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“What I see in Hopper is a sort-of sense of everyman. That any of us could be sitting in this diner. It’s really the idea of, We are individuals, but we have a collective consciousness, as well. I think people just relate to the everydayness of it. They can put themselves in these pictures.” — Judith Barter on Edward Hopper

Shuttered museums around the world are sharing their collections with the world in unique ways, giving us an opportunity to learn more about them, or to visit a favorite masterpiece. At the Art Institute of Chicago, they’ve launched a series of short videos called their Art Institute Essentials Tour. In this video we hear from the now-retired Judith Barter, former Field-McCormick Chair and Curator of American Art, speaking on Edward Hopper’s iconic masterpiece, Nighthawks (1942). The audio was originally published in 2016. During the COVID-19 quarantine, many of us are feeling a particular affinity for this picture, and it is reassuring to hear it described as less about loneliness (perhaps) and more about collective experience.

From Art Institute Chicago:

Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by “a restaurant on New York’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet,” but the image—with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative—has a timeless, universal quality that transcends its particular locale. One of the best-known images of twentieth-century art, the painting depicts an all-night diner in which three customers, all lost in their own thoughts, have congregated. […] Hopper denied that he purposefully infused this or any other of his paintings with symbols of human isolation and urban emptiness, but he acknowledged that in Nighthawks “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”