in which it is possible to
approach the world of Edward Hopper’s work in another
way. Both artists selected the surroundings of a night bar
as a refuge for isolated people in the shape of an ‘idyllic’
space amidst a time of chaos in the external world.
The question that must be asked, however, before
any further investigation of Nighthawks and The Age
of Anxiety, is whether, in this case, it is not a matter of
Auden’s ekphrasis of Hopper’s painting, as Auden is well
known for his poetic descriptions of artworks. As far as
the author of this study knows, Auden’s poem was not
written as an ekphrasis of Hopper’s painting. It is highly
probable that Auden did not even know of Hopper’s
painting, as it was sold, almost immediately after its
completion in 1942, to the Art Institute in Chicago, where
it is still to be found. Auden, according to the numerous
biographies, spent his time in American exile almost
exclusively in New York, which is also where he wrote
his poem The Age of Anxiety, and he probably never visited
Chicago (or at least not in the period when he wrote the
‘Baroque Eclogue’).6
Assuming, then, that there is no direct inspiration
between the works, it is possible to consider, when exam-
ining Hopper’s painting and Auden’s poem, that the role
of object and subject may be accorded to both differing
artworks and by means of a gradual changing of the angle
of their role and relationships it is possible to talk of the
moment of the interpretation of one work with regard to
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
tomáš murár
NIGHTHAWKS IN THE AGE OF ANXIETY
1/ Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942
oil, canvas, 84.1 × 152.4 cm
The Art Institute of Chicago
Photo: © 2017, The Art Institute of Chicago - Art Resource, NY - Scala, Florence
the other, doing so in the moment of their intersection in
the sense of chiasm, of the Greek X (chi). The relationship
of these two works is, as indicated, their proximity in
time and space of origin and their artistic content is also
similar. In one point, this being the central one, two dif-
ferent artistic representations become the expression of
the same problems, in spite of their counter-movement as
the lines of the letter X (counter-movement in the sense
of different artistic media).
A certain inspiration and guideline in such an in-
terpretation might be the concept given in the mid-1990s
by W. J. T. Mitchell in his Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal
and Visual Representation. Mitchell presented, among
other things, the concept of the ‘imagetext’ as a certain
principle with the continuous ‘pouring’ of representation
between text and image.7 Mitchell uses this as a possible
starting point for the problem of seeking the ‘theory
of the image’ or the ‘science of representation’8 with
reference to Deleuze’s understanding of image and text as
primary prerequisites for self-expression: ‘Speaking and
seeing, or rather statements and visibilities, are pure Elements,
a priori conditions under which all ideas are formulated and
behavior displayed, at some moment or other.’9
Mitchell looks at the comparison of visual and
verbal representation as an opportunity to study artistic
structures in a given period, in which are tackled certain
problems, which artists, regardless of the technique of
their expression, try to conceptualize in their works.10
ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES      245
This is why it is important, apart from considering the two
works as a kind of ‘imagetext’, as indicated by Mitchell,
not to allow the theoretical consideration to stray too
far from the actual subject of research, meaning the art
works as part of the given place and time. Through such
a comparison of works with a similar artistic subject we
can trace certain period structures, which can tell us in
return more about the thought construction and help us to
explain the works studied. As Mitchell notes: ‘The impulse
to “interartistic comparison” cannot be totally pointless. It must
correspond to some sort of authentical critical desire to connect
different aspects and dimensions of cultural experience.’11
Hopper’s painting and Auden’s poem may share this
‘cultural experience’, as is suggested by their visual-verbal
similarity. It is therefore good, alongside the research into
relationships between the painting and the poem, to ex-
pand the ‘interpretation network’ in some way, especially
by the artistic and historical connotations with Hopper’s
painting, just as it is necessary to create a framework of
theoretical questions, which the painting may bring up
in comparison with The Age of Anxiety. The comparison
must not, therefore, be restricted in this sense merely
to the image-text relationship, but must also contain in
its contexts an artistic-theoretical connection. Mitchell
also draws attention to this need for further relationships
in the comparison of art works: ‘Comparison itself is not
a necessary procedure in the study of image-text relations. The
necessary subject matter is, rather, the whole ensemble of rela-
246       ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES
tions between media, and relations can be many other things
besides similarity, resemblance, and analogy.’12
With this idea it is possible to overcome the most
difficult problem in the comparison of Nighthawks and The
Age of Anxiety, which is the different manner of represen-
tation. As Mitchell indicates in his theory, the comparison
of image and text is not merely seeking similarities, but
also differences, and what these may say about the art-
works studied, as well as to uncover the parallels invisible
(or inaudible) at first glance (or hearing). Analogies and
differences between the works can thus be conceptualized
subsequently as means for the investigation of their
relationship to the represented reality, i.e. the already
mentioned ‘cultural experience’ of the two artists.13
Nighthawks by Edward Hopper and
the Baroque Eclogue of Wystan Hugh Auden
Edward Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack in New York
into a Protestant family of third-generation immigrants;
his mother was originally from a French family and his
father from a Dutch family.14 When he was young Hopper
was interested in marine engineering, in 1899 he entered
the New York School of Illustrating, so that he would be able
to devote himself to the artwork that he had mastered in
the designing of ships, and also so that he would be able
to earn a living.15 But the very next year, in 1900, he trans-
ferred to the prestigious New York School of Art, where
Robert Henri (1865–1923) began teaching in 1902. Through
his activity the latter shaped the generation of young
artists linking the American Realism of the 19th century
with elements of the more relaxed impressionist, almost
expressive painting, known today as The Eight (of these let
us mention at least William Glackens or George Bellows).16
After graduating from this school in 1906, Hopper visited
Europe several times, spending most of his time in Paris
and painting under the influence of impressionism.17
In 1910 he made his third and last trip to Europe
and after his return he practically never again left New
York, with the exception of summer excursions to the
country. After the critical rejection of his work Soir Bleu
(1914) because of too great a French influence, as the
critics commented, Hopper almost stopped painting for
ten years, in spite of the fact that one of his paintings
was exhibited at the legendary Armory Show in New York
in 1913 (it must be noted, however, that this work was
received with no great interest by public and critics).18
In the period when Hopper was not painting he devoted
his time to illustrations for periodicals, watercolors and
especially graphics. In 1925 he then painted House by the
Railroad, through which he found an artistic style that he
did not abandon until he died.
From the mid-1920s there began to be interest in
Hopper’s work, which strengthened after the crash on
the New York Stock Exchange in 1929 and with The New
Deal of President Frank Roosevelt, supporting American
artists in material need within the framework of the
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
social reform.19 A condition for receiving support was the
creation of works with an American national theme, as
at this time the USA was beginning to isolate itself from
European influences, both political and artistic. Artists
therefore began to turn systematically towards American
tradition, in particular to the realist artists of the mid-
nineteenth century, for instance the work of Winslow
Homer (1836–1910),20 as whose follower Hopper also began
to be declared and is still perceived today.21
The great influence of European avant-garde art af-
ter the Armory Show thus began to decline in the 1930s and
the main interest was accorded to the artists of so-called
American ‘regionalism’, also known as the ‘American
Scene’, among whom Hopper began to be classified
thanks to his depiction of the ‘ordinary’ American man.22
Considered to be prominent figures in this trend are, for
instance, Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) or Grant Wood
(1891–1942).23 In general terms we might characterize this
art as national, ideological and non-conflictive, based
on the modern reformulation of the American realism
of the 19th century. As is emphasized by Gail Levin: ‘In
this context, Hopper’s paintings seemed to suggest traditional
American values; his figures had ‘typical’ American faces, and
his straightforward brand of realism appeared far less menac-
ing than modernist styles.’24
Hopper thus became an artist ranking alongside
Wood, Benton and other representatives of purely
‘American’ art, although I suspect that his art was con-
structed on a different basis from the works of the
regionalists. As Hopper himself said in 1964: ‘The thing
that makes me so mad is the “American Scene” business.
I never tried to do the American Scene as Benton and Curry
and the midwestern painters did. I think the American Scene
painters caricatured America. I always wanted to do myself.
The French painters didn’t talk about the “French Scene”, or
the English painters about the “English Scene”’. It always
gets a rise out of me. The American quality is in a painter. He
doesn’t have to strive for it.’25
The critics also began to notice this. Especially at the
end of the 1930s and then in the 1940s, during which the
USA opened their doors to artists fleeing from war-torn
Europe.26 At the end of the 1930s in the American artistic
environment there was also loss of interest in American
regionalism, which collapsed completely at the begin-
ning of the 1940s with the arrival, on the one hand, of
European surrealism in America, but especially with the
increasing promotion of Abstract Expressionism led by
Jackson Pollock (1912–1956).27
In this situation Hopper began, according to the
diary entry of his wife, Josephine Nivison Hopper
(1883–1968), the painting entitled Nighthawks in December
1941, shortly after the planes of the Japanese air force
launched the attack on Pearl Harbor. Josephine Hopper
wrote that: ‘Ed refused to take any interest in our very likely
prospect of being bombed — and we live right under glass
sky-lights and a roof that leaks whenever it rains ... but Ed
can’t be bothered. He’s doing a new canvas and simply can’t be
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
tomáš murár
NIGHTHAWKS IN THE AGE OF ANXIETY
interrupted!’28 Hopper noted of the painting that ‘[It] was
suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two
streets meet.’29 This was his work method: the collection of
inspiration by walking around the city (a habit adopted
from R. Henri) and then recreating the impressions
acquired when back in the studio in the form of the
feeling it evoked in him: ‘The idea had been in my mind
a long time before I painted it. It was suggested by glimpses
of lighted interiors seen as I walked along city streets at night
… it’s no particular street or house but is really a synthesis of
many impressions.’30 After the purchase of the painting for
the Art Institute of Chicago, Hopper wrote a letter to the
Director of this institution, in which he said that: ‘It is,
I believe, one of the very best things I have painted. I seem to
have come nearer to saying what I want to say in my work, this
past winter, that I ever have before.’31
This is a further reason for us to consider Hopper’s
Nighthawks as an emblematic image of his whole work and
to seek in it a certain starting-point for the effort to under-
stand Hopper’s artistic expression. In this picture Hopper
painted an American diner, a bar offering coffee, alcohol
and something to eat. A large pane of glass separates the
viewer and the four figures seated within — a woman in
a red dress beside a man in a black suit with a hat on his
head, to the right of whom sits another man, also in suit
and hat, with his back to the viewer. These people are
being served by a man in white, bending down behind
the counter. The whole scene of the bar is depicted as
seen from a street by night, leading to the left and ending
somewhere outside the picture. Behind this establishment
stretches a long row of buildings with an empty first floor
and darkened shop windows on the ground floor. The only
source of light for the whole picture is the electric lighting
of the bar, at the summit of which is an advert for cheap
machine-packed cigars.32 In the darkened window of the
house opposite can be seen an old-fashioned till.
Several preparatory drawings exist for this painting,
showing sketches for the bar and for the individual fig-
ures. In the final picture there were several changes from
these drawings, such as the position of the woman’s hand,
her interaction with the man sitting next to her or the
clothing of the man sitting on his own, who was originally
depicted in police uniform.
