Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Nighthawks (1942)

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why the painting "Nighthawks" by Edward Hopper is secretly incredibly fascinating. (Here's a direct link to see the painting: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/111628/nighthawks)Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Quick fun announcement for people who support this show. We are doing a gaming livestream in a couple of weeks. Me and Katie, along with our friends Ella Hubber from Let's Learn Everything and Ellen Weatherford from Just the Zoo of Us, we're all going to get together to play the game Wingspan. Wingspan is a card game and board game and also just fun to watch on the internet. It's all about birds. So I hope you join us that February 1st and it's exclusive to supporters of our show. We activated that in the Maximum Fun Drive last year. If you please

go to MaximumFun.org slash join and support this show you get all sorts of stuff. You also get to come hang out with us on February 1st to talk about birds. So it's gonna be a great time. See you there. Nighthawks. Nor four being a painting. famous for being a diner, painting, spooky, nobody thinks much about it so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Nighthawks is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more

interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie golden Katie Hey, what is your relationship to or opinion of the painting Nighthawks? I don't think this is true I I just googled it because I had this memory of there being a version of it where it's all wiener dogs And apparently I just I've I've imagined that, which... That could exist. There's a lot of parodies.

It should exist. But maybe you also just wish. I think it might just exist. I know that there's the Gary Larson art book where he does a bunch of famous art with wiener dogs. A quick Google does not result in a wiener dog version. So that does seem like a missed opportunity for human society. Your mere mention of Gary Larson made me imagine Night Cows. Of course, this with cows. It just

feels right. Yeah. It's one of those things that is such a cultural touchstone. I assume everyone has parodied it at some point. Yeah. And because I grew up in the Chicago area, I'm one of the like relatively few Americans who saw the actual painting more than parodies right away. Like all my all my formative art experiences happened at a museum called the Art Institute of Chicago and they have Nighthawks. So it's on the wall. Is that the one from Ferris Bueller?

Yeah. John Hughes just stops the movie for about a full minute to show you his favorite paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago. And that's great. I wish it was 100 minutes. I like that. I do like that. We'll have a direct link to just the painting

in the description of the episode. It's in the show links too. But I want to make that as easy for people to see as possible. But it's the one you're thinking of, of four people, one of them an employee in a diner that's kind of isolated and haunting looking in a lot of people's opinion. Kind of have that positive association viewing it as a kid. Like I think the mood is sort of mysterious and a little bit of isolation because there's,. Because there's only four people. There's like one man that's on his own. There's one man seated next to a woman in a red dress. And then there's

the guy at the serving counter. And the street is dark, but the cafe is well lit. And it just has this kind of sense of late at night and that feeling of sort of being alone late at night, but not completely alone. Just the, you know, the rest of the city has gone to sleep. It is a very evocative painting. I can see why it's so famous because it gives you an instant emotion that I think everyone can kind of relate to. Yeah. And especially in the middle of the episode, we'll talk about this vibe a lot because the

vibe is part of why it became world famous. And also this topic was very in demand in the polls, which is great. Thank you especially to J Smooks for a very fun push for Nighthawks as a topic. Support from Josh the Speakman, Mint Bones, XKarax, Cassifras, Court Jester, Mike the Bitter, Jason Stash, Lynette T, DC Prox, ACAB, and others. So a lot of people on Discord excited about it. And it was a hit right away and ways we'll talk about too. To get into that, on every episode, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week that's in a segment called stats and numbers stats and numbers there's a sif about pickled cucumbers you gotta help me on that one because i it's It's a song called Love and Marriage. I've heard a song by Frank Sinatra.

It's the theme tune to Married with Children, the sitcom. See, that's why I don't, I didn't ever watch Married with Children or listen to any Frank Sinatra, nothing. No, I'm joking. But... And that name was submitted by Dangit Bob and also by Young Argonaut Pigeon. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make a Missillian wacky and bad as possible.

Submit through Discord or to sifpotatgmail.com. You know why I didn't get that was Frank Sinatra is you didn't do the Looney Tunes thing of like being sort of shaped like a spaghetti and then like almost passing out on the microphone. Because there used to be this Looney Tunes thing making fun of Frank Sinatra for being anemic. And they would have them just like basically a spaghetti with like a head and then he'd always be nearly passing out. And then sometimes they'd have like a blood donation bag

attached to his arm. It's really mean actually. Looney Tunes used to pull no punches, just really making fun of celebrities. Especially because I feel like now all male celebrities have to be completely jacked, but they were not strong in the past necessarily. And so to pick on Frank Sinatra for not being hugely muscular when skinny, weird Humphrey Bogart is the leading man? I don't know. I don't get it. Yeah.

It's whatever. He was a normal guy. Yeah, Looney Tunes really did. They would just pick any feature of someone and be like, oh, it was a hundred times that. And we made fun of you for that in every one of our cartoons. Yeah, Peter Laurie had one million wrinkles on one face. He had gigantic bug eyes, apparently. And then when I see the actual picture of him, I'm like, oh, he looks like a human being. That's interesting. Yeah, like a less baggy Steve Buscemi.

Like he looks very regular. And speaking of kind of that era, the painting Nighthawks, the very first number is 1942. That's when this was painted. And another quick number that we've kind of covered is four, because there are four people in the frame, one employee seemingly of the diner, and then two men and one woman at the counter, one man sitting by himself, the other man sitting with the woman. And yeah, again, it's linked in the description if you want to see this painting, but it's probably in your head, we stick to paintings that are

in your head for CIF episodes. Yeah, it's mostly green and red. Like it's... And then a bit of yellow is the overall color composition. Yeah, really striking colors. And yeah, and this painting is pretty world famous. In 2014, it topped a poll in the US of 100 American artworks that were candidates to be put on billboards as a public good thing that a billboard company was doing. It was the top one out of 100 artworks from five major museums. Another number is 1984. That's

when a performance artist named Gottfried Helmwein made a new version of Nighthawks where the customers are Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart and James Dean and the diner employee is Elvis Presley. Hostie But not wiener dogs though, huh? James Yeah, that's one of the more famous parodies, like the Kitsch people really liked, and then that also made the original more famous. It's like these mid-century celebrities that are glamorous are the Nighthawks people. Yeah, there's so many versions. There's a Studio Ghibli version where you've got a bunch of Studio Ghibli characters in it, little Totoro's and stuff.

