Echoing Edward Hopper's 'Nighthawks' (1942), 'Owl Cafe' depicts a late-night diner on a city corner through its large plate-glass window: three customers seated along the counter and a lone waiter in a white jacket, none of them meeting each other's eyes. The harsh fluorescent light spills onto the deserted street outside, and the silent triangulation of glances is a distilled portrait of modern American urban solitude. Held by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, it is a centrepiece of the museum's accounts of 20th-century metropolitan painting.

Exhibition Venue

Whitney Museum of American Art

New York, United States