ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to thank specifically Ms Carol Rusk, the Benjamin and Irma Weiss Librarian at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10021 for her kind assistance in helping us locate Edward and Josephine Hopper letters and other writings from the Frances Mulhall Achilles Library, Whitney Museum of American Art.

Another source that must be acknowledged is Edward Hopper – An Intimate Biography by Gail Levin (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, 1995). Built primarily upon the diaries and letters of Josephine Nivison Hopper, accessible when Ms Levin was curator of the Edward Hopper Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art back in 1976, the book is a model of well-written scholarship. Its precise documentation of the artist’s life complements the many books written by Ms Levin about Edward Hopper’s work.

The author would also like to thank the Chicago Art Institute Ryerson Library.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

EMERGENCE – A WORLD OF LIGHT AND SHADOW

Paris, Impressionists and True Love

TURNING POINTS

Return, Rejection and Flight

On his Terms

Changing Times

Searching Afield, Finding New Tools

The Acid Etching Process and Dry Point Etching

Redemption in Black and White

LOVE, MARRIAGE AND WATERCOLOUR

New Victories, New Adventures

On the Road with Ed and Jo

LIVES OF A GRAND OLD ICON

Rise and Decline

Fame, Honour and Tears

Confrontation — 1940s

Personal Vision

The Comedians

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

NOTES

1. Self-Portrait, 1903-1906. Oil on canvas,

65.8 x 55.8 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art,

New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

INTRODUCTION

Edward Hopper’s realist creations in oil, watercolour and etchings earned him a degree of celebrity throughout America’s interwar years from the 1920s to the 1940s. During the last twenty years of his life, the honours came, the medals, the retrospective exhibitions and the invitations to countless museum and gallery openings, many of which he turned down. He was a recluse, a captive of his overachieving upbringing, a prisoner of humiliating memories of early rejection, the tenant of his failing body and the sole occupant of a darkly silent philosophy that resonated with virtually anyone who confronted his work. Hopper’s creative efforts discovered elements of the American scene that appear to be silent remnants left behind, or events about to happen. His work is his autobiography.

Edward Hopper and his wife, Josephine – in later years almost nobody thought of him without her and so they are linked in art history – were married for forty-three years. He stood six foot five inches and she topped out at five foot one inch with coppery red hair. Virtually everything in their life together orbited around his art. Josephine Nivison Hopper also had modest talent as an artist. Through her contacts, she helped him exhibit his first watercolours. Nevertheless, in Hopper’s solar system there was room for only one artist – himself, the sun at its centre. Yet she insinuated herself into his self-absorbed world. Once they were married, with few exceptions, the only women appearing in Hopper’s small repertory company were painted from Jo’s nude or costumed form.

Besides modelling, in 1933 she began a relentlessly personal diary of their life together adding to a detailed record book of his work: its size, brand of paint used, canvas or paper, oil or watercolour, what gallery accepted it, and its selling price – less 33% gallery commission. With her own art career in tatters beneath the weight of his creative shadow and callous indifference, she bonded with him as clerk, diarist, house lackey, social prod, financial juggler and creative scold.

Drip, drip, drip, her constant flow of chatty encouragement wore down the resolve of his blockages, his inability to work, his cavernous depressions. She also knew how to push his buttons and twist the guilt knife. He saw no reason to stop reminding her of her second-class status in the household and as an artist. They splashed each other’s psychological vitals with acidic scorn and calculated goading and then battered each other, drawing blood physically and emotionally. But their mutual dependence persisted.

Edward and Jo also had good times as they explored the eastern Seaboard beginning in the 1920s, stopping to sketch and splash on watercolour. They made friends of the people whose homes and boats and special places Edward drew and painted. They tramped together along the streets of New York where they had studied art and were part of the Greenwich Village artist scene.

From the 1920s to the 1960s they both embraced the realist American art movement as other painters and sculptors came and went. Hopper stood like a rock amid the chaos that welcomed, then rejected the Impressionists, dismissed, then lionised the Expressionists, Surrealists and other ists that bubbled to the surface. His work needed no manifesto, belonged to no school. A Hopper needed no signature and its value never dropped. Like bankable Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso, once he hit his own creative personal stride his paintings and etchings always found buyers. Hopper’s two-dimensional world turned in on itself from unpopulated introspective compositions of hills, boats and houses to include a pensive collection of seeming allegories featuring a silent cast of drained characters, each captured with something yet undone, or done and now buried beneath regret, or just waiting to see what might come and change their lives.

