New Objectivity - 926

Narrator (m):

The city at night is also a common motif in the works of the American artist Edward Hopper from the late 1920s and early 1930s. In Night Windows of 1928, he shows the modern city as a city of voyeurism and thus sheds light on the contradiction between access to the intimate lives of strangers and simultaneous loneliness and isolation.

Narrator (f):

The composition of three windows creates a dramatic juxtaposition of lighted interior and dark night. Whereas in many paintings of New Objectivity the view is from the inside outward, Hopper reverses that perspective and creates an interplay of showing and hiding. The work also has a cinematic quality; as in the cinema, there is a sense of fleeting excerpts that resemble still photographs, leaving lots of room to imagine a story.