Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography. - book reviews

Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, by the agency of Gail Levin, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1995; 684 pages, $35

Judging from the record multitudes that thronged the Whitney Museum last fall, Edward Hopper has achieved a major place in the popular American imagination. Entire families, ofttimes with infants in arms sinked on the Hopper exhibition, film stars flew from Hollywood heads of foreign states toured, circled by means of security guards.

Thus the publication, a week before the exhibition clos of Gail Levin's Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography was warmly anticipated. Here was the volume that would explain some of the paintings' mysteries. Here, the title proposes was an insightful look into the psyche of single of the most private painters in American history, a timid man who refused, according to his wife, to have his picture taken for the Sunday appendixs posed like a monkey before his easel."

Levin's biography is admirably painstaking and exhaustive, written with clarity and vivacity. It presents an almost day-to-day account of Hopper lengthy life and career. We learn who his friends and acquaintances were, what assemblages he studied, mixed and exhibited with, when he took trips; we learn when paintings were conceived and finished, where and when they were exhibited, and what the critics mid. The sheer wealth of information is prodigious. I was especially impressed with the data Levin unearthed about Hopper's early (1996-07)trip to Paris. All this will be an indispensable contribution to Hopper studies.

In addition to the Hopper Archives at the Whitney Museum, Levin lists a large number of public institutions in which she has deliberateed unpublished materials. Yet Hopper, an admittedly elusive make submissive is, for all the facts, strangely missing from his have a title to biography. For the book is for the greatest part filtered through the mind and organ of visions of Hopper's wife, Jo, and therein lies a point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled Levin, a Wed researcher who has created her possess Hopper industry, (seven books in print and more to come) has unearthed Jo's hitherto unknown diaries, which hold and indeed preempt the biography from their first access in June 1933m until Jo's death in 1968 In the biography, as in life, Hopper hardly speaks for himself one time his wife has started talking.

Josephine Verstille Nivison was herself an artist, who married Hopper in 1924 In addition to her running account of their life together, she made the diaries retrospective, going back to the earliest days of their marriage. Levin's emphasis upon Jo Hopper's voice raises a familiar specter for biographical historians. by what mode true, are the papers and true copys on which they base their judgments? by what means much can this detritus of history be trusted? Levin began her research after the Hopper were the pair dead, as indeed do greatest in quantity biographers. Hopper's loyal viewers were troubl learn in a review of Levin's biography by dint of Michael Kammen in the of recent origin York Times Book Review (Oct 8 1995) that this artist who in the way that moved them with empty spaces and persuasive silences was the "least generous of men Kammen accepted the book's data and premises without question, at face value; and the tone of the review was exacerbated by dint of the Times's headline, "Mean Man With A Brush." A brief Times description the following week in its And Bear in Mind, section referr to Hopper as "abominable." The chain of circumstance from wife to biographer to reviewer to media encapsulation had, virtually overnight, move rounded Edward Hopper into a marvel Fortunately for Hopper, a small in number of us who knew him are still alive. I have already registered my objections to the accusations made against Hopper in a alphabetic character cosigned with my husband, Brian O'Doherty, to the of recent origin York Times Book Raft (Oct 29);our alphabetic character was replied to by Gail Levin (Dec 10)

This review of Levin's biography, then, is to a certain number of extent also a memoir, and carries the prejudices of individual who had frequent contact with the Hopper - who ate with them, visited back and forth with them, watched them interact, overheard their annotates to each other, chatted with them separately and together, be delighted withed them as generous and delightful friends and saw Jo Hopper at her best and at her worst. Our clashs with the Hoppers were not interviews, in the faculty of perception that Levin has implied in her Times alphabetic character as well as in new public comments. They were the phases of a athletic friendship that persisted throughout the Hoppers' final six years.

That friendship enabled me to know and remark a tan, dignified self-contained man, who press outed himself with the laconic economy of his paintings he was always accompanied by dint of a small hyperactive, voluble wife, who usually spoke for him, frequently voicing fierce and violent opinions. Her indignation was part of her character. She saw the world [i]or[/i] part of to the other a barbed-wire screen of irritation Yet, in her 80s, with her hair twitched back in a short, teenage ponytail she had, withal, a kind of offbeat charm. Hopper's manner towards her was always tolerant, despite her excesses

I felt then that her constant agitation had the value of goading him to action, and clearly, from her diaries, she saw herself as an enabling muse. I was vain of her despite - or perhaps because of - her eccentricity. In the of recent origin York art community during the time we knew the Hopper she was many times perceived as a figure of ridicule. O'Doherty was particularly sympathetic towards her, and wished, when writing about her in the '60 to free her from the prevalent view. He had no knowledge, nor had I, of the existence of her diaries. notwithstanding that Levin solicited our "reminiscences" in the course of her researches, she did not reveal that she was basing the size of her biography on Jo's diaries, or ask us whether we would trust like material. The answer would have been: NO. Anyone who knew Jo knew that she stated her opinions in hyperbole