Yeah, there's a Simpsons version. There's so many versions. This makes me feel even more cheated out of a Weiner Dog version. There's so many versions. This makes me feel even more cheated out of a Weiner Dog version. Yeah, there's really too many direct comedic parodies to name. But also, this painting ended up having a serious influence on especially movies. One big number there is 1981. That is when the principal production happened for the movie Blade Runner. And according to director Ridley Scott, quote, I was constantly waving a reproduction of Nighthawks under the noses of the production team to illustrate

the look and mood I was after, end quote. That's very interesting because it does have a extremely stark chiaroscuro, which is like light dark. So you have one half of it is very brightly illuminated because you have the yellow interior of the cafe and then the rest of it is quite dark. So you have this very harsh contrast between artificial light and dark in which, yeah, I mean, that is for sure sort of the feeling of a Blade Runner, especially the kind of like retro futurism, right? Because this feels like a very, it doesn't feel too much like a really old fashioned

painting for some reason. It's got such sort of clean, modern lines and minimalism. It feels quite modern. Yeah. 1942 is pretty long ago and it feels very fresh. I guess kind of like some Looney Tunes I'm thinking of that we were talking about, but also yeah, it doesn't feel dated and it's partly because it's influenced all these things. My challenge for 2025 is to stop bringing up Looney Tunes because I'm afraid the Zoomers

are going to clock me. Oh no. Yeah. because I'm afraid the zoomers are gonna clock me. Oh no, yeah. Well, she likes modern cartoons. She likes SpongeBob. I'm shouting to them for you. To SpongeBob? Uh, don't look up when SpongeBob's friend.

Modern cartoons like SpongeBob. Alex, we have aged. We have aged. I'm like, she likes Felix the Cat and cave paintings. I'm just like going really too far. And also this painting from 1942 was an immediate impact on cinema, in particular a movie in 1946. Hollywood adapted an Ernest Hemingway short story called The Killers into a movie starring Burt Lancaster and Eva Gardner. And the main location of the story is a diner and the movie kind of imitated

a lot of the look and some of the framing from this painting. It makes a lot of sense. It's just a very, it's a very evocative painting because it gets across, I think something that is quite common in sort of noir or in dramatic movies that the combination of isolation but also people kind of coming together in isolation, if that makes sense. Because it's not like these people are completely isolated. There's like, it's a tiny warm oasis in darkness of night where there is some warmth in it, there is some light.

And I think that's what makes it so appealing. It's not just loneliness and isolation, but it's like a theme of that. And you also see, I mean, for me, you have the couple and the man working at the diner, they're closer sort of to this illuminated portion. But then the one man who's kind of seated separately on his own, he's closer kind of to the shadow and dark. So you have both that feeling of isolation and then the feeling of sort of a shared experience in the other portion of it. So I think that kind of makes for a lot of different appealing narrative ideas. I can see that being really

inspirational for filmmakers, for other artists where it has that kind of that conflict. Totally. And yeah, that smash hit painting also just made all of this artist's paintings more influential on cinema. The artist is Edward Hopper. Just have a lot of other Hopper paintings linked. And there's an early one called The House by the Railroad that he made in the 1920s. And it's a painting of just one big Victorian house. And it was the direct design inspiration for the Bates Motel in the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho. Interesting. I'm going to look that up. They've also quoted Psycho's screenwriter Joseph Stefano, who said that if the character

of Norman Bates were a painting, he quote, would be painted by Hopper. So with the help of Nighthawks, Edward Hopper is kind of a favorite painter of movie makers and filmmakers. I can see why, because he has a very dramatic use of color and light and his style is not really impressionistic. What would you call his style? Yeah, he, oddly early in his career, he was really influenced by impressionists. And then he became the leading painter of what's just called realism in the United States. And then

ended up sort of being considered in conflict with new impressionists in America. A lot of people in the mid-century said that Edward Hopper and Jackson Pollock were like the two ends of a spectrum of really realistic or really abstract American painting. I do think that there's a type of realism that isn't about just capturing reality because you're also putting in some emotion or some concepts in it. So it's not necessarily just like, oh, here's a house. I painted the house. It looks exactly like this house. So it's a type of realism where yes, it is realistic and it's maybe capturing something about reality, but the light and the dark and the way he chooses to frame it to me, you know, is inserting a lot of his own style.

In the same way that like photography, right? Like you can have a photographer who captures something realistic, but a lot of interesting photography is about the specific framing, how they choose to use the lighting for their subjects and stuff. So yeah, it's very interesting to me. Yeah, 100%. And yeah, and Edward Hopper was celebrated for doing that in his lifetime. The most amazing number there to me is 1933, the year 1933. That's when the Museum of Modern Art in New York, MoMA, in 1933, they gave Edward Hopper a retrospective exhibition. Whoa. Basically a lifetime achievement of, look at the amazing already career of this definite master artist. He already did an amazing job.

And for reference, when did he start? So like, when did he paint his various paintings? Because it looks like House by the Railroad was 1925. When was Nighthawks? Yeah, Nighthawks was nine years after MoMA gave him essentially a lifetime achievement award. So he was famous across the art world, maybe not the regular world, but he was like considered a master of art long before he got around to painting the one everybody knows now. So he peaked early and then he just kept peeking. The weird thing is he struggled for an extremely long time, then suddenly became very, very famous.

He was not able to quit his day job until age 42 when he had a hit show in 1924. Then nine years later, 1933, he's pretty much getting a lifetime achievement award from MoMA. And then nine years after that, 1942, he paints Nighthawks. He's age 59 when he paints Nighthawks. What was his day job back when he had one? His day job, very relevant and related. He was a commercial illustrator. Okay. Yeah.

So he was still like making stuff, but apparently he despised his work as a commercial illustrator and really just wanted to be a painter. And he, from a very young age all the way to his early 40s, would kind of pack his illustrating work into a couple days of the week so he could paint the rest of the week. And just like- That's right. Work smarter, not harder, buddy. Yeah, it's like work from home, work smarter kind of stuff.

