Painting the Loneliness  

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Painting The Loneliness

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Painting the Loneliness

01/06/2010

BBC Radio 4 Extra - Painting The Loneliness

An exploration of Edward Hopper's famous painting of a lonely bar in night-time New York.

Adam Gopnik explores the imaginative impact of Nighthawks, American artist Edward Hopper's 1942 painting of a diner. From 2010.

It's a dark night in Greenwich Village, New York. In Edward Hopper's 1942 painting Nighthawks, a couple, a solitary customer and the bartender seem adrift in the darkness around them. 

Adam Gopnik, writer on the New Yorker, walks the streets in search of the location and the mood, wondering whether Hopper was 'painting the loneliness'  he claimed, while Barbara Haskell, curator of a forthcoming Hopper exhibition, offers other interpretations.

Hopper called his paintings 'silent theater', but we take the liberty of dramatising fleeting thoughts of the four characters. What is going on in their minds in Hopper's diner late at night? 

We are free to speculate on the countless possibilities with the help of playwright Dean Olsher and three actors: Michael Dowling, Sara Paul, and Jim Frangione.

Producer: Judith Kampfner
A Ladbroke production for BBC Radio 4 first broadcast in June 2010.

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