So far the most widespread study of Hopper’s
Nighthawks is the already mentioned book by Gordon
Theisen. After an introduction to Hopper’s work and life,
Theisen pays particular attention to the history of the
USA on the basis of the popular culture, which in its for-
mulation, according to Theisen’s explanation, comes close
to Hopper’s artistic expression. The book draws attention
to the (lost) American urban way of life, to the (exagger-
ated) American national pride, to the commercial (venal)
market culture, to the freedom (depersonalization) of the
state and the individual in it, to the (suppressed) sexual
revolution with a view of the way in which the USA, in
spite of its Puritan beginnings, actually became a great
power of the pornography industry, together with a look
ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES      247
at the bombastic (superficial) film production of the
Hollywood studios.33
Great attention was paid to Hopper’s work by the
American art historian Gail Levin, who published the
basic literature on Hopper’s life and work. In her studies
she also mentions the Nighthawks painting, especially
from the historical-cultural point of view.34 She sets this
painting in the context of Hopper’s work and draws at-
tention to the events framing the painting of the picture,
especially with the help of the diary entries of Hopper’s
wife Josephine and archival research in the Whitney
Museum of American Art in New York.
Levin links up in her interpretation with Lloyd
Goodrich (1897–1987)35 and elaborates a note to the effect
that Hopper might have painted Nighthawks on the basis
of inspiration from the painting by Vincent van Gogh
(1853–1890), Night Café, from 1888, which was exhibited in
New York in January 1942.36 Levin also considers a possible
source of inspiration for the painting in a short story by
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), The Killers, which was pub-
lished in 1927 in Scribner’s Magazine, to the editorial board
of which Hopper sent a letter of thanks for so doing.37
In the painting itself we can see that, in spite of it
being basically a public establishment, in other words
any passer-by could take the role of a visitor, the area of
Hopper’s diner is not accessible to anyone else, because it
has no entrance. This is in spite of the existence of a door
behind the waiter alongside the coffee machines, because
it is blocked by the continuing wooden counter. The paint-
ing places the viewer in the dual role of chance passer-by
and at the same time of voyeur. On the one hand the
observer follows the scene with delight that he cannot be
seen, but at the same time he feels a strange inclination to
avert his gaze, for he is aware of a certain anxiety in his
observation.
The reason for this delight causing anxiety, as we
see further, is the manner of the artistic construction of
‘another’ space and time in the painting; the onlooker
becomes part of the ‘transparent isolation’ of the paint-
ing, in which he follows artificially created space and
time. In the thus articulated time-and-space of the bar
the naturalness of a person is formed by the artificiality
of the cultural background for people to meet, in which
the onlooker paradoxically feels even more isolated
and ‘encroached upon’ by his own anxiety. At the same
time, in spite of this, he is not driven out of the bar by
the alien nature of the environment or a feeling of the
un-naturalness of being in it, even though not physically
there. As Brian O’Doherty, another important interpreter
of Hopper’s art, mentions: ‘His [Hopper’s, noted by T.M.]
concentration on a scene was such that his painting lifted it
out of its natural continuum, so that one might say that for
Hopper a fact was a snapshot of a process. In this way, mean-
ing was made inaccessible but, as in an uncaptioned news
photograph, still implied. By denying meaning, his pictures
provoke it; they pretend to be a familiarity of recognition
which they eventually frustrate.’38
248       ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in 1907 in York in
England and studied at Oxford, which he attended until
1928. After finishing his education he decided to move to
Berlin, which he saw as a lively modern city full of new
political and life-style inspirations.39 In 1930, however,
Auden returned to Great Britain and began lecturing in
boys’ schools, first in Scotland, then two years later in
Colwall and from the beginning of the 1930s he began to
publish his first poems. This marked the beginning of
Auden’s great influence on new English poetry.
In the first half of the 1930s Auden published,
for instance, Poems (for the first time in 1928 at private
expense, then in 1930 and again in 1933), but he also
published prose work, such as The Orators of 1932, and
theatrical plays (such as The Dance of Death of 1933 or The
Dog Beneath the Skin of 1935). In the second half of the
1930s Auden published the poem Look, Stranger and trav-
elled a lot, for instance in 1936 to Iceland, in 1937 to Spain
(where the civil war was under way and Auden supported
the Republican side). From these travels he published
Spain and Letters from Iceland.
The following year Auden visited the United States
of America for the first time and on the basis of this visit
he decided that he wanted to become an American citizen
(he did so in 1946). At the beginning of 1939 he therefore
left for the USA and remained in New York,40 and shortly
after his arrival he achieved the same recognition as he
had in England, becoming ‘a defining figure for post-World
War II American poetry.’41
In the first half of the 1940s a considerable change
also occurred in Auden’s work. The poet had not only
physically arrived in a new country, but he also attempted
a different kind of poetry, through which he could
capture and characterize the mental and spiritual basis
of his new environment. The first long poem that Auden
wrote in America was New Years Letter.42 In this he dealt
mainly with his journey from Europe to America and
simultaneously with his new journey to faith through the
philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard.43
The clearly most famous and most-read collection
of poems from the first half of the 1940s, consisting
of two long poems, For the Time Being — a Christmas
Oratorio and The Sea and the Mirror — A Commentary on
Shakespeare’s The Tempest, has the collective title For the
Time Being and was published for the first time in 1944.44
Auden dedicated it to his mother, who guided him to
Christianity in his youth, and through this dedication
he tells her of his return to the faith of his youth, but in
a strongly modified form.45
Published together with For the Time Being was The
Sea and the Mirror. Auden gave this poem the subtitle
A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest and it consists
of the dialogues of fictitious Shakespearean characters
with a strong autobiographical undertone. The title itself
alludes to Shakespeare’s statement that ‘art is a mirror held
up to nature’.46 The main themes of this poem are art itself,
which Auden investigates in its limits in relation to its
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
viewer, and his inspiration, Nature, and he handles the
problem of art as a possible instrument of manipulation,
but simultaneously as a necessity for spiritual self-
reflection and self-perfection.
Auden’s last American poem of the first half of the
1940s is the poem studied here, The Age of Anxiety. A Baroque
Eclogue.47 Mingled in this is Auden’s American experience
and its chief motif is a quartet of isolated individuals meet-
ing in a bar during the war, in a time of anxiety about loss
of life and also the fear of becoming lost in life.
The poem consists of six parts: Prologue, The Seven
Ages, The Seven Stages, The Dirge, The Masque and Epilogue.
It is clearly defined in time, between the evening of All
Souls’ Day with the meeting of four strangers in a night
bar, and ends at dawn after the night of All Souls, in the
course of which, with the arriving morning, the inner es-
sence of the evening spent together subsides and anxious
reality returns to life.48
In the Prologue the reader is introduced to an atmos-
phere, ‘when the historical process breaks down and armies
organize with their embossed debates the ensuing void which
they can never consecrate, when necessity is associated with
horror and freedom with boredom, then it looks good to the bar
business.’49 Auden subsequently creates the anxious feeling
of the repetitive routine of a life full of the responsibili-
ties and needs of obligatory relationships, which takes
the individual, as the result of a time of fear of the loss
of one’s own self, into the anonymous space of the night
bar, in which he can quietly contemplate his own life.
With this manner of introspection Auden presents the
individual actors in his poem in the introduction.
The four protagonists, Malin, Quant, Emble and
Rosetta, meet in a bar during the war when ‘everybody is
reduced to the anxious status of a shady character or a dis-
placed person.’50 Quant is an Irish immigrant, a widower,
a travel agent and a connoisseur of mythology. He is
a nihilist and represents a degree of despair in his own
weakness with a surface layer of fragile and easily viola-
ble cynicism. A further participant is Malin, a member of
the Canadian Air Force, who is the definite ‘director’ of
the whole story and a representative of the strong ‘hero’.
The only female figure is Rosetta, a successful buyer for
a large store, with a fear of poverty and a predilection
for English detective novels. The last of the four is Emble,
serving in the Navy, depressed by fear of his own future.
Their contemplative thoughts are interrupted in the
introduction by a radio broadcast on the latest news from
the battlefront:
‘Now the News. Night raids on
Five cities. Fires Started.
Pressure applied by pincer movement
In threating thrust. Third Division
Enlarges beachhead. Lucky Charm
Saves sniper. Sabotage hinted
In steel-mill stoppage. Strong point held
By fanatical Nazis’.51
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
tomáš murár
NIGHTHAWKS IN THE AGE OF ANXIETY
After several further comments the narrator informs us
that, with growing anxiety, ‘they could no longer keep these
thoughts to themselves’,52 and began talking together. This
is again interrupted by the radio broadcast, which is soon
ended, however, by Quant’s raised finger in the direction
of the radio and at this point it goes silent. Upon this, at
Rosetta’s proposal, they all quit their bar stools, which
formed a separate space for each of them, and sit together
at a single table and ‘drinks were ordered and the discussion
began.’53
Then follows the second part, entitled The Seven
Ages, in which each of them in their discourse creates,
from memories, ideas and desires, the image of the six
‘Ages’ of the individual in an artificially created world.
The individual voices are also open to song, initiated by
Rosetta’s throwing a nickel into the ‘Wallomatic’. After
the sixth ‘Age’ the talk increases in tempo as they come to
their own lives.54 They gradually get into their own time,
their own present, which becomes the seventh stage of
their lively conversation.55
All of them subsequently return to their own
thoughts, when they order another round. With the in-
creasing level of alcohol in the blood, as the narrator once
again informs us, all in the bar reveal their hidden Egos and
these are suddenly able without difficulty (which they have
when sober) to accept complete strangers as part of their
own present and to create a certain union with them. Then
we learn that all four are less and less aware of their sur-
roundings and increasingly aware of each other, as a result
of which they fall into common dreams.
This is followed by the third part, entitled The
Seven Stages, in which we follow the creation of a bucolic
Arcadian countryside, in which the individual characters
travel in dream-created time and space. They travel for
the most part in pairs, which change and thus create
various emotions and sympathies between the individual
figures. Emble and Rosetta find the most pleasure in one
another on their joint journeys through the countryside,
whereas Malin and Quant are sometimes so similar that
they are incapable of being alongside one another. The
types of transport means change, from a horse’s saddle
through walking to cars. Gradually they reach together, in
the course of unarticulated time, the individual ‘Stages’
of their journeys and create places in a state between
dreaming and waking and thus delete the ‘real’ time and
space of the night bar.56
After awakening from this common dream, when
the bar is closing, Rosetta proposes that they transfer
to her apartment.57 The part that follows is entitled The
Dirge. On the way to Rosetta’s home in the taxi they all
think with some disgruntlement of the loss of Nature and
Man in their inevitable need for extinction, when even
‘Gilgamesh or Napoleon, some Solon or Sherlock Holmes’,58
who appeared from time to time to save both, were also
not eternal. It is for these essentially necessary entities,
condemned to extinction at the moment of origin, which
form life, that this (Auden’s) lament was written.59
ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES      249
The fifth part, The Masque, takes us to Rosetta’s
apartment, in which the men helped themselves to food
and drink, and in their deepest thoughts ‘they were tired
and wanted to go home alone to bed.’60 But because of the
need to remain and wait for what would happen they are
all forced to don a social mask and ‘enjoy themselves’.