He also lived in a very cruddy apartment up four flights of stairs overlooking Washington Square Park in New York City. I know the last part sounds good, but it was bad at the time. He had a weird little coal stove apartment looking at the park where he just constantly illustrated for money and painted for himself. I'm looking at his illustrations. I mean, to me, they look very nice, but I presume it wasn't that he was frustrated with his technical ability, but rather that he just did not enjoy that style so much. Like he wanted something more creative

than the illustration would allow him. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, and he had supportive but practical parents. The quick lifespan numbers are Edward Hopper lived from 1882 to 1967. Wow. So a long life, but you know, he's almost 60 when he paints Nighthawks. Born

and raised in the Hudson River Valley of New York State, a town called Nyack, he was apparently a very quiet, tall, skinny kid. He was six feet tall by age 12. And he just spent most of his time drawing. And his parents were very encouraging, but also said they wanted to send him to commercial illustration school so he could make money. And his parents were very encouraging, but also said they wanted to send him to commercial illustration school so he could make money. And then he went to art school in parallel to that for himself. Yeah. I mean, I see this picture of him next to his wife that you sent me and it's like either the wife is short or he is tall or both potentially, or they're on an angle. You know what? They are on a little bit of a hill, which I, as someone who is married to a tall man,

whenever he's like, whenever we take a photo and he's like up on a curb, that is a big problem for me because you can't, that's just, that's, that's juice in the stats. That's gilding the lily. It's, it is just, it's adding insult to injury in my opinion. Yeah. And you're not short, Brett's just tall. And so yeah, you got to... No, and I've had friends who think I'm short and then when I'm with them on my own, they're like, oh, I forgot you're taller than average.

You just, yeah, in comparison. So I do feel for his wife in this photo because it looks like he's up a little bit on the hill, making him look quite giant next to her. But yeah, I can see that. He was probably a tall, skinny kid. He looks like he's maybe in his 50s in this photo, late 40s or 50s. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Well, I have a blank that's a picture of Edward Hopper and his wife, Joe Nivison Hopper, who we'll talk about a lot too. And yeah, they married in their 40s as well. He was like a silent tall guy drawing all the time for decades in the run up to eventually

breaking into fine art. To get a date, did he have to like paint a restaurant and then slide it over to her and like point to it and then point to a picture within the restaurant of him next to her on the date. But he like can't help but make the spacing feel lonely so she's like why are we seated at opposite ends of the restaurant in your invitation? This is weird. Like why do I look sad in the invite? This is bad. in the invite. This is bad. Yeah, so Hopper starts our school in 1899 and is not able to quit his illustrator job until 1924. So about a quarter century of

hustle to get there. Yeah. And Hopper also finds excellent mentorship in two ways. One is that his key teacher was an artist named Robert Henri and according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Robert Henri ends up being a very major figure in all of American art. He leads a movement called the Ashcan School that focused on the good and bad of urban places, which you can see as an influence in all of Hopper's work from there. Was it called the Ashcan school because they would paint Ashcans? Almost. They would paint like dirty, ashy New York. I see.

Like underbelly, seamy kind of stuff. And then also, oh, look at this neon and dancers and fun. They would do all of it. Yeah. That's interesting because that also seems very like you mentioned the connection between Hopper's work and how it inspired the, what is it, Blade Runner. And that seems to be with those movies that they can be both very aesthetically pretty. It's also supposed to demonstrate some ugliness, but then it's like, ooh, also pretty lights.

Exactly. Yeah. And yeah, and then the other also urban influence on Hopper is that he saves up enough money from his illustration work to make three long trips to Paris in the first decade of the 1900s. And then he learns and observes all sorts of artistic styles, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Fauvists, all kinds of things, also surrealists. And some people see the lack of a visible door in the Nighthawks' diner as kind of a surrealist touch and kind of a way the people are trapped.

Are you sure he didn't just forget it? You know how things get. You're drawing, you're really in the zone, you're like really focusing on the details like she's got to wear a red dress and there's a guy sitting alone and then before you know it there's a guy sitting alone. And then before you know it, there's no door. It is. It is very me playing The Sims when I first got The Sims. Like, oh, a toilet, right? Sorry. Oh, a door. I forgot. I just wanted to pick your sweater and your funny couch. I'm sorry. Oh, I did that. I did that on purpose.

Okay. Suffer my puppets. Yeah. And the other somewhat surreal touch people point out is that the people in Nighthawks look a little bit like birds. Like their faces and their arms and their angles. There's a slight hawkish thing going on. And so, yeah, some people think his time in Europe especially influenced that. Yeah.

I guess I can see that for one of them. His nose is kind of like a beak, but that's only for the one guy. The other ones look like normal people to me. It's pretty subtle. Yeah. Yeah, it's not human-animal hybrids, I was going to say. Anyway. I'm not an art expert, but I know what I like.

And it's guys with bird noses. He looks like Adrian Brody. Very, very Brody, yeah. It's not extreme or anything. Yeah. And yeah, and that step in Hopper's education in Europe leads to our first takeaway number one. One reason Nighthawks feels so American is that Edward Hopper got bullied for painting a French clown. Oh no. This is quick and about earlier works, but it's important.

Because one of the biggest reasons Nighthawks caught on with the public is that it had perceived Americanness and felt extremely American. And Edward Hopper focused on American paintings when he got bullied for painting French stuff. In particular, a painting he was really proud of where a clown is the main thing. The name of the painting is Soir Bleu. It's from 1914. Soir Bleu. I'm looking at it. I'm not saying the bullies were right, but I don't like this clown. He does not make me happy or joyful. Not a big fan of this clown. I think the painting is fine. There's nothing wrong necessarily with the painting, but yeah, the clown disturbs me. But I'm assuming that people bullied him not because it's a clown, but because they're like, oh, you're just doing some kind of derivative French thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Edward Hopper's timeline lines up with a early 1900s push by Americans where they said so much of art is French. Everything's French. When are we going to get some American paintings? You know? Right.

USA, bald eagle. Like an eagle at a cafe. Yes. Night eagles. A Hummer ordering coffee at night. Hummers get terrible coffee mileage, by the way. Don't try to get a Hummer if you want to efficiently use coffee.

You know, I want to do a version of this painting where it's just Grimace instead of the clown sitting with a cigarette dangling from his purple lips. I like that it's not the clown Ronald McDonald. It is Grimace. No, no, no. No, it's got to be Grimace. Yeah, the key source here is two books that are really helpful with this episode. They're both by an amazing scholar named Gale Levin.

