Metroview; Gail Levin On Edward Hopper

MUSIC Welcome to Metro View. I'm Ed Rogowski. One of the very special things that we get to do on Metro View is to celebrate the work of the faculty of City University all around the various colleges, and we're doing that in this particular edition with the author of Edward Hopper, an intimate biography, a major new work which has gotten all kinds of acclaim and even gendered all kinds of discussion and reaction about this major figure in American art. Our guest Professor Gail Levin, who is Professor of Art History at Baruch College of the City University and the Graduate School University Center. Welcome to Metro

View. Thank you, Ed. It's nice to be here. It's a pleasure to have you and to celebrate this major achievement. This is the seventh or eighth book that you've done on Hopper, so you've had a long time acquaintance with the work of this painter and with his life. Tell us a little about your background and how it is that Hopper became the focus of your work. Well, I did my doctoral dissertation on the same period of Hopper's career, but on the kind of art he detested, it was called as the Kandinsky and the American avant-garde in 1912 to 1950. That was at the major years of his career. But very different artists. Very different, and although I had a chapter on abstract expressionism and artists like Duchunin and Rothko, a really respected Hopper's work, I liked it very much. He had no use for their work or anything abstract. So that work was done at Rutgers University and I did my undergraduate education at Simmons College in Boston and I do think it's of interest perhaps and how I became so

fascinated with Hopper that I had arrived from the Deep South where I grew up in Georgia to Boston and Hopper is of course definitely a painter of New England. He worked about half the year from 1934 in Truro and Cape Cod where he and his wife had a home and the other half of the year here in New York City he lived on Washington Square North and so for me my move to New England and then to New York and to CUNY where I arrived in 1986 Hopper is a really an emblematic artist for this region and yet his paintings have a universality about them and so I began working on Hopper about 19 years ago when I in 1976 became a curator the first curator of the Hopper collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Is that the largest of the Hopper collections there? Yes it is. It's an unusual collection because Edward Hopper died in 1967 shortly before his 85th

birthday and his wife also an artist Josephine Nip for still Nivison Hopper died less than a year later and she bequeathed all of his work that she had left which of course was mainly his early work things he couldn't sell before he was famous and all of her work to the Whitney Museum so they have really the Hopper estate if you will. A commanding collection there and you were curated there for that collection and then moved over to the city. Yes it's been eight years there and one that I organized a very large retrospective the largest ever in 1980-81 which toured across the United States and in Europe and that was the first Hopper exhibition to show his famous paintings together with their preparatory sketches all of which by the way are on paper he didn't do small oil studies and also to show his early work in a certain amount of depth because I was already very interested in his artistic development and that

of course led to biography I was producing which actually today as we're speaking the complete catalog of Edward Hopper's work four volumes including one which is on a CD-ROM and that's what I was working on then and as after I did that show the people who had inherited Joe Hopper's diaries brought them to my attention and they were 63 volumes yes small and fragile and often in pencil but very small difficult to read handwriting quite often and so I began to look for I was almost done with the catalog guys and I began to look through to find what she had said about the creation of his paintings and she certainly had plenty to say but in the course of doing that I was astounded I you know my I would slip and I'd read something else or I'd be scanning and I'd see something that was just extraordinary and the diaries really tell a compelling story of really their intimate life together home as they would

call it Shay Hopper always in French which was they were language of romance and of course they were married for over over 43 years and so it's it's quite a story and the diaries by the way are also fascinating for the picture they draw of the entire art world in New York and of so many artists and they're amazingly reliable they check out beautifully well we'll want you to tell us a little bit about some of Hopper's work we'll take a little tour through some of the major pieces but let let's just start for the moment by commenting on the painting that you chose to be the cover of the book here is the book as it's presented in bookstores and then this plastic slides off and we have a hopper painting which is the cover and he's seated outside assume this is the tour house again and she's calling him from the window well they didn't have a gas station so this is a thorough gas station really from Hopper's imagination and you know his wife Joe was also his only model that frankly he

would have allowed she would have allowed him to have other models but they were both too thrifty and he was so seldom inspired that he wouldn't have a model come to work he wouldn't be able to paint anyway so she was there in German she was there and available but in any case for this painting the reason I chose it for the cover and we have a detail of the painting on the cover not the whole painting in her diary well in the record books she kept also she was kind of a secretary keeping marvelous detailed records of his work and he would draw a little record sketch for each entry they often they would name like the characters like the secretary and office at night from 1940 is called Shirley and what she's wearing and all is described on this one Joe did not name the characters and in her diary we learned that she didn't post for it Edward did it out of his imagination and we learned that she realized for once that the painting was autobiographical she said he's painting me like an ugly