They take on the roles of actors of life, in which social
principles render their own desires and decisions impos-
sible. Rosetta, as the narrator again tells us, has turned
the radio on and Emble invites her to dance, while the
remaining two, Malin and Quant, watch them.61
After an emotionally tense exchange of views
between Rosetta and Emble, Malin and Quant decide
to leave, Quant begins to sing and Malin joins in with
several stanzas. Rosetta accompanies them to the lift and
they disappear from view to the sound of Quant’s and
Malin’s songs. On her return Rosetta finds young Emble in
her bedroom, where he has fallen asleep. The last verses
of this extensive part belong to Rosetta, addressing the
whole evening, life, love, faith, herself and Emble.
The poem ends with the part entitled Epilogue,
which describes Quant and Malin after they have left
Rosetta’s apartment and at the point when they expressed
mutual pleasure at having had the opportunity to become
acquainted and, after a mutual exchange of addresses
and promises to ‘keep in contact’, they parted and had
‘immediately forgotten each other’s existence.’62 On the way
home Malin thinks about his life and the whole evening,
whereas Quant sings all the way home. Quant gets home
first; Malin’s journey ‘was still not done.’63
The last pages of the poem therefore belong to
Malin, who gets out of the train at Manhattan Bridge as
the sun is rising and the narrator emphasizes that: ‘It
would be a bright clear day for work and for war.’64 As the
narrator again warns us at the end of the poem, Malin
has gone back to work, ‘reclaimed by the actual world
where time is real and in which, therefore, poetry can take no
interest.’65
The poem is usually interpreted by Auden’s fascina-
tion for the thoughts of Kierkegaard, through which he
found the way back to God and to the Anglican Church,
in the traditions of which he was brought up. We can
observe here, as in The Sea and the Mirror, the search for
the relationship between Man in the world and his God,
which accompanies him on his journey through life. At
the same time, in this case it often also draws attention
to Auden’s interest in the psychoanalysis elaborated on
the one hand by Freud, but especially by C. G. Jung. In
this framework the main characters of the poem are
interpreted as Jung’s archetypical faculties: Intuition
(Quant), Thought (Malin), Feeling (Rosetta) and Sensation
(Emble).66
We are offered the comparison of Auden’s poem
and Hopper’s painting — a bar with lonely guests asking
about their own determination, fate and future. Auden’s
verses may be, in our thought construction, applied to the
figures in Hopper’s Nighthawks; the painting thus appears
250       ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES
in new possibilities of expression, which may further
help us with its interpretation. In this way we can, with
a certain degree of exaggeration, read the sequence of
Quant’s thoughts, through which he asks himself and the
figures of Hopper’s painting:
‘My deuce, my double, my dear image,
Is it lively there, that land of glass
...
Do you feel, my friend? What flavour has
That liquor you lift with your left hand;
...
Nicer myself (though not as honest)’.67
Malin, who studied medicine before entering the
air force, throws doubt on the idea and the image of
reality, but not like Quant through realization of life as
a deception, but through rational consideration of the
world. Malin has long believed, as the poem suggests, in
the sciences as opportunities for the understanding of
reality, but the experience of the loneliness of the bar on
All Souls Night under the threat of instant death and the
cataclysm of war leads him to doubt the rational basis
of the world. Into his thoughts and the ideas he delivers
there penetrates the terrifying, brutal reality of violence,
under the weight of which the rational construction of
the world crumbles. He considers:
‘Man has no mean; his mirrors distort;
His greenest arcadias have ghosts too;
His utopias tempt to eternal youth
Or self-slaughter’.68
Hopper also doubts the general idea of reality, but in
a different way from the surrealists or abstract expres-
sionists of his time. His painting gives the impression of
being distant and, in spite of the apparently unequivocal
and understandable nature of the painter’s realism, it
does not let the viewer get closer than the window of
the closed night bar. Just as Malin’s words destroy the
rationality of his former idea of the world, so Hopper’s
painting disrupts the clarity and peace of American
verism in the perception of the viewer. Something com-
monly confirmed and considered a matter of course (the
idea of the rational construction of the world as well as
American realist painting) is disrupted by the subversive
idea of shattering and a fall into another perspective of
perception. For Auden Malin is an element of this sub-
versiveness of reality, which we can also find in Hopper’s
painting, as we will see bellow.
Whereas Quant and Malin are disruptive elements
of ‘reality’ in the poem from two different polarities (in
other words phenomena first and foremost rationally
perceived, which we might declare to be of a cultural,
almost masculine nature), Rosetta and Emble are different
appearances in the general configuration. And the fact
that Hopper also selected the constellation of three men
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
and one woman, where the figures of two of the men give
almost the impression of doubles, whereas the third man
and the woman are dressed in strongly differing color
tones, is not necessarily a coincidence.
Rosetta, as can already be seen from her first reflec-
tion and also further on, is the voice of naturalness, an
organic and natural element. Her perception of nature is
a memory of an Arcadian idyllic place that is, according to
Malin, full of apparitions and ends in self-slaughter. She
is aware of this threat, but does not destroy her illusion of
naturalness with criticism and the rejection of rational-
ity, falling rather into the endless sleepiness of distant
utopian space:
‘For down each dale industrious there ran
A paternoster of ponds and mills,
Came sweet waters, assembling quietly
By a clear congress of accordant streams
A mild river that moseyed at will
Through parks and ploughland, purring southward
In a wide valley’.69
An analogical idea of the suffering of nature and thus the
loss of naturalness can also be seen in Hopper’s painting.
In it nature is denied completely by the construction of
a built-up concrete city without any sign of a natural
element. The very environment of the bar of the poem
and of the painting can then be seen as an artificial living
space. However, as will be indicated, even Hopper’s
painting is forming ‘another’ place detached from the
‘outside’ world, similarly to those that Rosetta creates in
her dream-like wakefulness.
Emble, just like Rosetta, is a protagonist of
naturalness, which in Rosetta is lost and in Emble as yet
undiscovered, from which stems his anxiety. His unfound
nature is his perception of himself as a sexual subject
and object, incapable of attaining satisfaction in an I–You
relationship. And thanks to this his eccentricity of the
unknown, in other words uninitiated, he becomes an
external observer of himself and his surroundings; he is
an invisible subject, able to perceive himself as an as yet
unrealized substance.
A similar feeling of being ‘outside’ like Emble may
be experienced by Hopper’s waiter in his white uniform,
who is an unobserved observer of the surrounding world
and is enclosed within the limits of the bar counter, and
also by the viewer himself in his position as a ‘chance’
passer-by who, like a voyeur, observes the ‘inner’ life of
the individual characters. With our gaze we try to get
closer to the people inside the bar and we long to know
the intimacy of their lives. Nevertheless, we are not
successful when trying to get ‘into’ the painting. There
is, as we will see, an apparent moment of ‘isolation’ in
the painting in the onlooker’s perception. Auden voices
Emble’s position, which we may bestow upon Hopper’s
painting and its viewer, in the introduction to the poem
as follows:
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
tomáš murár
NIGHTHAWKS IN THE AGE OF ANXIETY
‘Enstranged, aloof,
They brood over being till the bars close,
The malcontented who might have been
The creative odd ones the average need
To suggest new goals. Self-judged they sit,
Sad haunters of Perhaps who after years
To grasp and gaze in get no further...’70
Emble is, then, alongside Rosetta, an instinct-inspired
individual who, unlike Rosetta, who — as she thinks —
has lost her naturalness, has not yet awakened this in
himself. In both of them, however, their naturalness
exists only in illusion, whence their anxiety. On the other
side are the (apparent) ‘rationalists’ Quant and Malin,
whose spontaneity and naturalness come into conflict
with their rationalism, in which they seek support
against the loss of focus, lack of confidence and anxiety
of man, floundering not only in the labyrinth of the great
modern city, but also in that of a world unhinged by the
catastrophe of war. The night bar is a fragile, temporary
refuge, enabling one to forget and to meet others.
Anxiety and the simultaneous desire for contact
with others is the common denominator of the night-time
‘encounter’, and similarly the creation of the illusion
of (self-) forgetting and new (self-) discovery. Auden’s
four figures, after the interruption of the introductory
thoughts by the news from the front on the radio, as was
mentioned above, get into conversation and later also
into the joint creation of a dream, from which, like in the
‘realistic’ painting of Edward Hopper, the linear timing
is lost and changes into the form of the time-and-space
construction of an artificial world.
Nighthawks in The Age of Anxiety
In 1945 the Austrian philosopher and sociologist Alfred
Schütz (1899–1959), residing in the USA, published the
study On Multiple Realities.71 In his phenomenology of
various forms and manifestations of reality the philoso-
pher starts off from the idea that there exist infinitely
many spheres of reality, each one of which has its own
constitution and its own and different way of being.72
Each area of reality is, at the same time, separate, i.e. an
enclosed area of meaning, which requires a specific style
of knowledge. Among these specific worlds, enclosed
by a sphere of meaning, Schütz classifies the world of
dreams, imaginary ideas and fantasies, in particular the
world of art, the world of religious experience, scientific
contemplation, the world of children’s games and the
world of madness. Their ‘finitude’ lies in the fact that
it is not possible to form mutual relationships between
them, because they do not have ‘rules of transformation’,
which would permit the transition from one world to
another.73
The world of the ordinariness and everydayness
of human activity and actions has therefore its layers of
reality. This world is, as Schütz observes, ‘the scene and
ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES      251
also the object of our actions and interactions’.74 Each of these
layers or fields of reality is characterized by its own cog-
nitive style, spontaneity and tension of consciousness as
a specific form of ‘epoché’. To the region of ordinary eve-
rydayness, which Schütz describes as a ‘daily-life’ reality,
falls a unique role in the sense that this is an area of joint
communication and joint actions. In spite of this there
also exist, of course, in the region of everydayness, such
experiences as transcend everyday reality — religious
experience, aesthetic, fantasy or dream experience — in
other words, transcendental experience is part of our
everyday life; on the folio of everyday reality a different
reality is constituted.75
Time and place in ‘daily-life’ reality are at first sight
clearly defined by the framework of Hopper’s painting
and Auden’s poem, which is offered to the viewer and the
reader as the given criterion of both works of art. Auden
introduces his poem with a verse from the Lutheran
Chorale of the English priest and novelist Sabine Baring-
Gould (1834–1924) from 1865,76 to which he connects with
his own definition of the historical in its weakened state
and collapse: ‘When the historical process breaks down and
armies organize with their embossed debates the ensuing void
which they can never consecrate, when necessity is associated
with horror and freedom with boredom, then it looks good to
the bar business.’77
Auden thus points out in the introduction that by
‘entering’ into the poem the ‘historical process breaks
down’ and the four visitors to the bar are ‘derailed’ from
the course and accustomed order of historical time
and through a crack in the ‘daily-life’ reality they find
themselves in the reality of subjectively experienced
time; as long as the four of them are in the bar, away from
the world of the ‘outside’, they are in this subjectively
created and experienced time-space. By leaving it they
find themselves back in the reality of the outside world
with its pragmatic-empirical model of probability. What
this world characterizes is expressed in the prologue to
the poem by the verse ‘The universal disorder of the world
outside’: from the unhinged world of war and destruction,
from which the four heroes of Auden’s poem seek, at least
for a few hours, escape in the illusion of the artificial and
unstable ‘idyll’ of the night bar.