From his birth in Nyack, New York in 1882, to his death at the age of eighty-five sitting in his chair in the New York City apartment-studio he occupied for fifty years, Hopper spent his eight decades in pursuit of light and shadow. He mastered executing their delineation of our lives and environment. Thanks to Josephine, his would-be browbeaten Pepys, busy, busy, busy beside him, we have a small and often vitriol-spattered window into his reclusive world. The pursuit is a rich journey through painful creative self-discovery and massive self-denial. We travel through the evolution of technical facility in a schizophrenic labyrinth snaking between commercial and artistic success fuelled by the need for recognition, underscored with self-loathing and ending in his lifetime among the immortals of fine art.

Many writers have taken this trip and for their discoveries and their scholarship, I am grateful. To the museums and institutions that hang his work and archive the papers accumulated by his long life goes more of my gratitude. I also owe much to my years as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where, brush in hand, I fought the lonely battle with my own demons. Every day I walked through the galleries on the way to my classes. Every day I walked past Hopper’s Nighthawks and every day, when my mind wasn’t occupied with the detritus of youth, I felt success as a painter slipping away. Only later I discovered that art is supposed to be painful if you do it right. Following Hopper’s tortuous career prickles long dormant memories.

Each writer has come away with a slightly different Edward Hopper. Even though his paths are known, his acquaintances documented, his days and dates authenticated and his body of work is catalogued, what emerges is still an enigma. Hopper the man and artist remains a puzzle box with many hidden compartments and sliding panels. Located within the final secret space may lie a Rosetta Stone, a Rosebud, a key to his workings. Since the only paths to the why of a creative artist lie in the trace elements left behind and what the artist chose to reveal, these scattered traces and choices cause curious writers to put on comfortable shoes and begin.

— Gerry Souter,

Arlington Heights, Illinois

No one can correctly forecast the direction that painting will take in the next few years, but to me at least there seems to be a revulsion against the invention of arbitrary and stylised design. There will be, I think, an attempt to grasp again the surprise and accidents of nature, and a more intimate and sympathetic study of its moods, together with a renewed wonder and humility on the part of such as are still capable of these basic reactions.[1]

— Edward Hopper, 1933,

Notes on Painting (excerpt)

2. Jo Painting, 1936. Oil on canvas,

46.3 x 41.3 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art,

New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

3. Le Louvre et la Seine, 1907. Oil on canvas,

59.8 x 72.7 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art,

New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

4. Le Pont Royal, 1909. Oil on canvas, 60.9 x 73.6 cm.

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,

Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

EMERGENCE – A WORLD OF

LIGHT AND SHADOW

On 22 July 1882, Edward Hopper emerged into the middling-size prosperous town of Nyack, New York on the Hudson River. His mother, Elizabeth Griffiths Smith Hopper, was of English and Welsh stock, while his father, Garrett Henry Hopper, came from generations of English and Dutch ancestors. The elder Hopper tried his hand at sales and finally opened a dry goods store that failed to achieve any great success. Edward was the second child in the family, arriving two years after his sister, Marion.

While Hopper senior toiled amid bolts of cloth, cards of buttons and celluloid collars, Edward’s mother kept her son and daughter supplied with creative tools targeting the theatre and art. An early prized possession for young Edward was a slate blackboard and chalk. He could draw and erase with impunity, but any particularly satisfying result lacked permanence. He began sketching and painting early, taking his sketchbook with him on frequent treks into the nearby countryside.

The Hopper home at 82 North Broadway belonged to Elizabeth’s widowed mother, Martha Griffiths Smith, and was the site of Liz and Garrett’s marriage in 1879. It was a rambling two-storey white frame house sheltered by trees and punctured by shuttered windows beneath deep-set eaves, decorated with cornices and belted with a corner porch across the front. To Edward, this place with its dark windows that revealed nothing of the lives lived inside represented home, personal solitude and a refuge during his early years. Its counterparts would appear repeatedly in his future paintings.

The fact that his father could not afford to move their family into a house of their own had to affect Edward’s Victorian childhood during which men were expected to be the sole providers. His Grandmother Smith not only owned the house but also claimed the moral high ground in the community where her father, The Reverend Joseph W. Griffiths, had started up the Nyack Baptist Church back in 1854. The female side of the Hopper family provided for the family needs through rents and mortgage payments on other Nyack properties.

Edward and his older sister Marion attended private schools and came home to rooms cleaned by an Irish maid, and delivery boys bringing groceries and other purchases bought on account in town. His grades were above average throughout high school. One of his favourite subjects was French, which he studied and learned well enough to be able to read throughout his life.