shrew because he's so angry at me and that's why I wanted it on the cover because I think many of the paintings of these couples that don't communicate very well are autobiographical for example 1932 is really one of the earliest room in New York a man reading a newspaper a woman seated at a piano about to disturb him her hand about to press a key on the piano and we are a wire is looking across the window the threshold of the window and it almost like a close-up movie camera we look in on them hopper love this issue of wireism in any case that painting is clearly reflective of their marriage which began in 1924 and by 1932 is already beginning to unravel a little at the edges that is some discontent has certainly entered the relationship and this is reflected in the paintings also the paintings are autobiographical in other ways for example things that Edward was reading and he spent more time

reading than he did painting and a lot of the literature that he read works its way subtly into the painting it's not always it's not really ever obvious when you just look at it but it's there and really the getting your hands on these diaries given to you as you know having them given to you was with a major new opportunity to write the the story of the development of his paintings of their content of their themes from her perspective as she knew him as as they live their lives together but it's at the same time your reliance on those diaries for this intimate biography has at the same time been the source of great discussion in the reviews about the book which had been terrific the words from from Michael Cameron in the New York Times front page book review were masterly but chilling compelling and an accessible narrative and so you have made it accessible to us but you're painting a picture of a

human relationship or the relationship between two people which leaves us cold well people used to ask me before the book was published did they have a good marriage and I would always answer what's your definition of a good marriage because they were very close very intense they share so much time together yes they shared so many things and for example when they bought the land on the cape and built their house there in 1934 which Edward designed and they had built with money Joe inherited from her uncle there was plenty of room they built a separate garage it's way up on a hill and they could easily have been a separate studio but no the house only had three rooms a studio living room that's one room a bedroom and a kitchen and of course Joe was free to paint anywhere she wanted as long as she wasn't in the studio and Edward was painting well he wasn't painting all the time but she was often forced to paint out in the kitchen of the bedroom where the light was impossible but in any case Edward never sought to build himself a separate studio away

from the house where you could say Joe this is where I'm going to retreat from you no he clearly like to have her around the same as Joe in a city once they got an extra studio for Joe went free because the landlord could no longer the bathroom was shared with neighbors originally out it was out in the hall and it was became illegal by city change in city regulations to rent it to anyone else so they had a whole huge studio well not huge but a nice equal to Edward's for Joe for free and Edward didn't want to spend money there was no central heating until the early 1960s he didn't want to spend money for oil or coal for a stove to heat her studio so they used to use it to gel jello and to store paintings but not to work in now and again spending all that time together but but she clearly in in a secondary role the same facility not available to her well she was his leading lady you know she was in a sense he was like a film director and she was modeling and she was not just a passive model but really getting into the fantasy but I do want to correct one thing

that you said earlier that I relied on these diaries or at least that there are many other viewers yes and it's really fascinating I think the story of Joe's diaries in fact they do say that is so compelling that they overlook the fact that I spend a lot of time really giving an original and new analysis of Hopper's art and there's a great deal of other sources there that I drew on for example the diaries of many of Ed he didn't keep any but many of his male friends did Geek and Dubois Walter Titles C. K. Chatterton Charles Birchfield Janame only a few Richard Leahy is another one so while I didn't have Edwards I collected all of his letters of course but he was a very terse letter writer and Joe often wrote the letters for them for him or for the two of them I collected all of her letters too of course and some of some of the you know most shocking scenes for example the hunger strike that she went on in 1986 oh sorry

1946 that is best documented in a letter she wrote to a friend an male friend Carl Springhorn who had gone to art school with both Joe and Edward at the New York School of Art where they had all studied with the famous teacher Robert Henry at the same time so you know people have question whether these diaries could tell the truth but here one of the most shocking scenes is really told in a letter to a male colleague and I have no doubt as to the accuracy well let's you know dwell in the neuron on this business of the critical reactions of your book and the way that they've tried to suggest that that the diaries are in fact the the single source if not the dominant source in your interpretation if opposed to your other research which I think is clearly an important distinction to make it's about the nature of their relationship of the kind of distance between the silence between them you know are the diaries her version of reality may have been quite different inside his head and how does