At the end of Auden’s poem this ‘opened time’
closes: in the last sentences Malin is described as the last
‘creator’ of the alternative reality of the poem and he is
‘reclaimed by the actual world’, in which ‘time is real and in
which, therefore, poetry can take no interest.’78 Finally even
Malin ‘disembarks’ from the time-space of the poem in
order to return to the reality of life, but not to ‘living’,
the meaning of which according to Auden is creating.
The last sentence of the poem expresses disenchantment
and anxiety about the inevitable return to the reality of
the ruined world of cold and loneliness: ‘Facing another
long day of servitude to wilful authority and blind accident,
creation lay in pain and earnest, once more reprieved from
self-destruction, its adoption, as usual, postponed.’79
252       ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES
This is a world where the boundaries are formed
by ‘necessity with horror’ and ‘freedom with boredom’. The
dream logic of the overturned reality of the poem, over-
turning the pragmatic-empirical model of probability,
makes it possible to read these concepts not linearly, on
the basis of their syntagmatic arrangement, but para-
digmatically and seemingly paradoxically on the basis of
their chiasmic intersection. If ‘the world outside’ is under
the rule of ‘horror’ and ‘boredom’, then all one can do is
create a subjective world of ‘freedom’, which for a creative
man becomes the very ‘necessity’ of survival.
At the beginning and end of the poem, where the
‘historical’ time of the reality of the outside world rules,
there thus occur inharmonious pairs, which cannot coex-
ist in symbiosis (horror x necessity, freedom x boredom,
real time x poetry), but in spite of this they intersect not
only in the internal world and the time awareness of the
characters in the text, but also from the perspective of
aesthetic reception, meaning from our viewpoint, our
experience and our time lived.80
Similarly for example we learn from Quant’s story
that these were dreams through which he wanted to
escape from the ‘principle of reality’ and into which
there entered for him ‘from time to time’ and ‘unexpectedly
and incomprehensibly ... images, some highly-coloured, some
violent, derived from a life he could not remember.’81 The expe-
rience of this ‘other’ reality, which he ‘could not remember’,
because it was pushed out of experienced reality, foretells
the constitution of ‘another’ time-space of the night bar.82
The atmosphere of the bar is therefore an atmos-
phere that in a strange way enables and potentiates
the creation of notional modifications of experienced
reality through illusions of ‘other’ reality, which in the
movement of the storyline of the poem increase in the
intensity, with which the daily-life ‘of the world outside’ is
disrupted. This brings about the ‘multiple realities’, about
which Schütz observes that ‘living in one of the many worlds
of phantasy we have no longer to master the outer world
and to overcome the resistance of its objects. We are free from
pragmatic motive, which governs our natural attitude toward
the world of daily life, free also from the bondage of ‘inter-
objective’ space and inter-subjective standard time. No longer
are we confined within the limits of our actual, restorable, or
attainable reach.’83
In Hopper’s painting we also find, as in Auden’s
poem, indications referring to the period reality of the
American city in the mid-1940s. As Gordon Theisen points
out: ‘Nighthawks gives ample evidence of the importance he
granted to being in a specific place at a specific time. ... The
urban diner Hopper portrayed is securely rooted in the early
1940s. Diners, for example, were a twentieth-century phenom-
enon, increasing in numbers through the 1920s and 1930s and
reaching their heyday in the 1940s and 1950s.’84
Theisen also notices that it was just at the begin-
ning of the 1940s the white glare of electric light spread
massively in such enterprises in the USA.85 Equally
characteristic of the time is the advertisement for Phillies
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
cigars and the clothing of the bar guests, especially the
men’s typical hats, known as fedoras, which ‘were, along
with their suits and ties, practically mandated wear for men in
midcentury.’86 Just as typical is the clothing of the woman
in the red dress, whose bare arms and striking décolletage
might have been inspired by the Hollywood icons of the
1940s, such as Betty Grable or Rita Hayworth.87 These de-
tails set Hopper’s Nighthawks in the period, but the actual
painting as an autonomous artwork and the creation of
an imaginative consciousness means ‘something more’, as
we could also sense in Auden’s poem.
The night bar of Hopper’s painting is, despite the
veristic technique and the material nature of the period
life and institutions in the background, a stage for action
beyond the bounds of the time and space of the external
world and its reality, as is Auden’s poem enclosed in its
own imaginary world, isolated from the world ‘outside’.
As we have seen at the crossing of the at first sight dispa-
rate pairs in The Age of Anxiety, similarly the aesthetic of
the impact of Hopper’s Nighthawks lies to a considerable
extent in the chiasmic crossing of ‘reality’ and ‘virtuality’,
or else of the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ time-space. It has its
own reality, which is not a radical ‘counter’ reality of the
external world, and yet the world of Hopper’s painting
(like Auden’s poem) is a virtual world, as we will see
below. In both Auden’s poem and Hopper’s painting we
can therefore trace a possible conceptualization of the
‘crossing’, or rather ‘disruption’, between the ‘daily-life’
reality and its ‘other’ realities.
The atmosphere of the night bar is inspired in
Hopper’s painting, according to the artist’s own mention,
by the memory of one of his walks through Manhattan at
night.88 While recalling this moment Hopper constructed
a place on the basis of sensation and impression, not on
the basis of a model and reality.89 In relation to Edmund
Husserl’s phenomenology of visual awareness and mem-
ory it might be said that the painter modified the memory
by fantasy consciousness (‘Phantasiebewußtsein’) as
visual fiction: real reality became artistic possibility.
With what chronology, what time dimension, do we
then meet in Hopper’s painting? If we started out hypo-
thetically from the painter’s primary impression, which
inspired the creation of his Nighthawks, we might say that
this ‘original impression’, which in Husserl’s phenomenol-
ogy of the consciousness of time and its constitution
corresponds to the ‘now-moment’ of the time object,90 in
other words the newly and ‘freshly’ experienced percep-
tion is altered and modified in Hopper’s painting, by
productive fantasy, into what Husserl calls a ‘secondary
memory’. This ‘Wiedererinnerung’, recollection, has,
however, the same constitution as the original percep-
tion.91 The reproduced impression is not, understandably,
the present, but a ‘present made present’,92 existing in
thought (‘nur vorgestellt’).93
Inspiration by the given moment in a particular
place becomes the accelerator of artistic activity, as
Hopper himself observed: ‘Great art is the outward expres-
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
tomáš murár
NIGHTHAWKS IN THE AGE OF ANXIETY
sion of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result
in his personal vision of the world.’94 O’Doherty also remarks
an analogous principle in Hopper’s painting: ‘Hopper’s
images have, to my mind, a distinct relationship to another
class of images, which are less subject than ordinary images to
the dynamics of remembering and forgetting. These are images
with strong emotional tone, persisting from some experi-
ence. ... Hopper’s pictures, in their peculiar isolation from
identifying contexts (his work by and large is placeless and
unlocatable), have something common with such images.’95
Hopper’s painting could thus on the one hand
be a memory and record of an experienced event; on
the other hand it could also be comprehended as the
re-presented impression and creative transformation of
a timely moment.
In this concept of the constitution of the particular
‘inner time’ of the painting there arises the uniqueness of
Hopper’s Nighthawks; this painting creates its own ‘virtual’
time-ness that disrupts the viewer’s subjectivity, therefore
eroding his or her awareness of time. There exists
a common moment of time between the painting and the
viewer, which is based on ‘daily-life’ reality; however, at
the same time the ‘reality’ of the painting creates its own
time consciousness and isolates itself from the viewer. The
onlooker then remains ‘in front of ’ the painting; a tension
between the ‘daily-life’ reality of the spectator and the
‘other’ reality of the painting is formed.
The spectator becomes only a ‘passer-by’ of ‘another’
reality of the painting that exists in the viewer’s own
‘daily-life’ reality. In other words, according to Schütz, the
perception of the onlooker of the painting ‘persists’ in the
‘daily-life’ reality, in which the spectator is exposed to the
‘other’ reality, which he or she accesses through his or her
inner experience with the painting. As Schütz mentions:
‘We speak of provinces of meaning and not sub-universes,
because it is the meaning of our experience and not the onto-
logical structure of the objects which constitutes reality.’ 96
The painting suggests that we are entering the open
street and approaching the bar’s pane of glass, which
splits the ‘other’ reality of the painting. However, this is
only a phantasm, because we as the viewers are already
separated from the painting itself, therefore even the
street is only a ‘simulation’ of our own ‘daily-life’ reality.
This constitutes an illusion of ‘openness’ of the ‘other’
reality in our everyday experience.
This moment of apparent openness of the painting’s
foreground with the aim of bringing its background
closer to the onlooker, which at the same moment creates
ambivalence in experiencing the ‘other’ reality ‘behind’
the glass, is, as I propose, essential for understanding this
painting. O’Doherty notices a similar phenomenon in
Hopper’s art: ‘His [Hopper’s, noted by T.M.] art often has
to be defined by negatives until something positive is forced
into the open. This is appropriate for the reversals his pictures
provoke — switching emptiness into fullness, isolation into
spiritual richness, lack of emotion into feeling. His work ties
a net slipknot in time, revealing the transience in permanence,
ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES      253
the permanence in transience. This traffic through opposites
leads again into their apparent source: the separation and
fusion of object and subject, signified further by the frequent
traffic between inside and outside in his work, which can
be extended to the observer and observed... These and other
aspects of Hopper’s art are exemplified by his most obvious
and enigmatic motif: the window, which signifies most clearly
those habits of observation that bring the distinctive ‘voice’
into Hopper’s work. The window as lens or eye, of course,
monitors traffic between inside and outside.’97
With this knowledge we can consider that Hopper’s
Nighthawks can thus appear to be a time about which the
viewer ‘knows’ that it should have passed, but neverthe-
less he ‘sees’ its state of being halted. In confrontation
with Hopper’s work, time loses it natural trait of ‘eternal
flowing’ and Hopper is painting merely a ‘moment of
time’, which appears to be ever-present in its artistically
represented ‘eternal moment’.
A certain ‘eternity of the moment’ was considered in
the 1930s and 1940s by Jean Gebser (1905–1973), a German
philosopher who lived in France and in Switzerland, in his
opus magnum on the development and structure of the hu-
man consciousness. In his two-volume work Ursprung und
Gegenwart, which was published for the first time in 1949,98
he investigated various degrees of awareness of the world
on the basis of the formulation of Renaissance perspec-
tive, which became his starting point for the description of
various phases of understanding of man in structured and
measurable space and time: ‘Scarcely five hundred years ago,
during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of
our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective, which
opened up the three-dimensionality of space.’99
Gebser divided up the development of human
consciousness chronologically into his ‘unperspective’,
‘perspective’ and ‘aperspective’ phases, doing so on the
basis of understanding of time and/in space in individual
periods. In his consideration the Renaissance represented
looking at the world in its unity of time and space with
the supposition that this understanding was primary up
to the middle of the 20th century. Before ‘perspective’
there existed also awareness of ‘unperspective’, in
which there did not exist any linear apportioning of
time-space.100 From our viewpoint the most interesting
are Gebser’s findings on awareness of the ‘aperspective’,
which was characteristic for Gebser’s present, in other
words for the 1930s and 1940s; the period in which both
Hopper’s painting and Auden’s poem came into being.
