An anxious America, 1930s to 1940s
This room brings together American paintings made between the Great Depression and the Second World War, a period when several artists moved away from the optimism of American Scene painting toward a darker, at times almost hallucinatory, view of urban loneliness and the passage of time.
1. A blackout turned into a painting
Nighthawks, finished by Edward Hopper on 21 January 1942, shows three late customers in a neon-lit diner at the corner of two empty streets. Hopper said he was inspired by a real restaurant on Greenwich Avenue in New York, but the painting's atmosphere owes much to the months following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941: Hopper, struck at the time by blackout drills and the near-total darkness settling over the city's streets at night, carried that unusual darkness into the composition.
The red-haired woman in the painting was modeled by Josephine Nivison Hopper, the painter's wife and a painter herself, who kept a shared journal with him recording the progress of each canvas — which is how the exact completion date of the painting is known. The Art Institute of Chicago bought Nighthawks on 13 May 1942, for $3,000.
2. A pitiless mirror on the passage of time
Hung in the same room, Ivan Albright's Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida, painted between 1929 and 1930, shows an aging woman facing her mirror, rendered with an almost unbearable attention to detail: every wrinkle, every age spot painted with the same clinical care. Where Hopper offers silent solitude, Albright chooses excess and accumulation to evoke the same subject — time wearing down bodies and lives.
How much time
Two very different visions of mid-century American unease, worth looking at one after the other.
- Nighthawks (Hopper) — 10 minutes.
- Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida (Albright) — 8 minutes.
Sources and verification
Checked against the official notices of the Art Institute of Chicago (artic.edu) and cross-checked with Wikipedia EN/FR.
- Art Institute of Chicago — Gallery 262
- Art Institute of Chicago — Acquiring Nighthawks
- Art Institute of Chicago — Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida
- WTTW Chicago — Edward Hopper's Iconic 'Nighthawks'
Displays and room openings can change. Check the Art Institute of Chicago website on the day of your visit before following a route.
Listen to the commentary in the gallery
This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.
