Edward Hopper's Automat, painted in 1927, is usually taken as an image of loneliness: a smartly dressed woman alone at night in a cheap New York cafeteria, looking down at her cup of coffee, and behind her a black window with nothing in it but lights.
An automat was a restaurant with no waiters. Food sat behind small glass doors, and customers opened them with coins. The Horn & Hardart company opened its first one in Philadelphia in 1902 and its first in New York in 1912.
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The loneliness is the part Hopper added. The art historian Carol Troyen points out that nothing inside the picture says automat. The title does. There are no glass doors in the frame, no counter, no line of customers.
The real thing was the opposite of quiet. Automats stayed open at all hours, and they were busy, noisy and anonymous. Hopper took all of that out. I think the silence is the subject: he emptied a room built to be full.
A room that looked nothing like this
In July 1912, a New York Times advertisement for the new Times Square Automat called it a "New Method of Lunching." A customer dropped a nickel into a slot, opened a small glass door and took out a sandwich or a slice of pie. Coffee cost a nickel a cup until 1950.
The appeal was practical. The automats drew working people and frugal diners, and city workers who were given less and less time for a lunch break. The chain fed hundreds of thousands of people a day in more than eighty locations in New York and Philadelphia.
Of that busy room, Hopper kept a table and a chair, and he set the woman at the table nearest the door.
What You'll Discover
What Hopper left behind her chair.
Who posed for her, and how Hopper changed her.
What the black window reflects.
How it came to stand for depression.