THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 21, 1996 TAG: 9601180573
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY PEGGY DEANS EARLE
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
EDWARD HOPPER
An Intimate Biography
GAIL LEVIN
Alfred A. Knopf. 678 pp. $35.
The image is so familiar, it might have come from a recurring dream:
The corner coffee shop, middle of the night; harsh light illuminates the faces of a couple at the counter. A white-uniformed sodajerk appears to be speaking to the man. Another sits, back to us, gazing down. Two gleaming silver coffee urns are mute witnesses to the scene.
Edward Hopper's 1942 masterpiece painting, ``Nighthawks,'' is surely engraved onto the collective American unconscious. With it, ``Early Sunday Morning'' and others in Hopper's portfolio arise questions about the artist - his life, his creative process and his psyche. In Gail Levin's fascinating and comprehensive Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, most of those questions are answered.
Levin, a professor of art history, is one of the most well-known and prolific Hopper scholars. This deep exploration of Hopper's life (1882-1967) is a treasure, enhanced by the almost compulsively thorough diaries kept by his wife from the early 1930s until her death in 1968.
Levin traces Hopper's early development as an artist from his first drawings at age 5 to his New York art school training. Early on, Hopper displayed signs of the introversion, moodiness and preoccupation with death apparent throughout his life and on his canvas.
His artist's existence in a Greenwich Village apartment can only be described as bohemian, yet his beliefs were surprisingly conservative. A staunch Republican, he hated Franklin D. Roosevelt and was infused with a Puritan sensibility and a nostalgia for ``the good old days.'' In fact, the stark, lonely scenes of his paintings are commonly interpreted to reflect his dislike of the modern world. The modern abstract expressionist movement was abhorrent to Hopper, and he was a vocal detractor.
After years of struggling as an art teacher and illustrator, Hopper advanced in small increments. When he finally achieved popular success, he was celebrated as ``the dean of American realist painting.''
Levin gives equal weight to Hopper's artistic life and the mercurial, neurotic relationship he had with his wife. Josephine Nivison, an actress, teacher and painter, met Hopper at a summer artist's colony in Maine. Polar opposites in personality and outlook, Hopper once observed that he was a ``watcher,'' she a ``participator.''
Jo's diaries reveal her professional jealousy of and sense of victimization by her husband. While the two came to refer to his paintings as their ``children'' (they never had real ones), Jo sadly called her own creations ``my poor little bastards.''
She complained bitterly that Hopper never took her art seriously, at times even belittling or ridiculing her attempts. Reproductions of Jo's work show that, while attractive, they clearly lack the power and genius of her husband's.
But if Jo is not remembered as an artist in her own right, she can surely be feted as an invaluable asset to Hopper's work and career. She could coax him out of his frequent dry spells and posed for every female figure in his paintings, a fact that actually stemmed from profound possessiveness; she feared an attractive model might steal him away.
Portraits emerge of an anti-social, egocentric, selfish man who was, paradoxically, totally faithful and capable of downright romanticism - and his eccentrically unbalanced, long-suffering yet devoted mate. Jo's descriptions of the couple's violent physical battles and disparate sexual appetites do not diminish their moments of tenderness and caring.
The couple is, finally, prosaically human. How poignant is Jo's wifely lament: ``I can scarcely stand E.H., but how possibly live without him.''
For art lovers, the most delicious components of the diaries describe the gestation and evolution of some of Hopper's most well-known pictures.
As described by his friend, painter Raphael Soyer, Hopper had a ``loneliness about him, an habitual moroseness, a sadness to the point of anger.'' Amazingly, those negative traits did not obstruct a life devoted to art and creation of the iconic images we find so irresistible today.
As aptly stated in one Hopper obituary: ``Hopper distilled, more masterfully than any other artist of his time, a haunting look and mood of America.'' MEMO: Peggy Deans Earle is a staff librarian and painter. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
``Nighthawks,'' 1942 The Art Institute of Chicago
by CNB