Gale Levin was the first curator of Hopper's paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The books are Edward Hopper, The Art and the Artist, and then also an edited collection of Hopper's prints. In 1915, the reaction to an art show changes Edward Hopper's path and sets him toward Nighthawks. He is a totally unknown artist. He's only ever sold one painting for money and so very far from quitting his illustration job, but he's also been constantly training

and fresh off being in France a lot. And so he presents two of his paintings at a fancy art club in New York City. The main one is a huge painting of a French cafe scene called Soir Bleu, which means blue evening, features a rich variety of French people, including a clown, also a relatively scandalous woman. So it feels extremely French to people. By relatively scandalous, it's just a woman with heavy makeup and you can see her bosoms, the cleavage, but she is wearing a dress. She is not naked. Yeah, to me it's a 1920s dress. So I think in 1915 people were like, whoa, you know, like they couldn't take it. Yeah. And this

is like a group art show and the show says, Hey, Edward Hopper, okay, here's your picture one big painting, you have space for like one other small painting if you want. And so he just rummages through some stuff he's painted and picks a small piece called New York Corner, which he'd done much earlier. It's basically an impressionistic painting of a bar in New York on a corner. That's it. Like there's not a lot to it. And critics savage the French painting and celebrate the New York bar painting that he threw in. Do we have any examples of them savaging the clown painting? It's polite to me. The quotes are not like super fun, but they all just directly in the

same sentence say New York corner's great, Swarbleau stinks. Yeah. The building, it is more impressionistic than the eventual Nighthawks. Yeah, blurry. Yeah. But the overall feeling of the building where it's like this deep red, is it kind of, you know, I can kind of see some of the interesting parallels there, but it's also the light and dark balance is not nearly as dramatic as in Nighthawks. So I can definitely see where he's starting to get there though. Yeah, and apparently one of Hopper's formative takeaways of Paris was seeing the paintings of Vincent van Gogh. There's a passif all about Starry Night, you can hear about him.

But yeah, he really loved how van Gogh used color and also didn't necessarily make stuff blurry. Alex, please, it's Vincent van Gogh. Goffa fafa. And yeah. Goffa. I just did that because I needed to clear my throat to be honest. Vincent van Groch. And yeah, and so Hopper carries like a quiet grudge about this for the entire rest of his

life. He, over the next several years, keeps painting both France and America. Critics only like the American stuff. When he finally mostly paints the US, he starts to take off, but he also rejects the idea that a painting can be American. And he says, quote, the American quality is in a painter. He doesn't have to strive for it. I agree with him. I do too. I think that it's kind of silly that it's like if you paint a scene from France as an

American painter that it's no longer an American perspective. But if you paint a street corner from New York, it's like, now that's American. It's kind of silly. But no clowns, though. To me, going away from painting clowns is always a good idea. Yeah. Apparently some of his favorite French painters were Degas and also Manet. And they both did a lot of paintings of like performing artists in France and also less of a blurry style. And so he's really doing them a little bit. And people were like, stop painting clowns and mimes and stuff. American entertainers are vaudeville and jazz and lumberjacks, you know. I never quite understood the hate that mimes would get, but now I live in a city where

sometimes mimes will just come up to you. They don't do any like performance. They just like offer you a like, they whistle and then offer a handshake. And it's like, I don't what I'm supposed to give you money. What's happening? Which does feel a bit like a shakedown, like they're holding an invisible pistol and asking you for money. I don't really know. So now I know I get it. Now I get it.

Now mimes scare me. I run away when I see one. I'm glad you still have that American core that we all have where we don't like it. have that American core that we all have where we don't like it. Yeah, and my favorite part of this grudge is in 1941, many years after MoMA has celebrated him and he's very famous in art, Hopper forces a gallery that's showing his work to show 11 paintings he made of French subjects way back when, when he was in France. Because he at that point was starting to feel pigeonholed as a guy who just paints American stuff. And then also he wanted to make the point that his French stuff was good after all these decades of success.

Well, like where they're like, yeah, but we still like the American stuff better. Pretty much. Yeah. It didn't, it didn't like suddenly open up him to doing that all the time. And yeah, to the end of his life, he mostly paints just what keeps becoming the new United States stuff. A link one called Western Motel that's considered one of the best late works by Hopper.

It's one woman in a Western US motel that's very that style. Oh yeah, I think I've seen this one before. She's a, I feel like his paintings become smoother and like realistic in a certain way, but also there's a kind of almost cartoony element to it, which is really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And oddly France and Belgium and stuff have a big cartoon tradition, but also the US does. And so, yeah, he and cartoons seem to have influenced each other a bit.

Yeah, that makes sense. And so yeah, he really gets known for this American style. And back to one more number, the number is $3,000 and one painting. That was the purchase price of Nighthawks in 1942. So what's that in modern monies? For one thing, the one painting, the Art Institute of Chicago purchases Nighthawks for $3,000 and also one painting by Hopper that they had paid $1,000 for. So if we plug $4,000 of 1942 money into an inflation calculator, you get about $80,000 of current money, $80,000.

That seems low, because he was already fairly well known by this time. Yeah, and that was the approximate going rate for most Hopper paintings, which means he was both doing very well and also not suddenly financially independent. This was just a very good sale for him and a run of good sales across the 1930s and 1940s. And so yeah, they thought they were buying another very good Edward Hopper. They didn't know they were buying the most famous one necessarily. But yeah, and we'll link the Hopper painting they traded back. It's called Compartment C, Car 293. That's a 1938 painting of one woman in a train car. Hopper is really known for painting either

one person or zero people in a kind of stark situation in a modern situation. And so at this point, people are swapping their hoppers like that for other hoppers like that. It's like hoppers, hopper pogs, or Pokemon cards or something where it's like, I got a single lady in a train. Well, I got a single lady in a hotel room. There's an extremely technical thing with Nighthawks where he tried to use basically a different kind of white paint with zinc in it and then it cracked and he had to swap

it out. But I'm imagining that's shiny, like a shiny Pokemon card. And then the others are not. Yeah. No, it's interesting because I'm looking at the Compartment C car. It still is that theme of like you do get a sense of isolation. There's a certain melancholy to it, but it's not sad. It's not completely, cause she's well-lit, she's reading,

she doesn't look sad or anything, but yeah, just that the sort of there's, cause like if, when you're alone, right? Like it's not, you're not always necessarily sad. It's not always necessarily melancholy, but there is an, it's a, you're not always necessarily sad, it's not always necessarily melancholy, but there is an, it's a specific feeling, right? That isolation feeling that I think he does a really good job of getting across in his paintings.