According to Gebser, ‘aperspectivity’ is not the
opposite of ‘perspectivity’, or its loss, but it is a certain de-
viation from its character and sense. The main principle
of Gebser’s aperspectivity is the ‘incorporation’ of time
into the perception of space, as opposed to perspective
and unperspective consciousness, in which the awareness
of time did not play a part. ‘Time’, according to Gebser,
entered man’s consciousness in the twentieth century
and thus detached and altered the principles of the unity
of time and space of the perspective understanding of
254       ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES
the world, because chronology threw into doubt the
motionlessness and stiffness of Renaissance (perspective)
time-and-space, and brought it into the constantly re-
presented and transparent present.101
The impact of time in human perception, Gebser
points out, divides up space in relation to the understand-
ing and characteristics of a given space in a given time:
‘Every body, to the extent that it is conceived spatially, is
nothing but solidified, crystallized, substantiated, and ma-
terialized time that requires the formation and solidification
of space in order to unfold. Space represents a field of tension;
and because of its latent energy, it is an agent of the critical
or acute energy of time. Thus both energetic principles, the
latency of space as well as the acuteness of time, are mutually
dependent. ... For both space and time exist for the perceptual
capacities of our body only in the present via presentiation.’102
The ‘alienation’, ‘silence’ or ‘timelessness’ often as-
serted by interpreters of Hopper’s painting can therefore
be rather the specific ‘time’ of the painting in the ‘aper-
spectively’ formulated space of the picture. The world ‘in
front of ’ the window of the night bar in the Nighthawks
is constantly changing, but the world ‘behind’ the glass is
permanent, and if its material nature exists, then its ever-
renewing moment of time also exists: ‘Instead of presenting
a temporal moment, the picture renders an enduring, indeed
eternal present.’103
However, when investigating this problem of
Hopper’s painting, attention must be first drawn to
Auden’s subtitle A Baroque Eclogue.104 An eclogue, as a liter-
ary genre of idyllic pastoral life, may at first glance appear
to be a misleading concept,105 but in relation to the content
of the poem, in which the visitors to the bar create a new
‘idyll’ through the modification of time, it acquires a spe-
cial brisance. Wolfgang Iser points out that the eclogue as
a literary genre is ‘a work of art that thematizes art itself.
It does so by withdrawing from another world, although this
other world continues to impinge on that of poetry.’106
The genre of the eclogue has its origins in ancient
literature and it was frequently used in the Renaissance
period. Baroque eclogues with pastoral focus did not
appear quite so often.107 This makes all the more interest-
ing Auden’s choice of subtitle. We may consider that it
concerns the connection of the creative dimension of the
Baroque outside rationality, because both Baroque art
and philosophy deal with and count on the irrational as
part of the world, together with the auto-referential and
allegorical basis of the eclogue, which, despite its idyllic
form, may refer to something other than what is being
spoken of.108 In this way the ‘Baroque’ basically raises the
eclogue to a certain sphere of creative illusion, which
does not, however, become ‘false illusion’, but artificially/
artfully created fantasy, which acquires a new dimension
and its own time-ness, balanced to the rational world; this
is, however, detached from rationality itself by its basis in
the ‘Baroque’ eclogue.
We may therefore refer to the ‘Baroque eclogue’ as
a ‘subversive’ allegory of an idyllic world, as the eclogue
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
in its classical form creates an ideal world separate from
and only difficult to access from the ‘real’ world. On the
other hand, the ‘Baroque’ eclogue opens the gates of
‘another’ world through the very principle of its existence
in the ‘real’ world and its existence ‘outside’ reality is not
possible. It thus uses elements of ‘daily-life’ reality for the
creation of ‘subversive’ ideas of a ‘pseudo-ideal’ world,
which exists and is accessible to anyone wishing to enter
it. The existence of this other space is, however, limited
just by the ‘connection’ to reality with the existence of
linear time: the ‘Baroque eclogue’ is therefore, in spite of
its ‘simulacrum’ of the ideality of space, determined by
the time of the ‘visitor’.
This simulacrum of ‘idyllic’ reality as ‘another’
reality formed on the foundations of ‘daily-life’ reality is
the basis of the ‘Baroque’ eclogue. In the Baroque there
is, you see, ‘the phenomenon of the surface, the wrapping,
the fabric, the veil, textile and texture, the mask, drapery,
‘skin’, which envelopes the basis, substance, dimension of
depth and the interior. This phenomenon, linked with the
idea of another world as a true sphere of transcendental
subjectivity, is one of the constituents of the Baroque ‘feeling
of life’ and experience of the world.’109 The eclogue as an
auto-reference literary genre and Baroque as a principle
veiling the essence of depth, and thus the understand-
ing of everyday reality as a certain surface or veil of
‘another’ world, create a subversive space disrupting its
own essence with its mere existence. At the same time,
only through this ‘disruption’ between the worlds are
they enabled to exist.
In the Renaissance man was in objective (perspec-
tive) contact with ‘daily-life’ reality and such a perception
of his surroundings enabled him to investigate himself
as an integral part of the world, as indicated by Gebser:
‘Besides illuminating space, perspective brings it to man’s
awareness and lends man his own visibility of himself. We
have also noted that in the paintings of Giotto and Masaccio
this evident perception of man comes to light for the first time.
Yet this very same perspective whose study and gradual ac-
quisition were a major preoccupation for Renaissance man not
only extends his image of the world by achieving spatialization
but also narrows his vision….’110
We may consider that Renaissance man did not,
then, understand the contrast between matter and spirit
as contradictory, but as balanced and self-evident. The
Baroque, however, through its negation of natural exist-
ence as ‘sinful’, basically disrupted this ‘idyll’ of the earthly
world and presented it merely as a surface, a kind of fabric
thrown over the essence of things. In this way Auden, by
connecting the ‘Baroque eclogue’ with the action creating
‘another’ pastoral time as a subversion of the ‘ideal’ world,
deepened the creativity of the imagination not as an escape
from ‘everydayness’ into ‘ideality’, but as a slump from the
‘determined space’ to an ‘imaginary created space’.111
Auden may thus be considered as a ‘pseudo-
Baroque’ author attempting to elaborate the concept of
reality beyond the limits of the real through the shatter-
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
tomáš murár
NIGHTHAWKS IN THE AGE OF ANXIETY
ing of individuality outside of the given space and time
of the ‘daily-life’ world. Individuality, in its multitude of
folds, forms new spaces in the Baroque sense on the basis
of a subversively idyllic world, in which the finding of
Renaissance individuality as the center of understanding
of the ‘external’ world, is lost; this rule of the perception
of reality is replaced by ‘being torn out’ of oneself and is
set in the plurality of constantly changing Me’s.
Auden’s night bar is thus semanticised as an affective
allegorical space and it becomes, through its existence in
real space, on the one hand ‘another’ time and also it is
‘another’ space. And we can find these elements not only
in Auden’s, but also in Hopper’s bar. Hopper creates in his
work ‘another place’, which on the basis of the ‘subversive’
allegory of the imitative principle semanticises reality in
the form of a unique space in a multitude of disintegrating
realities, as such a space cannot exist otherwise and
elsewhere than just in one given picture.
With the notion of Gebser’s considerations on an
eternally ‘re-presented moment’ in which a ‘transparency
of time’ in space is evident, and with the notion of ‘finite
provinces of meaning’ of particular realities, we could
reflect on Hopper’s painting as ‘pseudo-Baroque’ in
the way Auden creates ‘Baroque’ elements in his poem
mentioned above as well. This could be shown when we
consider the particular self-awareness of Hopper’s paint-
ing in the sense of its own time-space that is re-presented
to the viewer. This self-awareness could be characterized
as a representation of simulacrum, which exists only
through the interaction with the onlooker. The painting is
‘aware’ of its own two-dimensionality, which expands to
the viewer’s time-space, re-presenting its own conception
of time and space.
The particular ‘self-awareness’ of a painting is
considered by Romanian art historian Victor Stoichita in
his book The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern
Meta-Painting.112 Among other things he refers to a specific
problem of the European painting of 16th and 17th centu-
ries that he calls ‘Split Paintings’.
Through considerations of the origins of this type of
painting in the work of Amsterdam artist Pieter Aertsen
(1508–1575) Stoichita examines early works by Diego
Velázquez (1599–1660) called ‘Bodegas’ from 1618 and 1619,
specifically Christ in the House of Martha and Mary and
The Mulatto Girl. Stoichita shows that in the foreground
of these paintings is an illusively simulated scene that
penetrates the space of the viewer in order to ‘expand’
the painting’s reality into the onlooker’s one.113 In this
case a still-life motif with a figure is used to suggest the
everydayness of the scene.
According to Stoichita, this type of painting could
have been used as part of kitchen decorations,114 but this
at first sight elementary interpretation is complicated
by scenes in corners in the background. These represent
biblical narratives with Jesus Christ and, as Stoichita
mentions, even though they enter the viewer’s ‘expanded’
reality through the foreground, they are at the same time
ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES      255
isolated by their framing, which creates the tension of
remoteness.
The viewer, on the basis of the ‘expansion’ of his
own reality, therefore perceives the biblical scenes, which
are, however, considered as ‘split’ paintings — it is not
defined, according to Stoichita, whether in the case of
biblical scenes the moments are contemporary with dis-
play in the foreground, or are pictures within a picture.
As he states: ‘Even if hypothetically this were a window
depicting a scene unfolding in the adjoining room, the scene is
portrayed in such a way that it “becomes an image”’.115 We are
therefore able to realize the ‘separation’ of the ‘reality’ of
the biblical scene and even though we can approach it and
see it, we cannot ‘enter’ it, unlike the scene with a still-life
in the foreground, which is ‘simulated’ as a part of our
‘daily-life’ reality.116
Some similarities could be found to the structure
of ‘Split Paintings’ in Nighthawks.117 In the context of the
‘framing’ of the biblical scene Stoichita refers to a particu-
lar uncertainty, which the painting wants to induce.118 The
problematic of the ‘self-awareness’ of the painting of the
‘real’ space is conceptualized due to its simulation of ‘daily-
life’ reality in the foreground, where in this ‘real’ space the
painting ‘re-presents’ another existing picture, thus the
framed biblical scene. Through this the self-consciousness
of the isolation in the painting is constituted.
In the sense of the particular ‘self-awareness’ in
Hopper’s painting O’Doherty notes: ‘Within a picture,
a window is a kind of inner eye through which the subject can
flow either way, introducing a dialogue that Hopper frequently
replicated by providing numerous vantage points of more dis-
tant observations, leading to such questions as: Who is it that
sees the picture? Or, who is it that the picture itself ‘watches’?119
The simulation of the ‘daily-life’ reality in the fore-
ground is in fact a painter’s tactic to strengthen the notion
of the isolation of the scene in the background. The out-
come for the viewer is that the scene in the background
seems more distant. Hence we could consider Hopper’s
bar as secularized (American) space, which re-presents
the ‘self-awareness’ of isolation.120 In this way another
O’Doherty observation could be linked in: ‘The Nighthawks
inhabit a not unfriendly oasis; many of his people are not
unaware of each other’s sexuality and, as animals, [and as
well as Auden’s protagonists, as we have seen, noted by
T.M.] they seem to be in their proper habitat. A more telling
isolation is of two orders. One is the observer’s distance from
the scene. (Whose eye is watching?) The other is the isolation of
the image from any easily accessible context that would make
it psychologically available. (There is massive abstraction to
Hopper’s realism.)’121
Therefore we could think that, as Auden conceptual-
izes this ‘isolation’ by crossing the inharmonious pairs,
which cannot exist together in the ‘daily-life’ reality, and
through this ‘opens’ the ‘other’ reality, which is, however,
still ‘closed’ in its separation, Hopper treats a similar
problem by ‘splitting’ the visual surface of the painting
and creating the division between the ‘daily-life’ reality
256       ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES
and its ‘other’ reality within as well. Thus the two types of
isolation mentioned by O’Doherty could be viewed as the
disruption between, on the one hand, the viewer’s and, on
the other hand, the painting’s perception of ‘reality’.
