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    The flickering ray of hope in the stark loneliness of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks

    The American artist Edward Hopper (1882–1967) was part of the realist movement, and his oil paintings depict isolation, modernity and everyday life in the US. Nighthawks (1942), likely his best-known work, portrays a nighttime scene of customers sitting in a near-empty Manhattan diner. In this video essay, Evan Puschak (also known as The Nerdwriter) explores the themes of voyeurism, vulnerability and alienation that pervade Hopper’s work, and considers whether Nighthawks’ historical context might lend it a surprising air of optimism.

    Video by The Nerdwriter

    13 September 2016
    A split image showing a woman in a green room with a gramophone, next to an artwork of a man sitting in a sunlit room.

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    Edward Hopper came of age with cinema. As an artist, he left a lasting mark on it

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    Painting of a woman in a pink dress lying in a field of tall grass, gazing at distant buildings under a grey sky.

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    ‘I built the ground thinking of her’: the story of Andrew Wyeth’s ‘Christina’s World’

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    Ugly on purpose: the intentionally drab desperation of Van Gogh’s ‘The Night Café’

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    How Rembrandt used light and motion to make a mundane commission a masterpiece

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    When is art a better tool for understanding mental illness than science?

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    The female Abstract Expressionists of New York shook the world of art

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    Can art in a swanky restaurant ever be transcendent? On Rothko’s Seagram Murals

    15 minutes

    Black and white photo of a mountainous landscape with dramatic clouds, snowy peaks, a rocky foreground, and a calm lake.

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    What can Ansel Adams’s enduring photography teach us in the age of Instagram?

    6 minutes

    Painting of two clothed men and a naked woman picnicking in a forest, with another woman in the background near a pond.

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    Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist

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