Exactly. And Nighthawks is sort of distinct from all of the rest of his work for a relatively specific reason, which is takeaway number two. Nighthawks might be a painting about the Pearl Harbor attack and in some ways about the opposite of loneliness. Interesting. It turns out we know like to the day when exactly he worked on this painting and he might have fully taken the first brush stroke of Nighthawks when Pearl Harbor was attacked and proceeded to capture the vibe of the immediate month and a half after the Pearl Harbor attack.

I mean, I can kind of see that. Was he trying to get across the idea of sometimes when there's like a big national trauma, strangers will kind of strike up conversations more with each other, bond more. Like someone walking down the street will be like, hey, you know, how are you doing or something? Kind of what I was saying earlier was you both get this sense of isolation, right? Because it's at night, everything else is closed. Like there's a store opposite of them that's closed, but

the cafe itself is quite brightly lit. You have this small cluster of people interacting. To me, there's both of them kind of happening, both the feeling of isolation, but also like that oasis of sort of warmth within that kind of isolation. Totally. And, yeah, I'm excited to link so many other Hopper paintings because when you see it in the context of his other work, it's less lonely. He tends to put people totally on their own. And one reason we also think this might be about people kind of coming together is that

he just did people actually alone so often. So for a Hopper painting, like four people together is kind of a crowd. It's kind of a party. So you can also see some things in the painting, like the woman's hand is really close to the man's hand. They're not holding hands, but like she's leaning forward on her elbows on the table, the man's kind of leaning forward as well. And so their hands, they're not actually touching because hers is in the background,

his is in the foreground, but physically speaking, they are actually overlapping. The table, like it's not people sitting in sort of separate tables, it's one of those long round bars, right? So they're all sitting at the same bar, even if they're kind of sitting, like two of them are sitting apart from the one who's on the other end, he's still on the same structure as they are. Yeah. I would say that the guy who is sitting on

his own does get across a little bit of loneliness to me because he's mostly in shadow. He's not looking up. It looks like he's kind of looking down. The other three do seem more like they're engaged in sort of an active conversation. I see all that. Yeah. And it seems like people did at the time too. Because yeah, this painting, it becomes nationally famous within the year 1942. It goes up on the wall in the Art Institute in October. It also wins a special prize of theirs. They also do an entire exhibition of 21 Edward Hopper paintings and announced that no living American artist has ever gotten this tribute.

And then the painting gets requests for loans from everywhere. And apparently it got loaned out so many times in its first 11 years that they had to do a bunch of restoration work on it because it got like beat up in transit. Oh, no. Packing peanuts, guys. Maybe they didn't have this back then. peanuts guys. Maybe they didn't have those back then. Yeah. So it was like massively culturally important immediately. And part of it might be that it came about in a difficult time. The key source for this idea, it's an amazing piece by Sarah Kelly Oler. She's the Field McCormick Chair and Curator of American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. And the other source is the journals of Joe Nivison Hopper, his wife, because she kept

pretty detailed notes about what Edward Hopper worked on. And we know from her notes the exact date he finished it. He finished the painting January 21st, 1942. Okay. So that was like a, how long after Pearl Harbor was that? It was 45 days after Pearl Harbor. And Joe also said in a letter to a friend that Edward worked on Nighthawks for a month and a half. Yeah. And a month and a half is like 45 days. Like, we don't exactly precisely know that he started

painting December 7th, 1941, but that's the date of the Pearl Harbor attack. And either way, he did pretty much all of this as the United States reacted to that and super knew they were immediately at war on several continents. Yeah. So even if he started it like before, it would still have been potentially influenced by that event. Exactly. And in particular, how New York City took it. Because again, Edward Hopper, he

lives in a horrible apartment in the Washington Square Park and Greenwich Village area of Manhattan. Oh, he's still in that horrible apartment when he paints this. Even after Joe marries him, he convinces her to move into his horrible apartment and they're both stuffed in there. I can't overstate what a hole in the wall in New York City he lived in. They also spent summers on Cape Anne in Massachusetts, but otherwise they were just in a terrible apartment that is now luxurious because of its location. But it was like a bad place with like a weird coal stove that he had to lug coal up for flights to fuel and stuff.

Why didn't he, did he, was he just not well off enough at this point to move or was it sort of stubbornness? Mostly stubbornness. He wasn't well off enough until his late forties and then he was just stubborn and Joe was on board. So, yeah. On board with the terrible apartment. And so he also liked to walk.

He's one of these, I find it relatable being a tall dude who likes to walk. He liked to just stroll the city. So when he walked around New York City immediately after Pearl Harbor starts doing blackout drills and also starts changing public lights to dimmer settings. The not really necessary idea was that it would make it harder for Nazi air or sea forces to bomb New York City. They didn't really try. But what happens is suddenly New York is like dimmer, sadder, more tense. And then also when you can gather with people in a lit place that feels great. Yeah. Yeah. And so that is kind of the hidden

thing going on in the painting and possibly makes it actually a lot more hopeful and more connected than it feels. You know what I was going to say is like this kind of makes me think of in terms of our big events, the pandemic, where it's like there's both the sort of the isolation, but then the warmth you feel when you can connect to people despite the fact that you're kind of forced to isolate. And Sarah Kelly Oehler wrote this piece about it in March of 2020 making that specific connection. Wow. Oh, wow. Okay. Hey, I'm gonna look at me over here. I'm a lot expert. Look at me. I'm analyzing art over here. Yeah, like that and maybe 9-11. Those are kind of similar events where people, when you can just see some other people, you're like, thank God, let's like be human and feel

better about all this. Yeah. No, exactly. And the other reason we think that maybe this painting is not about loneliness is that Hopper said it's not. Oh, well, that's a pretty big hint. He could be wrong. He could be wrong about his own art. Yeah. And there's an interesting thing where a lot of, especially blogs, will mislead you because they only take a piece of a quote he said.

