Office at night

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was an American artist and a master of solitude and lonesomeness. There is a certain silence in his pictures, something pressing, almost, that intrigues me.

The painting above was created in 1940 and depicts an office—at night, according to the title—with two people in it, one male and one female. It seems to me that the man is the boss, submerged in reading some documents, while the woman—his secretary, probably—is withdrawing something from the archives. She suddenly stops, I imagine, thinking of something, on the brink of suggesting that… but then she stops.

The image has been interpreted—as I understand it—with some sexual undertones. There is a tension between the two in the painting. Even though the male figure most likely is formally superior, the female has some power too. She turns towards him, obviously with something in mind, and this something may, or may not, be work-related. Perhaps she has moved over from her desk in the lower left corner of the painting and up to the drawers to be closer to him, and perhaps the man is not submerged in his documents at all but quietly hoping for the woman to delicately state her suggestion. A number of different developments are possible from this situation…

The elevated view from which the spectator is positioned indicates that he or she is peeking in from outside, as the scene is observed from a distance. Hopper later indicated this in a letter to Norman A. Geske, the curator of the Walker Art Center, which acquired the painting in 1948. He stated that the image was...

...probably first suggested by many rides on the 'L' train in New York City after dark, glimpses of office interiors that were so fleeting as to leave fresh and vivid impressions on my mind.

So, there it is, then. A glimpse into an office environment the year World War II broke out, and neither we nor the artist may know what became of the two portrayed people.