that affect the interpretation then of his art how question that if you have an argument with your spouse or anyone has an argument with their spouse each spouse has their own point of view there is no question and the diaries represent for the most part Joe's point of view or what she claimed was Edward's point of view how she viewed Edward's point of view but I don't think she made it up I think she gave us her honest view at least of how she viewed Edward's side of the argument however Edward did tell us his point of view he left these incredible caricatures which he made for Joe and that was how he communicated with her and also what he had to say he says in his paintings and his relationship toward women is quite clear in many of the drawings that he makes and you know one of the reviewers actually in the Wall Street Journal a male an aging male art historian actually claimed that I favored Joe's art over Edward's which I don't think is true at all and I think he's one of America's

greatest artists I think she was you know a reasonably good artist very different in my evaluation but she was much better than the fate her work received but we could talk about what he does because of the shadow was being in his shadow do you think oh well you see the Whitney Museum basically gave her work away to charity institutions they keep no records of it they gave three paintings to New York University where they still have three but not three of the major ones and some of the others they just discarded they threw them out and I can't imagine a museum today doing that this is back in 1968 and the men responsible are dead now so you know the culprits are gone it's important to say that because hopefully we're in a changed world but still you know we have groups like the guerilla girls saying that women artists aren't treated very well by museums galleries and critics and it's very interesting certain men of course love this book and reviewed it very well

others perhaps more traditional male chauvinist I've seemed to be very threatened by what Joe wrote in her diaries I'm never saying kind things in my opinion about Edward Hopper I'm feel very sympathetic for the man despite the fact that he sometimes swatted his wife and slapped her and he was after all nearly six foot five and she was barely five feet it doesn't seem like much of a physical context contest after all although she fought back she didn't go crazy she wasn't like Zelda Fitzgerald when he hit her she tells in her diary and she told an interviewer this a male interviewer in front of Edward she says I once bid him to the bone and so I think that was maybe more than once that she at least fought back but I think Edward's point of view I mean she gives a blow by blow of their sexual relationship as she saw it he makes this hilarious caricature call the sacrament of sex where he's

dolled up in a night shirt and a sash he's wearing a halo he always sees himself as angelic now I don't think either one of them were angels but he's bowing and she's sitting up in bed looking like you know free to kill oh painted herself Diego Rivera's wife right and with a kind of labra and there's a bird on the head perched on the headboard and it looks all very ceremonial is if I think Edward saying Joe you want too much ceremony you demand too much you know how you can imagine a man having that point of view and and she's saying well I deserve all this I should have it the way I want it and you're not giving it to me you're not concerned with what I want so I think we have both of their points of view there. Hopper's images the the scenes that that I guess have worked the way most into the popular awareness are usually almost sometimes painful in there in the loneliness or the isolation of characters and even

when it's architecture the house by the railroad from 1925 that was by the way the first painting ever acquired by any artist for the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Bon & Art they got in January 1930 five years after it was painted and the museum was only founded the year before and if you think about that painting with the man's start roof no no characters figures in it it really epitomizes Edward Hopper's character because there's a certain nostalgia there he's born in 1882 he grew up in the Victorian age he has Victorian values he read misogynist Victorian literature he read Darwin he read Roger Kipling he read Montana's essays they don't have very good things to say about women hardly and she's more the woman of the 20th century so it's ironically because she's less than a year younger but as he couldn't deal with the 20th century when we see him paint skyscrapers he crops them off like an early Sunday morning or the view of Washington Square or the rooftops from

his studio city roofs he George O'Keefe is glorifying the skyscraper Joseph Stella other artists contemporaries not Edward he didn't like them his nostalgia is for small town America even though he's living in New York City he comes from Niac New York a small town 40 miles up the Hudson and he just couldn't he he the only he couldn't fly on airplanes he said he was afraid to die that way but Joe love them he said she thinks she's an angel and he painted herself with a halo yeah all right and her with a devil's tail he gives us quite he tells us he thinks she's devilish and difficult we know that and she tells us he's impossible and she's angry because he's not helping promote her work the way she helped him and you know when she married she was 41 he was 42 she was better known than as an artist than she was when she died at 85 in fact much better known and it was in 19 23 in the autumn after they had been