The piece they'll take is that he said, unconsciously probably I was painting the loneliness of a large city. But the actual full quote says the opposite. The full quote is, Nighthawk seems to be the way I think of a night street. I didn't see it as particularly lonely. I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger. Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city. So he at least partly meant it to be the opposite of loneliness. Yeah. I mean, I think that at least to me, that's how I, it is that sort of contradiction is there really strongly where it's not, it doesn't make me feel sad or lonely looking at it.

It is that kind of like, you know, that, that light in the dark where it's like, it's not cozy though. It's definitely, it's not like a painting of a cozy fire tavern scene. It doesn't completely fill you with warmth like that. It actually kind of gives me the same feeling of say, we talked about that in a different episode, the, the picture of earth like in space, where it's like you have earth,

that full image of earth in this sort of black void. And it's both kind of lonely feeling, but also really awe inspiring because it's like, well, but there's this big, bright, beautiful orb. It's not full on cozy warmth. It's something more subtle in my opinion. I agree. I really like the way you put that.

It seems like Hopper more than anything was just absorbing New York City in the month and a half after Pearl Harbor rather than trying to execute a specific vibe. In another quote about all his work, he said, quote, the loneliness thing is overdone, as in people are reading that into his work more than they should. And my favorite quote about his intentions is another one. He says, just to paint a representation or design is not hard, but to express a thought in painting is. Thought is fluid.

What you put on canvas is concrete and it tends to direct the thought. The more you put on canvas, the and it tends to direct the thought. The more you put on canvas, the more you lose control of the thought. I've never been able to paint what I set out to paint." I totally feel that because sometimes I start trying to paint a horse and then it turns out into a brown blob, I get that. I get that. We're on the same wavelength, me and this most famous American painter. It totally changes the meaning of the painting to see it as just he's a vessel for how stuff

felt. Yeah, I like that too. He seems like a cool guy. I like what he says about his artwork. He seems very level-headed. Yeah, I'm gonna rug pull that a little bit in the rest of the show. I'm sorry. Who did he murder? Did he murder a clown for humiliating him? Let's profit off of listeners and say it's true crime. Yes, it's coming, but it's not, that's not what's happening. We did a ton of numbers and two takeaways.

We are going to take a quick break and then find a whole new layer of meaning in this iconic painting. The Flophouse is a podcast where we watch a bad movie and then we talk about it. Robert Shaw in Jaws and they're trying to figure out how to get rid of the ghoulies and he scratches his nails and goes, I'll get you a ghoulie. He's just standing above the toilet with a harpoon. No, I'm just looking forward to you going through the other ways in which Wild Wild West is historically inaccurate. You know how much movies cost nowadays when you add in your popcorn and your bagel bites

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Monday on Maximum Fun. Folks, we're back and the whole rest of the main show is a mega takeaway number three. Edward Hopper's wife, Jo Nivison, is the model for the woman in Nighthawks, and she's the whole reason we have Edward Hopper paintings. Whoa. He would not be a known fine artist at all without his amazing wife, Jo Nivison Hopper paintings. Whoa. Like he would not be a known fine artist at all without his amazing wife, Jo Nivison Hopper. Was she ratatouille-ing him? So it's not that, it's that he was excellent at painting.

I like how you breezed right past me just saying, was she ratatouille-ing him, as if this small woman was like up on his hair pulling his strands of hair to somehow control his movements. But yes, continue. I think it's because of how you described pro bird rights sometimes and also just how much I like that movie. I really treat ratatouille as a very common and possible thing.

It's a verb now. In everything, everywhere, all at once, there's a raccoon doing it. Yeah, it's just part of life. There's a raccoon puny or something? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So sorry, do please continue because I'm very curious about this. So she was, she basically helped make his career sounds like what you're saying.

That was so insightful earlier when you said that Edward Hopper's quotes about how artworks are really insightful. He was a very talented artist and he had good ideas about how to make art, and she's the only reason he was able to be an artist across several dimensions. So is she kind of the communicator behind the artist? That's one of the dimensions, yeah. And she also made big sacrifices, including her painting career. Oh, interesting.

Before they got together, she was arguably more successful as a painter. Oh, wow. He's still an excellent painter. He's still the guy who painted Nighthawks, but she kind of gave some things up. That's, man, I wish we could have it all, right? Why couldn't she help him but also be a great painter? I guess it was the early 1900s. Yeah, sexism in the community was part of it.

Yeah. Right. And there's a ton of sources here, including Gail Levin's books, also writing she did for the Brooklyn Rail Art Magazine. Also another book that's just called Edward Hopper that's put out by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and a writer named Judith A. Barter, who's another Art Institute of Chicago curator did great work in that. Other sources include a Smithsonian Magazine piece by Molly Anking and an amazing piece for the Paris Review by Sarah McCall. Edward Hopper, he really was good

at art and painted his own paintings. But we mentioned when he went to art school, he had this amazing mentor named Robert Henri. There were several other art students including Jo Nivison. Oh, wow. She was an excellent artist and sort of a star student. And there's also an amazing portrait of her by Robert Henry from 1906, where she stands proudly, she holds her brushes. It's definitely a portrait of an artist, not just some lady. So they probably had a meet-cute where like they were both trying to wash their brushes, and then one of them got like watery paint on the other's hands. Like, oh no, let me clean that. And then they bonked their heads together. They fall over

and it's a tangle of limbs and brushes and linseed oil. Well, that was a great pull of an art supply at the end, that really got me. Yeah, and the thing is, Joe Nivison and Edward Hopper met many times without hitting it off. And the main reason is that Edward Hopper's weird. He was tall, stiff, introverted, and all their contemporaries described Joe as a short and vivacious person. My favorite adjective I came across in a source is somebody called her bird-like, which is very nighthawks, you know? It's fun.

Yeah. But she was like good at being fun and talking to people. They spend art school together, don't hit it off. They spend a summer as a couple of people in the same boarding house in a town in Maine, still don't hit it off. Apparently Jo once said, quote, sometimes talking with Eddie is just like dropping a stone in a well, except that it doesn't thump when it hits bottom.