This is a substantial change that occurs in Hopper’s
work in the early 1940s, as we can see by comparing
Nighthawks with, for example, Hopper’s early painting
mentioned above, Soir Bleu, which has similar basic
subject matter: a group of people sitting in a restaurant.
We could even realize that the main group also consists of
three men and one woman in the middle of the painting.
However, not only does the treatment of the surroundings
on the basis of other historical evidence change, naturally,
(Nighthawks depicts the world of the 1940s, Soir Bleu of the
1910s), but more importantly for us the whole concept of
the painting is different. Nighthawks ‘encloses’ the reality
of the bar from the viewer, unlike Soir Bleu, which is rep-
resented still in a ‘perspective’ manner as ‘seen-through’,
without the self-awareness of the painting in its openness
and division in and from the time-and-space perception
of the onlooker, as we can observe in Nighthawks.
Therefore, just as in Auden’s poem the space is created
by the visitors to the bar, so is Hopper’s painting created as
a separate (visual) space existing in independently forming
(ever-present) time. Hopper’s bar space with its apparently
veristic likeness of the external world exists in the percep-
tion of the viewer as without problems, but fundamentally
the bar is shut into its own time and space connotations,
which cannot exist ‘outside’ the picture, which is
thematized by the window of the bar. The reality of the
onlooker and the reality of Hopper’s bar coexist alongside
one another, they are mutually connected on their surface,
but by their own duration they exist as ‘finite provinces of
meaning’ with separate cognitive styles of being. Hopper’s
bar may therefore be seen, like the semanticised space of
Auden’s bar, as the subversively allegorical place of modern
man of the first half of the 1940s.
As in Auden’s poem, so also in Hopper’s Nighthawks
this gives rise to ‘another’ world through the connection
to this ‘real’ one. The principle of mimesis-realism ‘falls
outside’ this space, which is formulated on the basis of the
‘re-presenting’ and the uniqueness of the given moment
of the painting. The differentness of the space-and-time
(self ) awareness of the painting comes into being. It does
not matter what happened ‘before’ or ‘after’ the situation
in the picture, as with the creation of ‘another’ place, the
given moment is characterized in its ever-continuing
presentness as in its given time and space. This does away
with the primary intention of the mimesis principle, this
being the portrayal of the visible world in a work of art.
Nighthawks is not a portrayal of reality, but with the aid of
its own time and space it creates its own reality separate
from the viewer’s one.
Hopper’s painting and Auden’s ‘Baroque Eclogue’
thus show the symptoms of their existence outside
‘linear’ time, in which they create their ‘other spaces’. In
both Nighthawks and in The Age of Anxiety the principle of
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
‘heterotopia’ is thus evident, as was considered in 1967 by
Michel Foucault.122
Foucault shows that heterotopia, as space existing
in real space, and nevertheless denying it, is a ‘system of
opening and closing’, which ‘isolates ... and makes them
penetrable at one and the same time.’123 The reality of the
works we research is also enclosed in their construction
of time and space, but at the same time it is still open
basically towards its foundation, meaning the ‘daily-life’
world. The heterotopia of Hopper’s bar is therefore an
open space, which it is possible to ‘enter’ visually, but this
entering requires the ‘making present’ of perception and
the acceptance of the ‘other’ time and thus also the ‘other’
(enclosed) space of the painting.
The aim of heterotopias is also, according to
Foucault, that ‘they perform the task of creating a space of
illusion that reveals how all of real space is more illusory ...
On the other hand, they have the function of forming another
space, another real space, as perfect, meticulous and well-
arranged as ours is disordered, ill-conceived and in a sketchy
state.’124 Hopper’s illusory space also presents our own
world in the same and simultaneously in a subversively
idyllic form. The heterotopia of Hopper’s painting is thus
at first glance an ideal reflection of our reality, both in the
clarity of expression (realism) and the purity of theme
(four people in a bar). But it is nevertheless separate from
it and creates ‘other space’ due to its separation from the
represented reality by the ‘subversive allegories’ of real
time. This creates the differentness of the quasi-same
space by exposing the heterotopia to the principles of
another chronology; in other words, by the construction
of another space in real space in the ever-present moment
of the pseudo-mimetic representation.
The principle of the disruption of the ‘daily-life’
reality and thus the creation of the ‘other space’ and the
‘ever-present moment’ have the effect that in Hopper’s
Nighthawks the realism of the figural aim, considered
as the basis of American painting, is disrupted by the
very basis of verism, meaning in the very tradition of
American painting that was cultivated from the middle of
the 19th century. This disruption and the creation of a dif-
ferent world by a form of ‘daily-life’ reality takes place at
a similar level to that in Auden’s poem, in which for the
disruption of reality its elements are also ‘simulated’.
This aspect of the creation of ‘other spaces’ can be
traced in the part entitled The Seven Stages. In it the charac-
ters begin to realize their own ‘ever-continuing present’ of
time and the artificiality of their ‘other’ space. The group
of visitors in the bar creates an artificial (or even artistic)
reality within the everyday reality, doing so by the joint
creation of ‘another reality’ of the external world, when
they sink into joint sleep and dreams: ‘So it was now as they
sought that state of prehistoric happiness which, by human
beings, can only be imagined in terms of a landscape bearing
a symbolic resemblance to the human body.’125
Malin, Quant, Rosetta and Emble create ‘other
places’ with their ideas, through which they walk as
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
tomáš murár
NIGHTHAWKS IN THE AGE OF ANXIETY
individuals or as pairs. Their methods of travelling
through nature change and alternate and, in spite of their
mutual distance, they are always present in one Nature.
Their journey is the creation of a new space through new
chronology, which flows only on the basis of their con-
struction in the made-present moment of dreaming. They
alternate various means of transport and reach the most
varied places and are incapable of finding a single goal,
because through this their joint formation is an eternal
and continuing time-ness in ‘another’ space.
In Hopper’s painting we also follow, through ‘simula-
tion’, through a certain principle of the simulacrum of the
everyday world, a similar (pseudo-) scene of a night bar.
On the basis of the American art, which until the period
of World War II was mainly figural painting constructed
on the principle of mimesis imitation of the ‘seen’ reality,
Hopper painted the Nighthawks, which undermines the
given basis of American tradition, doing so by the con-
struction of own time and space in the cracks of everyday
reality; but always in the sense of this, because the time
and space of the painting do not deny ‘everydayness’, but
are at the same time outside it. We can thus consider the
subversive newness in the tradition of American painting
in the first half of the 1940s, when Nighthawks, like The
Age of Anxiety, creates an ‘aperspective’ (self ) awareness
of artistically/artificially created time-and-space.
We can thus conclude that Hopper’s painting does
not draw the onlooker’s attention due to displaying the
American man (as it is in the works of the American
Scene) nor due to its record of the inner life of the artist
(as it could be in the case of Abstract Expressionism), but
because Hopper’s painting, like Auden’s poem, disrupts the
‘daily-life’ reality of the viewer and at the same time does
not contradict it: the everyday reality in connection with
Hopper’s painting shatters and opens up new possibilities
of perception. The painting raises its own awareness of
space and time to re-present it outside the everyday reality
of the viewer and at the same time on its basis.
This conception of Nighthawks could alter the
position of Edward Hopper in the history of American
painting. His place in the American Scene seems inap-
propriate, as has been already remarked by O’Doherty, for
example.126 However, it seems there is no other similarity
in the history of American painting to Hopper’s artistic
disruptions of subjectively perceived time and to his
creation of pseudo-mimetic allegorized and secularized
space. This way of understanding Hopper’s painting could
therefore show opportunities to approach his work anew.
Hopper’s position in the (American) history of art could
in this sense be described as a requirement to represent
a new form of ‘other’ reality behind the ‘daily-life’ reality,
due to its fragmentation in time, when its ‘humanitas’
shattered in the war conflict of the mid-1940s and
therefore a need arose to ‘re-define’ the form of man and
his ‘other’ world in the work of art.*
TRANSLATED BY JOANNE DOMIN
ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES      257
notes
1  Gail Levin, Edward Hopper. Catalogue Raisonné, Volume III Oils, New
York 1995, p. 288.
2  Gordon Theisen, Staying Up Much Too Late. Edward Hopper’s
Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the American Psyche, New York 2006.
3  As observed in a recent study by Judith A. Barter, ‘Nighthawks:
Transcending Reality’, in Carol Troyen et al., Edward Hopper, London
2007, pp. 195–209, cit. p. 209: ‘We can look at the hermetically sealed world
of Nighthawks for hours, for a lifetime even, without discovering an obvious
meaning.’
4  Wystan Hugh Auden, The Age of Anxiety. A Baroque Eclogue, New
York 1947.
5  Hopper lived throughout the 1940s in Manhattan in New York in
his studio on Washington Square, as is shown by the diary entries of his
wife Josephine. He lived in his studio from 1913 until his death in 1967.
Auden also lived in Manhattan at the time of writing The Age of Anxiety,
and, apart from several months in Berlin and a visit to England after the
war in 1945, he remained there up to the middle of the 1950s, as recorded
by Charles H. Miller, Auden. An American Friendship, New York 1983, p. 99:
‘From 1945 to 1953, Wystan lived in small apartments, such as a one-roomer
at 155 East Fifth Street, and later in the more sizeable digs on Cornelia Street’.
Washington Square and Cornelia Street in New York are about 5 minutes
walk apart.
6  Recently in 2008 Alexander Nemerov pointed out a possible
connection between Auden’s poem September 1, 1939 and Hopper’s paint-
ing Ground Swell from the same year. This could help us to see potential
resemblance of subject matter as well as in Auden’s The Age of Anxiety
and Hopper’s Nighthawks. Alexander Nemerov, ‘Ground Swell. Edward
Hopper in 1939’, American Art XXII, No. 3 (Fall 2008), pp. 50–71. — See
also, for instance, Katy Aisenberg, Ravishing Images: Ekphrasis in the Poetry
and Prose of William Wordsworth, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin, New York
1995, pp. 29–90. — Edward Mendelson, Later Auden, New York 1999,
pp. 242–274.
7  W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual
Representation, Chicago 1995, p. 83.
8  Ibidem.
9  Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Minneapolis 1988, p. 60.
10  Mitchell (note 7), p. 86.
11  Ibidem, p. 87.
12  Ibidem, p. 89.
13  One of the first authors taking a critical-empirical look at the
problem of the relationship between painting and literature was, in
the second half of the 18th century, the German philosopher and poet
G. E. Lessing (1729–1781), who in 1766 published the now classical work
Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Lessing looks at
the possible similarities, but also especially at the differences between
a poetic work and a painting and points out that, already in ancient
Rome, philosophers and artists were aware of the similar impact of
painting (under this term Lessing includes all visual art) and poetry.
