Nightlife

This painting shows a packed cabaret, a club for drinking, dining and dancing, in Bronzeville, a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. It is oil on canvas and wider than it is tall, about three feet by four. The people are stylized, which means they are simplified and shaped by the painter rather than copied exactly from life. The colors are turned up high, mostly shades of magenta, a deep pinkish red, and violet, a purple. Together they give the whole room a warm glow and a feeling of movement, as if the music has just started.

Let your eyes travel across the room instead of settling on one spot. First, look for the gestures and glances passing between the people. The painter built a kind of network of them, so you can follow a look from one person to another and see small stories unfolding. Second, notice the diagonal lines, slanting strokes that cut across the scene and keep it feeling restless and lively. Third, watch how the colors shift from place to place. The painting is a study of artificial light, light made by people rather than daylight, and you can see how it changes everything it touches.

Archibald John Motley Jr., an American artist who lived from 1891 to 1981, painted Nightlife in 1943. It shows a part of Chicago he chose to portray, and he captured the exuberance of city dwellers out on the town. Motley was inspired, in part, by another painting, Nighthawks by Edward Hopper. Nighthawks had entered the Art Institute of Chicago's collection the year before, and Motley saw it there. His answer was a very different picture, crowded with people and bright with color, but it shares that earlier painting's close attention to artificial light.