Oh my God, burned. Oh my God. To be roasted this thoroughly by your future wife. Good, good gracious. She has a way with words. So I'm starting to suspect that maybe she's the one who might have written all these pretty wonderful quotes about art. Apparently, Edward Hopper was the kind of guy who would be super silent for super long periods of time and then say one interesting thing. This is kind of a tricky thing to balance the description of because he's definitely an actual artist and thinker and interesting person, but he also is, to my mind, too weird to have made it in the art world without her and then also other sacrifices she made. I mean, it sounds like he's very talented, but he would not have been able to maybe self edit or market himself, which sounds gross.

Like, oh, you should just, if you're a great artist, you should just be recognized for it. But that's not, that's just not reality. Exactly. Because part of the challenge of professional fine artists to like hit it off at the right cocktail parties, which is, should not be part of it, but is, and Joe could do that for him. And among other things, she sold Nighthawks to the Art Institute.

Wow. So she's really making it happen. When they finally get together, it is yet another long protracted period of time together. In the summer of 1923, they both are totally separate people who went to art school together. They happened to go to the same artist's colony in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which is on Cape Anne, that's sort of northern Massachusetts. And in that confined setting, some way or another they connect, it might have helped that they were both in their 40s.

They're within a year of age. So by the end of the summer, they've struck up a romantic relationship. The following summer they get married. And in between, the Brooklyn Museum wants to show a set of paintings by Joe Nivison, the relatively popular artist. And she talks them into showing a few Edward Hopper paintings. Wow. Why was she so motivated, I guess, to kind of focus on his career rather than hers?

Do you think that was just because of the times or because she saw something in him where she really wanted to, she felt like he could reach some sort of greatness that she felt like either because of her gender or just because of her style of art that she could not reach? It's all of the above. And she also continued to try to make it as a painter and just the market and the art scene didn't get into her work.

And also after they got together, they started spreading rumors that she was riding his coattails. Oh, for goodness sakes. That's just- Even though it was completely the opposite starting out. Yeah, like she kept painting. Maybe she could ride his coattails literally because he's really tall and she's really

short but other than just literally, like no, come on. Yeah. I mean, that's so frustrating. Yeah. Like apparently in the 1920 directory of New York City, she listed her profession as artist because she was that committed and going at it. And Edward Hopper listed his profession as illustrator because he felt like he wasn't in the scene yet. Luckily for Hopper, winter of 1923, the Brooklyn Museum buys one of the paintings that Joan Nivison

convinced them to show. It's a painting called The Mansard Roof. It's a painting of a house from that summer in Massachusetts. I don't find it particularly remarkable. That is only the second time Edward Hopper has sold a painting for meaningful money. But thanks partly to his gender, it becomes a springboard for him to finally break into the fine art world. And the following winter, he puts up a 1924 gallery show that sells so many paintings,

he can quit his illustrator job in his 40s and start painting more. I'm looking at some of Joe Nivison's artwork and it's incredibly good. It's interesting because her style is not so terribly different from his. And it makes sense. They went to the same art school. They were mentored by the same artist that they would have some similarities. But she has a very incredible grasp of light and dark. I'm sure if it had been a different era, maybe they would have been the world's first art power couple. Yeah, I feel like the only example is Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, but they did pretty

different stuff. That was still tumultuous and hard. They should have both gotten this chance. It's not that Joe Neveson said, Hopper has something special, we need to both go all in on him. They just both kept painting and the world was a jerk to her. Yeah, that's really too bad.

I mean, I hope that she felt some satisfaction and that she was contributing to his rise. And I hope that he gave her like a lot of positive attention. He treated her well. She felt a little bit of satisfaction and he was a jerk. No! I'm sorry. I said it'd be a rug pull, I'm sorry.

Damn it. Oh man. Cause when they get married, she voluntarily moves into his horrible apartment cause they both have the same priorities of let's live on the cheap Let's obsess about painting. Let's also agree that we're gonna make paintings instead of having kids he initially felt that way but then resents her and also

Her why? Because he ends up just feeling like he should have kids on top of everything else. Okay, but... Even though they agreed before. Man, that's so frustrating. Yeah, yeah. Also, like they got married at 40, which, you know, it's not that you can't have kids in your 40s, but there's not a lot of time at that point.

Yeah. Especially back then. Yeah, they don't have the technology that we have now too. And yeah. Yeah. And Jo does keep painting, but then Hopper resents her for not spending more time cooking or taking care of him. For goodness sakes.

She also keeps his social schedule and keeps him from being distracted by too many visitors. She serves as the female model for every painting. That was partly her concern that he would romance a model. Because a lot of his works involve nude women. And she just said, I'll do it, because then... Great. Smart woman. And there's sketches of the woman in Nighthawks looking more like her and then kind of shifting as the painting goes on.

But it's still her. And then in 1942, she drags him to a museum exhibition where he's just being silent and weird, but she talks up several museum directors and finds one who says, oh yeah, I know the name Edward Hopper from a painting he made called Gas, which we'll link where it's just one guy at a gas station. And she says, if you like that, you got to see this new painting Nighthawks. And then he goes and buys it and also hurries to buy it because he knows Joe Hopper spread the word so well. He needs to hurry.

Yeah. That helps close the deal. And she did that for most of his paintings, like did the legwork of making anybody care. Yeah. Man. And there's no evidence that he really recognized that about her or like, was he just kind of, was it sort of a mixture where maybe he recognized some of that, but he was also sort of had the same kind of like, ah, but why didn't you also simultaneously give me a bunch of kids even though we'd never discussed that? He was resentful. He was inattentive.

Historians have found mean sketches he made of her. Apparently they were both violent with each other. Oh, geez. Yeah. And then for their 25th anniversary, she joked that they should get like combat medals for dealing with each other. And then he made like a joke medal, but acknowledging it, that he drew it. Yeah. And she ends up spending most of her time handling his appointments and also rousing him out of creative funks. He was a very slow moving and painstaking producer of art, but he made more than 800 works in his lifetime, really entirely because Joe made his career professionally possible and roused him to keep going.