Lessing adds that, in spite of the fact that the effects on the perception of
the viewer may be similar, these are different types of art. He perceives
the main difference in particular in the dissimilar material nature of the
two arts, with the assumption that painting is a manner of expression
restricted to the depiction of a single moment, whereas in poetry
the story also develops in time. Even in the study presented here it is
essential not to forget the difference in the artistic representation of the
258       ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES
painting and the poem, but with knowledge of their ‘cultural experience’
to look at them as different articulations of a possible similar (artistic)
problem. The time relationship of the origin of the works is important
because there is not only a relationship between the representations, but
there is also a relationship of the representations to what is (or should
be) represented. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon. An Essay upon the
Limits of Painting and Poetry, Boston 1887.
14  Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, New York 2007,
pp. 6–12.
15  Ibidem, pp. 3–25.
16  Ibidem, pp. 40–46. See also, for example, Rebecca Zurier et al.,
Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, New York 1995.
17  This is in spite of the fact that Hopper was in Paris at the time
of the formation of the first avant-garde trends; as Hopper himself
mentioned, Brian O’Doherty, American Masters. The Voice and the Myth in
Modern Art: Hopper, Davis, Pollock, De Kooning, Rothko, Rauchenberg, Wyeth,
Cornell, New York 1982, p. 15: ‘I don´t remember having heard of Picasso at
all. I used to go to the cafés at night and sit and watch. I went to the theatre
a little. Paris had no great or immediate impact on me.’
18  Levin (note 14), pp. 84–100. See, for instance, Milton W. Brown,
The Story of the Armory Show, New York 1963.
19  With this reform the American parliament decided to invest
quite considerable sums of money in art with a programme entitled
Public Works of Art Project, later extended to become the Federal Art Project
of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). This state art was mainly wall
paintings in public buildings (post offices, banks, etc.), depicting the
American people in the idealized form of European post-impressionism.
The condition for receiving support was the financial distress of the
applicant artist and the artistic depiction of the ‘American scene’ in
a work with an effort to strengthen the national spirit of Americans.
The selection of artists for public commissions always took place in an
open contest, in which almost every artist could take part. During the
Depression many of them were able to ‘survive’ thanks to this govern-
ment initiative — right up to 1945. On this theme see Wanda M. Corn, The
Great American Thing. Modern Art and National Identity 1915–1935, Berkeley
1999.
20  E.g. see Nicolai Cikovsky, Winslow Homer, New York 1990.
21  See Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist, New York
1980.
22  E.g. see Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting
of the 1930’s, New York 1974. — Nancy Heller and Julia Williams, Painters
of the American Scene, New York 1982.
23  Michael David Zellman (ed.), 300 Years of American Art, New
Jersey 1987, pp. 699–706.
24  Levin (note 1), p. 7. At this point in time America feared various
boycotts on the part of the European immigrants and a considerable
part of the problem was also created by racism turned against the
‘non-American’ (i.e. ‘non-white’) races. This is why Hopper’s paintings,
inhabited by the homely white inhabitants of America, may have
appeared calming and problem-free, because they did not focus on the
transatlantic and African nations as was the case in avant-garde trends,
such as Cubist painting.
25  O’Doherty (note 17), p. 12.
26  David Schapiro and Cecile Schapiro, Abstract Expressionism.
A Critical Record, Cambridge 1990, pp. 5–8.
27  See, for instance, Christor M. Joachimides and Norman
Rosenthal et al., American Art in the 20th Century. Painting and Sculpture
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
1913–1993, Munich 1993. — Lamar Dodd and William D. Paul, American
Painting: the 1940’s, New York 1967.
28  Levin (note 14), p. 348.
29  Ibidem, p. 349.
30  Ibidem, p. 241.
31  Letter from Edward Hopper to D.C. Rich dated 13th May 1942,
D. C. Rich Papers, Art Institute of Chicago Institutional Archives.
32  According to Hopper’s painting, these were sold for a mere five
cents, as they were machine-rolled and not hand-rolled cigars, intended
to compete with the cigarettes popular in America already since the end
of the 19th century.
33  Theisen links all these aspects with important and cult works
of the cultural production of the US from the 1940s up to the beginning
of the 21st century. Central to his considerations is Hopper’s painting
Nighthawks, but although it is the center and title of the entire book, in
fact not much attention is paid to it and Nighthawks serves merely as
a springboard for thoughts about American man, his spiritual life and
American popular culture.
34  Gail Levin, ‘Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks”, Surrealism and the
War’, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies XXII, 1996, No. 2, pp. 180–195,
200.
35  Lloyd Goodrich, Edward Hopper, New York 1976.
36  Levin (note 1), pp. 87, 288–290. — Idem (note 14), p. 350.
37  Ibidem. — Many more interpretations of Hopper’s Nighthawks
exist. These are in general parts of texts devoted to Hopper’s complete
work. To a great extent these interpretations follow on from the type of
explanation indicated by Goodrich and later by Levin. In the forefront of
such texts one therefore finds mainly the time and circumstances of the
origin of the painting, the context of Hopper’s painted works, and often
the painting is explained also with regard to Hopper’s relationship with
films (Hopper went frequently to the cinema and his imaging typology
is frequently compared to film frames and the atmosphere of film noir).
Parallels are also sought between Hopper’s painting and literature, or
with other visual art as a source of inspiration (especially in French
painting and poetry at the end of the 19th century). It is also possible,
however, to view Hopper’s work from other angles. An example may be
the text by Brian O’Doherty cited in this study, or studies by Jean Gillies,
Linda Nochlin, Anne Coffin Hanson, or Pamela Knoob. See O’Doherty
(note 17). — Jean Gillies, ‘The Timeless Space of Edward Hopper’, Art
Journal XXXI, No. 4, Summer 1972, pp. 404–412. — Linda Nochlin,
‘Edward Hopper and the Imagery of Alienation’, Art Journal XLI, No. 2,
Summer 1981, pp. 136–141. — Anne Coffin Hanson, ‘Edward Hopper,
American Meaning and French Craft’, Art Journal XLI, No. 2, Summer
1981, pp. 142–149. — Pamela N. Knoob, ‘States of Being. Edward Hopper
and Symbolist Aesthetics’, American Art XVIII, 2004, No. 3, pp. 52–77. The
study by Jean Gillies from 1972 perhaps comes closest to the problem
tackled in the interpretation presented here, although with a different
starting point and conclusion to the research. Gillies follows on from the
explanations of the ‘alienation’, ‘timelessness’ and ‘silence’ of Hopper’s
work and investigates the spatial solution in Hopper’s paintings on the
basis of perspective, color and light. She points to the ‘unanchoredness’
of the viewer of Hopper’s paintings (in her study, however, she does not
touch directly on Hopper’s painting of Nighthawks).
38  O’Doherty (note 17), p. 23.
39  Aidan Wesley, The Age of Auden. Postwar Poetry and The American
Scene, Princeton 2011, p. 9.
40  Ibidem.
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
tomáš murár
NIGHTHAWKS IN THE AGE OF ANXIETY
41  Ibidem, p. 5.
42  Garrett Izzo, W. H. Auden Encyclopaedia, London 2003, p. 182.
43  For instance, right in the introductory verses of this poem we
read the reflection of Auden’s arrival in a new land, in new impressions
and the longing to return to faith, which may become a starting point
through his own contemplation, Wystan Hugh Auden, Collected Longer
Poems, London 1974, p. 79: ‘Under the familiar weight / Of winter, conscience
and the State, / In loose formations of good cheer, / Love, language, loneliness
and fear, / Towards the habits of next year, / Along the streets the people flow,
/ Singing or sighing as they go: / Exalté, piano, or in doubt, / All our reflections
turn about / A common meditative norm, / Retrenchment, Sacrifice, Reform’.
44  Izzo (note 42), p. 88.
45  For the Time Being is an explicitly religious poem, in which
Auden deals with the question of evil in modern man (and the artist) and
his possibilities of redemption in the contemporary rationalized world
without faith and without God, Auden (note 43), p. 137: ‘Alone, alone, about
a dreadful wood / Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind, / Dreading to find
its Father lest it find / The Goodness it has dreaded is not good: / Alone, alone,
about our dreadful wood’.
46  Izzo (note 42), p. 236.
47  Ibidem, p. 14.
48  In the introduction the individual figures are presented in the
form of prose and subsequently through their internal monologues and
later dialogues in the form of verses they become unsentimental heroes
of the intimate night scene.
49  Wystan Hugh Auden, ‘The Age of Anxiety. A Baroque Eclogue’, in
idem, Collected Poems, New York 1991, pp. 447–536, cit. p. 449.
50  Ibidem.
51  Ibidem, p. 454.
52  Ibidem, p. 459.
53  Ibidem, p. 464.
54  For instance Emble points out that, ibidem, p. 480: ‘I´ve lost the
key to / The garden gate. How green it was there, / How large long ago when
I looked out, / Excited by sand, the sad glitter / Of desert deck, not dreaming
I saw / My future home. It foils my magic: / Right is the ritual but wrong the
time, / The place improper.’
55  Ibidem, p. 481: ‘His last chapter has little to say. / He grows backward
with gradual loss of / Muscular tone and mental quickness: / He lies down; he
looks through the window / Ailing at autumn, asks a sign but / The afternoons
are inert, none come to / Quit his quarrel or quicken the long / Years of yawning
and he yearns only / For total extinction. He is tired out; / His last illusions
have lost patience / With the human enterprise.’
56  Ibidem, p. 489: ‘The railroads like the rivers run for the most part
/ East and west, and from here / On a clear day both coasts are visible / And
the long piers of their ports. / To the south one sees the sawtooth range / Our
nickel and copper come from, / And beyond it the Barrens used for Army /
Manoeuvres; while to the north / A brown blur of buildings marks / Some
sacred or secular town.’
57  As the narrator points out, Rosetta hoped that Malin and Quant
would refuse and Rosetta would be able to remain alone with Emble, but
after she had made her proposal there was no way back for all three of
them.
58  Auden (note 49), p. 515.
59  Ibidem, p. 515: ‘Sob, heavy world, / Sob as you spin / Mantled in
mist, remote from the happy: / The washerwomen have wailed all night, / The
disconsolate clocks are crying together, / And the bells toll and toll’.
60  Ibidem, p. 517.
ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES      259
61  The dancing made all the more apparent to Rosetta and Emble
the already suspected ‘spark’ of mutual sympathy, which increased in
strength when they began to sing together, Ibidem, p. 519: ‘Hushed is the
lake of hawks / Bright with our excitement, / And all the sky of skulls / Glows
with scarlet roses;’. After their dance Emble and Rosetta sat down, kissed
and expressed themselves in an emotional promise that, Ibidem, p. 521:
‘If you blush, I’ll build breakwaters. / When you’re tired, I’ll tidy your table. / If
you cry, I’ll climb crags. / When you’re sick, I’ll sit at your side./ ... When you’re
hurt, I’ll hold your hand. / If you smile, I’ll smelt silver’. Malin with the hint
of a priest addressed their expression of love with an appeal for mutual
need of one another, personally roused by the possibility of such emotion
in a time of terror and fears.
