Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography

No one can ever accuse Edward Hopper of having been an engaging character.  In photograph after photograph, he looks more like some small town store manager than an internationally known artist.  Bald and invariably wearing the type of conservatively cut suit favored by bankers,  he faces the camera with the unsmiling face of an accountant.  And this was no act.  There was no hidden warmth beneath his dour exterior.  The actress Helen Hayes once said of him: "I had never met a more misanthropic, grumpy, grouchy individual in my life..."

All this makes reading a lengthy biography of the man difficult for the average art lover.  Though he made the obligatory trip to Paris in his youth and spent most of his adult life in the same Washington Square apartment in Greenwich Village, there are no wild escapades to report, no mad flings with models.  Phlegmatic to a fault, he consorted with artists he felt could be helpful to his career, such as Guy Pène du Bois, but formed no deep friendships with them.  In politics, he was so far to the right that he might be labeled a reactionary.  He and his wife once drove 600 miles to register to vote so that they could cast their ballots against Franklin D. Roosevelt.

It is only as one proceeds through this exhaustive biography that one comes to realize that it was precisely Hopper's conservatism that made his paintings so effective.  In an exceptionally insightful comment, the author writes: 

"... it is his [Hopper's] profound alienation from contemporary life that makes his art so characteristic of modernity itself."

And this is it in a nutshell.  Hopper, born in 1882 in Nyack, NY, never really left behind his small town nineteenth century roots.  He never really felt at home in twentieth century America, the less so as traditional values gave way in the face of urbanization and technological advances to a rootlessness that even today underlies the American psyche.  Tellingly, in his pictures of New York City, Hopper never painted the full length of the skyscrapers that towered over him but only showed them, if at all, as truncated forms in the background.

Hopper's paintings paradoxically portray everyday scenes in the world about him and yet are filled with a sense of emptiness.  A rundown Victorian mansion in House by the Railroad (1925) and a row of Seventh Avenue storefronts in Early Sunday Morning (1930) are both melancholy remnants of an earlier age that has now vanished.  There are no people in either of these pictures (Hopper painted out a figure he had originally placed in one of the storefront windows in Early Sunday Morning); but when Hopper does paint figures they do not look at one another, nor at the viewer either, and thus their presence only intensifies the pervading sense of loneliness and alienation.  This can be seen clearly in the late 1963 painting People in the Sun.  None of the figures is wearing the casual attire one would expect of sunbathers but each is instead fully suited up in business clothes.  The lone figure in the second row looks down at his book while the four recumbent figures in the front row stare blindly ahead, one through dark glasses, into a featureless landscape.  In Girlie Show (1941), an expressionless dancer is oblivious of the audience as she moves naked about the stage.  In watching her, the viewer, like the audience itself, becomes a voyeur taking a peek at the forbidden.

Gail Levin has given us a well written book that is as thoroughly researched as one would expect of the author of Hopper's catalogue raisomné.  It is subtitled "An Intimate Biography," and so it is in more ways than one.  The drama is provided by excerpts from the diaries kept by Hopper's wife Jo - a frustrated artist who, like her husband, once studied under Robert Henri but was after her marriage completely ignored by the same critics and galleries who rushed to lionize her husband.  Hopper himself, prey to insecurity, did everything he could to crush his wife's career and to discourage her from painting.  Jo's attitude toward her husband was therefore, not surprisingly, at best ambivalent as she gave as good as she got in the couple's frequent physical altercations.  Levin has a great deal of sympathy for Jo, whose own artwork was discarded by the Whitney when it acquired Hopper's collection, and to a large extent the reader sees the artist from this woman's conflicted viewpoint.  Jo was aware of the extent of her husband's achievement and lauded him for it, but at the same time she never lost sight of Hopper's extensive personal failings.

This, anyway, is the narrative Levin offers the reader.  As one progresses through the book, however, Jo comes across more and more as a slightly dotty "cat lady," and one begins to question the prominence accorded her in this biography of her husband and the emphasis placed on the importance of her work whose quality appears, after all, rather dubious.

The book would have benefited greatly from an insert containing color plates of Hopper's major works.  As it is, there are photographs and preparatory drawings scattered throughout the text, but these are all in black & white.  A surprisingly large number of the paintings that are reproduced in monochrome are by Jo.  Unfortunately, these do nothing to support her credibility as a serious artist.  Looking at them, the reader feels that Levin has perhaps allowed her sympathy for the artist's wife to skew her judgment.