Right, right. Yeah, I know that there's this sort of stereotype of artists being really moody and not great communicators necessarily. I don't think that has to be the case though. I think a lot of that is just like maybe kind of the lack of therapy being normal back in this time period. Yeah, tremendous lack of emotional intelligence across all American history. As a somewhat creative person who has been to a lot of therapy, I can claim that therapy

does make you a really good communicator and you don't necessarily lose your creativity. Exactly. You can just be happy and work. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, and then kind of the final blow for Joe's art career is that Edward Hopper dies in 1967. She dies less than a year later. Well, yeah, dying will be a blow to your art career. Her skeleton should have kept painting. No. For one thing, Joe kept detailed notes of all of his work as soon as they were married.

So that's been a treasure trove for art historians. But the other thing is she ended up possessing everything the two of them had not sold. So like mostly just Edward Hopper paintings had been sold, but she takes this entire artistic estate of paintings and drawings and notes, donates it to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, which is still a big deal. It was a gift of more than 3000 things, by quantity the largest gift in the history of the Whitney Museum. And what the Whitney Museum does is says, we love this Edward Hopper stuff.

And then we're going to keep three Joe Hopper paintings out of many hundreds. And then according to Gail Levin, they quote, trashed the rest. Oh my God. Procuring no documentary photographs and leaving only a list of titles. That's so unnecessary. Why wouldn't you just give those away or sell them or something? I don't know. That just seems mean.

They did try one sort of, I think of it as a buy nothing group online. They tried that once before they threw them away. And so when you Google Joe Hopper's paintings, you found stuff for two reasons. One is that people have gradually found Joe Hopper paintings in like office building lobbies and hospital waiting rooms in New York City where institutions said, we have a bare wall, we'll take a free painting. Sure. And then it turns out to be by Joan Iveson Hopper. And then the other thing is that the Hoppers did keep a home in Cape Anne in Massachusetts.

And for one reason or another, all the paintings in it just didn't get sent to the Whitney. And so years later, people found a huge collection of dozens of Edward and Joe Hopper paintings and sketches in the house. And those are now at the Provincetown, Massachusetts Art Museum. So there is like, through luck, a Joe Hopper art collection that you can see. Yeah That's so frustrating. I hate that Just seems so unfair for a life where she sacrificed so much her husband. Maybe not the most appreciative Person on the world in the foot and on the planet

And then she's like, oh, here's this fantastic donation. It's like, great lady, we're going to throw out all of yours and keep the rest. Yeah. And then this museum has kind of reckoned with it as much as they can. Like Gail Levin was their curator and made a point of publicizing it, or the curator afterward, I mean. Right. Basically, Jo Hopper has given us her paintings and also Edward Hopper being a fine artist instead of like an angry old illustrator in a hole in the wall apartment wondering why nobody talks about his paintings because he's an introvert. Did they ever move out of that apartment?

They kept it and had a nice summer house. It's like, it makes both of them weird, the apartment. Like it's mainly him, but yeah. Maybe they're like living space masochists. That's like a kink of theirs. It's just like, oh man, the radiator's not working. That really makes me focus on that and not the problems in our marriage. Yeah, apparently they spent lavishly on movie tickets and books and otherwise cheap apartment, wore clothes till they worn out, drove cars till they fell apart.

Like they were incredibly thrifty except for culture was their deal. I mean, that's fair enough, I guess. If only they had spent a little more money on therapy. Or yeah, or like somebody invents some of it sooner would have been good. But yeah, I know that Last Takeaway has darkness to it and I also, it makes me really happy that the one Hopper painting people know, a lady based on Joe Hopper might be the most prominent figure, you know? She is world famous in that sense and also brought us the joy of his work, even if she deserved better. Yeah. Yeah. I hope that she had some moments of smug satisfaction knowing that this is

all because of her, baby. Yeah. Yeah. When they married, he had sold two paintings ever. And then he goes on to be the Dean of Realistic Art, end up there with Jackson Pollock and mid-century American art and one of the only paintings famous enough to be a Cif is Nighthawks. KS I hope she called him in arguments like, Mr. Only Sold Two Paintings Before We like, I can update the nickname pretty easily pal. Stay on your toes. Hey folks, that's the main episode for this week.

Welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, one reason Nighthawks feels so American is that Edward Hopper got bullied for painting a French clown. Takeaway number two, Nighthawks was painted in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack and might be about the opposite of loneliness. Mega takeaway number three, Edward Hopper's wife Jo Nivison is the model for the woman in Nighthawks and the entire reason we have Edward Hopper paintings.

And then so many numbers and stats in this, really two entire timelines of this painting and also the artist pretty much did his biography and then lots more numbers about the massive cultural and cinematic impact of Nighthawks and more. Those are the takeaways. Also I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode.

This week's bonus topic is the hunt for a real New York City location of Nighthawks. If you want to eat at a place that might be the Nighthawks diner in the past, you can do that. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 19 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org.

Key sources this week include a lot of wonderful art books, especially Edward Hopper, The Art and the Artist, that is by Gail Levin, who was the first curator of Hopper's work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Gail Levin also edited a collection of his prints that I relied on. And then there's a book just called Edward Hopper, put out by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The most helpful writer there is Judith A. Barter, who's a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Also highly recommend Digital Resources by Sarah Kelly Oehler, the Field McCormick Chair and Curator of American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. And along with a lot of digital resources, I'm especially excited to link pictures of other Edward Hopper paintings, especially a work called Chop Suey from 1929, a work called Early Sunday Morning from 1930,

a piece called New York Movie from 1939, and a work called Gas from 1940. I think that set of paintings is a really good evocation of what Hopper does with loneliness in a city and how that's distinct from Nighthawks. We'll also link Sois Bleu from 1914, his painting of a clown. New York Corner from 1913, which weirdly got the public's attention. His first sold painting called Sailing, his second sold painting called The Mansard Roof. The painting House by the Railroad is the basis of the house in the movie Psycho. The painting Compartment C, Cartoon 93, is a painting that was traded as part of the

purchase price for Nighthawks. I also love the portrait of Joe Nivison, painted by the artist Robert Henry in 1906. That Joe Nivison portrait is in an amazing piece for the Paris Review by Sarah McCall, which has a really wonderful emotional valence for the story of both of the Hoppers. On top of all that, that page features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoat people, and others. Also KD taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location,

in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIFT Discord where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 117, that's about the topic of raccoons. Fun fact there, raccoons appear to wash things in water.

What they're actually doing is using the water to moisten up their paws and make their paws more sensitive to textures. So, I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Goldin's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the BUDOS band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand.

Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to The Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.