62  Ibidem, p. 531.
63  Ibidem, p. 534.
64  Ibidem.
65  Ibidem, p. 535.
66  On the interpretation of Auden’s characters in The Age of Anxiety
as Jung‘s psychological types passing through the poem see Alan Jacobs,
Introduction, in W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety. A Baroque Eclogue,
Princeton 2011, pp. xix–xxi.
67  Auden (note 49), p. 451. The motif of the double and the motif
of the mirror reflection are present throughout the Auden poem, as
indicated by the figure of Quant, who can be seen as the embodiment of
introspection through his image. His entrance to the poem is staged as
follows. Ibidem, p. 449: ‘Looking up from his drink, Quant caught the familiar
eye of his reflection in the mirror.’
68  Ibidem, p. 452.
69  Ibidem, p. 453.
70  Ibidem, pp. 453–454.
71  Alfred Schütz, ‘On Multiple Realities’, Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research V, No. 4, June 1945 , pp. 533–576. Schütz is
considered to be the founder of sociological phenomenology and worked
in particular with the theories of Edmund Husserl, Max Weber and
Henri Bergson. He was born in Vienna, but in 1939, in the same year as
Auden, he emigrated to the USA, where he lived and worked until the
end of his life. He was considering his study On Multiple Realities from as
early as 1943, and was therefore writing it in the same historical-cultural
environment (the years of World War II in the USA), as that in which
both Nighthawks and The Age of Anxiety were created. This is why greater
attention is paid here to his phenomenology of ‘multiple realities’, for
his phenomenological-psychological explanation turns attention to the
problems of the perception of reality in a work of art, both visual and
verbal.
72  In his study Schütz starts off from the reasoning of the American
sociologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) The Principles of
Psychology, dealing with human awareness of reality, and characterizes
reality with various realities of sense, which exist for themselves and
are therefore separate from one another. Schütz calls these individual
realities of sense ‘finite provinces of meaning’ and he characterizes other
‘realities’ as the basic everyday sphere of life on the basis of various
experiences of perception in everyday life reality.
73  This relates to the explanation of Schütz’s phenomenology of
‘multiple realities’ in the book by Josef Vojvodík and Marie Langerová,
see Josef Vojvodík and Marie Langerová, Patos v českém umění, poezii
a umělecko-estetickém myšlení čtyřicátých let 20. století, [Pathos in Czech art,
poetry and artistic-aesthetic thought in the 1940s], Praha 2014, pp. 96–97.
74  Schütz (note 71), p. 534.
260       ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES
75  Schütz sees the ‘daily-life’ reality as the reality of objects and
experiences, with regard to which one always holds a certain opinion,
for the objects oppose his actions and one is thus forced to modify one’s
further activities on the basis of learnt experiences. In connection with
Henri Bergson, Schütz also draws attention to the innumerable other
differing approaches to reality and its layers, from the extreme of ‘daily-
life’ reality to the extreme of ‘dream’ reality. These various layers are
constituted on the basis of the tension of our awareness towards reality
on the one side and towards the internal world on the other. The basic
concept for Schütz is ‘attention to life’: a man perceiving ‘daily-life’ reality
as the ‘true’ reality is thus ‘wide-awake’ to things in the surrounding
world among which he moves.
76  Auden (note 49), p. 449: ‘Now the day is over / Night is drawing nigh,
/ Shadows of the evening / Steal across the sky.’
77  Ibidem.
78  Ibidem, p. 535.
79  Ibidem, p. 536.
80  The internal time of the characters in Auden’s poem is the time
of the telling of their ‘life stories’. As in psychoanalysis, in which Auden
was interested, it is also the case in these stories of the four heroes of
his ‘eclogue’ of fragments of experienced events, dreams, conscious and
unconscious wishes and desires, conflictive episodes, which together
form their narrative identity. Even before their meeting and their
enclosure in the fragile idyll of the night bar, Auden refers to their
‘escapes’ (or desire to escape) from the reach of the ‘principle of reality’.
But even escapes to the ‘principle of pleasure’ turn out to be illusion. In
The Masque the four of them set out from the bar to Rosetta’s apartment,
where the exhausted Emble quite tritely and outside the ‘principle of
pleasure’ falls asleep, even before Rosetta has accompanied Quant and
Malin to the lift.
81  Auden (note 49), p. 450.
82  The equivalent of dreams in the poem for Quant are for Malin
‘memories’, through which he tries, in an effort to forget the actual
‘Now’, to call up the time and ‘the old atmosphere of laboratory and lecture
hall’, in which he returned ‘with pleasure to his real interest’. Lost reality is
presented as the desired reality becoming the present reality, in spite of
the fact that in experienced time it is already forever lost. It exists only in
Malin’s imaginative awareness. Rosetta projects the illusion of ‘another’
reality with the help of ‘ideas’ from the reading of English detective
stories, through which she escapes from the pressure of reality into the
images of daydreams. Emble’s escape from the sphere of everyday reality
is the imaginations of his own Me, projected into the future, but also of
his own Me, who is a ‘different’ Emble. Emble flees from the reality of
the present, which he sees as unbearable, to the ideas and illusions of the
seemingly more bearable existence of others.
83  Schütz (note 71), p. 555.
84  Theisen (note 2), pp. 21–22.
85  Ibidem, p. 22.
86  Ibidem.
87  Ibidem.
88  Levin (note 14), p. 349.
89  Ibidem, p. 241.
90  Edmund Husserl, Husserliana: Gesamte Werke, X, Den Haag
1950–2003, pp. 376–377.
91  Ibidem, pp. 36, 53.
92  Ibidem, p. 36.
93  Ibidem, p. 41.
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
94  Edward Hopper, ‘Statement by Four Artists’, Reality I, Spring
1953, p. 8.
95  O’Doherty (note 17), pp. 26–27.
96  Schütz (note 71), p. 551.
97  O’Doherty (note 17), pp. 23, 36.
98  Jean Gebser, Ursprung und Gegenwart, Stuttgart 1949–1953. Like
Schütz, Gebser also wrote his work at the beginning of the 1940s, when
both Hopper and Auden created their works. This enables the comparison
of his ideas with theirs, which may indicate the unique war-affected
space of the 1940s, in which Gebser presented his thesis of ‘aperspective’
awareness of the world for the first time in 1936 and 1939.
99   Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, Ohio 1985, p. 2.
100  Ibidem, pp. 11–23.
101  Ibidem, pp. 24–25.
102  Ibidem, p. 25.
103  Ibidem, p. 28. Gebser expressed himself thus about one of the
Picasso landscapes when visiting his studio in the second half of the
1930s. Gebser talks about the missing time-and-space statement of time
in the painting, which fascinated him and showed him his considered
principle of ‘ever-present origin’ in practice.
104  In focusing on the creation of a new time-and-space in the
work of W. H. Auden and E. Hopper one must put aside to some extent
the problem of the ‘Baroque’ as an art theory phenomenon and it is
necessary to concentrate in particular on its principle of the creation
of illusiveness. It is nevertheless impossible to avoid the tackling of this
problem completely, as it is through the concept of this art-historical and
art-theoretical problem and its relationship to Auden’s poem that one can
understand the actual artistic/artificial time aspect, its deepening and the
loss of reality through finding a symbolical expression in fantasy.
105  Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary
Anthropology, London 1993, p. 34.
106  Ibidem, pp. 34–35.
107  Ibidem, p. 35.
108  Ibidem, pp. 36–37. Many authors have devoted attention to the
interpretation of the basis, origin and overlaps of the Baroque outside
the usual art-historical definition. For a deeper understanding of this
problem see, for instance, Jan Bialostocki, ‘Barok: Styl, epoka, postawa’,
in idem, Piéc wiékow mysli o sztuce, Warzsawa 1976, pp. 220–248 or more
recently Helen Hills et al., Rethinking the Baroque, Farnham 2011.
109  Josef Vojvodík, Povrch, skrytost, ambivalence: manýrismus,
baroko a (česká) avantgarda [Surface, concealment, ambivalence: Mannerism,
Baroque and (Czech) Avant-garde], Praha 2008, p. 76.
110  Gebser (note 99), p. 18.
111  In the context of the characters appearing in classical
eclogues an important aspect is the knowledge that their protago-
nists — shepherds — never have the solid position of their identity.
In the same way, in the third part of Auden’s poem the individual
identities of Quant, Malin, Rosetta and Emble vanish and form a newly
conceived idyllic countryside. The figures as protagonists are lost in
the very creation of another space, by the principles of the denial
of natural understanding of the world, in which the creativity of
joint imagination becomes the priority of perception regardless of
the personal preference of the individual. This, too, is characteristic
of the Baroque; Baroque art creates polyphony of impressions and
its purpose was to impact on all the human senses with the aim of
pointing to another dimension of reality besides the ‘sinfulness’ of the
earthly world. See Iser (note 105), pp. 37–38. For interpretation of the
UMĚNÍ  ART       3      LXV       2017
tomáš murár
NIGHTHAWKS IN THE AGE OF ANXIETY
Baroque see also, for example, Gilles Deleuze, The Fold. Leibniz and the
Baroque, Minneapolis 1993.
112  Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early
Modern Meta-Painting, Cambridge 1997.
113  Ibidem, p. 13.
114  Ibidem, p. 4.
115  Ibidem, p. 13.
116  As Stoichita states, ibidem, p. 8: ‘The foreground of the painting is
therefore the ‘pro-fane’ level, insofar as it is a level that precedes, differentiates
itself from, and contrasts with the sacred.’
117  Here it must be noted that I am referring to the tradition of
‘Split Painting’ as it was described by Stoichita, not to a direct correlation
between Hopper and Velázquez, which would require different and more
elaborate examination. I am therefore referring to the problematic of
re-presentation and awareness of the painting and how it could have
been apparent in the ‘cultural experience’ in the 1940s with the notion of
a European phenomenon of painting in the 16th and 17th centuries.
118  Stoichita (note 112), pp. 13–16.
119  O’Doherty (note 17), p. 36.
120  We could also interpret Hopper’s bar as secularized, because
in his ‘other’ part of the painting Hopper does not show an isolation
ČLÁNKY  ARTICLES      261
with the possibility of approaching the unapproachable, as it might be
in Velázquez’s paintings in order to show Christ in a devotional sense;
Hopper rather constitutes the isolation without any opportunity to
transcend it. There exists only separation as a fundamental principle of
the painting.
121  O’Doherty (note 17), p. 27.
122  Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’,
in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture. A Reader in Cultural Theory,
London 1997, pp. 330–336.
123  Ibidem, p. 335.
124  Ibidem.
125  Auden (note 49), p. 484.
126  O’Doherty (note 17), p. 27.
*   This essay is a continuation of my master’s degree thesis work
Nighthawks in The Age of Anxiety. Dílo Edwarda Hoppera čtyřicátých
let 20. století a „barokní ekloga“ Wystana Hugh Audena z perspektivy
intermediality (Nighthawks in The Age of Anxiety. The Work of
Edward Hopper of the 1940s and the ‘Baroque Eclogue’, by Wystan
Hugh Auden from the Perspective of Intermediality, written under the
supervision of Lubomír Konečný at the Charles University in Prague
in 2016.
Copyright of Umeni / Art is the property of Institute of Art History of the Academy of
Sciences of the Czech Republic and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites
or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However,
users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.