At a time when the average grown man’s height reached five feet eight inches, young Hopper at twelve years old already towered at six feet. He seemed to be all arms and legs, causing his friends to nickname him Grasshopper. He loved jokes at other people’s expense and often raged when he did not win at games. Many friends remembered his teasing, an annoying and persistent character flaw that stayed with him, often with a sadistic edge, into adulthood. Naturally shy, he peered over the heads of his classmates and always ended up in the back row in photographs.

Hopper spent puberty and adolescence wandering along the bank of a nearby lake where ice was harvested in the winter, sketching people, boats and landscapes. Yacht building flourished in Nyack and the boat docks along the river became hangouts for Edward and his friends. They formed the Boys’ Yacht Club and piloted their sailboats with varying degrees of expertise. From those days, Edward carried with him a love of boats and the sea that lasted the rest of his life.

5. River Boat, 1909. Oil on canvas, 96.3 x 122.2 cm.

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,

Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

The railway had arrived along with electric light, paved streets and changed the complexion of the town, bringing more traffic, small businesses and a mostly Irish immigrant population. Elegant Victorian houses along the Hudson River belonged to wealthy industrial barons whose Dutch ancestors had amassed fortunes. His world was an idyllic boy’s world at the end of the nineteenth-century.

Hopper’s religious education in the Baptist Bible School was at odds with the freedoms of adolescence. He absorbed teachings on the rewards of a frugal life style and the righteous need to step back from the gratifications of lust and sex and other immoral behaviour. Baptists had a strong belief in the hickory switch for bad conduct, but Edward, it seems, was rarely punished for his misdeeds. He was the young prince, the talented untouchable. Yet, his personality developed inward as if ashamed of his ascension in the face of his father’s second-class situation within the upper middle-class success of the matriarchal Smith clan. This reticence and retreat into long silences later evolved into bouts of depression when his self-perceived skills failed him and the armour of his ego no longer appeared to sustain his ambition. Already he had developed a placid mask to hide behind and contain the demons of perceived inadequacy that dogged his career.

If Garrett Hopper bequeathed any legacy to his son, it was the love of reading. While the elder Hopper struggled with his business books and accounts, he was at home in his library with shelves groaning under English, French and Russian classic literature. Great social changes were occurring during the Gay 90s and the replacement of Victorian religious rigour by Edwardian free-thinking. From Turgenev to Victor Hugo and Tolstoy, Edward fled into books to discover words for the feelings that he could not disclose. He adopted his father’s bookish salvation as a retreat and chose his most trusted friends from pages, not from life. Their quotes – often spoken aloud – became his surrogate responses.

By 1895, Hopper’s natural talent was obvious in his technically well-executed oils. He relished details in his meticulous drawings of navy ships and the carefully-observed rigging of the racing yachts built in Nyack shipyards. He always came back to the sea and shore throughout his life, back to the big sky continuously redrawing itself in white on blue from opal pale to dangerous cerulean, and the surf-shaped rocks fronting long sweeps of dunes topped by hissing grasses. By 1899 he had finished high school and looked toward the big city down the Hudson, the centre of American art.

Hopper’s mother saw to it that Edward and Marion were exposed to art in books, magazines, prints and illustrations. She spent a considerable sum on pencils, paints, chalks, sketch pads, watercolour paper, brushes and ink pens. While Marion preferred to pursue theatrical drama, Edward practised various art techniques, watching how light gave or robbed objects of dimension and how line contained shapes and directed the eye. He went to school copying weekly magazine covers created by the great illustrators of the time: Edwin Austin Abbey, Charles Dana Gibson, Gilbert Gaul and the sketches of Old Masters: Rembrandt and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

Hopper absorbed all the fine examples and still retained a sense of humour as a safety valve to release some of the high expectations under pressure. His cartoons and lampoons remained with him as age further hardened his face to the world. Often they represented deeply felt emotions, but were tossed off with a laugh so as not to draw attention to the man behind the pencil.

6. Ile Saint-Louis, 1909. Oil on canvas, 59.6 x 72.8 cm.

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,

Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

7. Après-Midi de juin or L’Après-Midi de printemps, 1907.

Oil on canvas, 59.7 x 73 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art,

New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

With his father’s practical approval and his mother’s profession-oriented encouragement, he decided to pursue a career as a commercial illustrator and enrolled in the New York School of Illustrating at 114 West 34th St.

Magazine and graphic poster illustration was in its "golden