painting together in Gloucester an artist colony on K-Pen in Massachusetts the previous summer the Brooklyn Museum invited her to be an very important group exhibition and she said well what about the work to show her watercolor she said what about the watercolors of my neighbor Edward Hopper he was living on Washington Square she was on 9th Street and they said well we know his etchings does he do watercolors have him bring some over to show us we'll take a look at them for you you know do our favorite yes so he did and they put up six of his next to six of hers the critics wrote about her a little bit and about Edwards a lot and the museum purchased one of them called Mansard Roof right out of the show for a hundred dollars it was the first painting he had sold in over ten years since the 1913 armory show and it was the second he had sold in his entire life so he was thrilled and the way I know the story is the Brooklyn Museum a year before Edward died taped him and Joe together on the

interview them on a on tape and they said Mr. Hopper how did you come to show this work at the Brooklyn Museum he said you know I don't remember and Joe said oh man they're all the same women are like elephants they remember turn me loose on that and she told the story and then afterwards of course he wanted to go back to paint again in Gloucester and she wanted to go back where she'd been in 1922 painting watercolors in Provincetown on the Cape on Cape Cod and they argued and he settled the argument was saying why don't we get married and go to Gloucester on our honeymoon which they did they got married that same day but years later you know when I said about 1932 that room in New York with the couple not getting along by then she realized Edward wasn't reciprocating he wasn't helping her work the way she had helped him and this was a sore point not only helping his work in the sense of being that when he was creating it or being being the subject that he painted being in the painting that's right promoting him to others and she wasn't getting the same thing no and he didn't

want to pose for her and not only that he demeaned her as an artist according to her diaries we did we do know that he would come home and it's it's you know it's too compelling you've got to believe it I mean he would say Mary Cassot got it all from Digga and just putting down other women artists cast to getting lady flower painters and you know when John Sloan was working to keep George O'Keefe from getting into the American Academy of Arts and Letters he came home and bragged about it both did about it to Joe so it wasn't just his wife's work he just didn't see the use for for women to be artist let me because we were gonna be out of time sooner than we think and I wanted to make sure that we show some of the major hyperpieces as we talk about them if you would just make reference to a couple of them as we're talking so we can put them on the screen and and have our viewers see more of hyper. Well we've already mentioned quite a few but we might certainly mention his masterpiece Night Hawks from 1942 which is out in the Art Institute of Chicago

and you know many people know this painting of the all-night diner there's been a parody by another artist in fact an Austrian who put in Humphrey Bogard and James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and then there's a version that that's also being sold with neon around it. Yes and there's even a Christmas card with Santa and his reindeer around a hopper's diner. You see it leaked into the public domain and people have been having a great time with it but that painting is fascinating because Hopper had a blank canvas and Arnold Newman the marvelous photographer photographed him next to that blank canvas that became Nine Hawks in December early December 1941 and Pearl Harbor was bombed and that sense of unease of the war reaching America's shores is in that painting of people out in the all-night diner and Joe was so nervous that the Germans or the Japanese were gonna bomb them next because they had glass skylights and she was busy being very anxious and packing an abstract with emergency supplies so

that they could evacuate Edward put his anxiety into the painting and I think very brilliantly and some of the other oh I think one that I think is really wonderful the two comedians it's owned by Mr. Mrs. Frank Sinatra it's painted a 1965 less than a year and a half before Edward died and it's the last painting he ever made and he represented Joe and himself as figures out of French Panama in which they loved it's inspired by Marcel Carne's children of paradise they don't fall to potty a film they saw several times they love so much and so both the film and the painting ultimately derived from the Commedia del Arte and Joe of course had been trained as an actress as well as a painter so she was the perfect model for Edward and what a perfect painting and finally in the end Edward let's Joe share the spotlight with him and they bow out together he mellowed by the end of his life a little bit and finally

the 20th century got to him well he had a lot of trouble with the changing roles for women that's for sure and I think some of the more tragedy reviewers have had some of those same problems with Joe I always wonder if these same men who get so upset about the revelations and her diaries beat their wives but I haven't been able to ask them or kick their dogs or some kind of nation there to be sure as you look forward now having done such a definitive amount of work about Hopper where will you turn your attention next to have you decided well I'm nearly finished with another complete catalog of an artist work the artist is Marsden Hartley who lived between 1877 and 1943 and was born in Maine but really wandered and painted all over the United States and Europe so he's a different kind of challenge but another wonderful artist and and I gather that your approach is to tell us that we understand that artist and his or her work best when we understand the elements of their lives

and it's around them as they were creating I never would have thought that like most art historians I didn't have a great interest in biography but I think my experience studying Hopper first through his art and then through his life has really opened me up to the value of biography well thank you so much for sharing this perspective on your work with us we can congratulate you again we look forward to having you back when the next great art biography comes forth thank you