The
Washington
Post
October 15, 1995, Sunday, Final Edition
Alone in America
by Robert Coles
SECTION: BOOK WORLD; Pg. X01
EDWARD HOPPER An Intimate Biography
By Gail Levin. Knopf. 678 pp. $ 35
WHEN A full cultural history of 20th-century America is written -- no doubt=
at
the start of the third millennium -- Edward Hopper will surely command a gr=
eat
deal of attention. Arguably, he will rank as our country's leading artist of
that century -- one whose canvases became part of a public consciousness, p=
art
of "a whole climate of opinion," in W.H. Auden's words, meant to
describe the assimilation of another gifted person's work (that of Freud) i=
nto
a broad kind of social awareness.Not that Hoppe=
r had
an easy time of it from the start. Like Freud, he had to endure years of
outright rejection, insistent disfavor. Like Freud he had stamina, stubborn=
ness
going for him -- a refusal to be deterred by the judgment of those who had
power. In Austria Freud had to persist in the face of fierce opposition from
the university world; in America, Hopper endured dismissal and condescension
from any number of art critics and museum curators, who were far more taken
with, say, abstract expressionist artists than with his kind of American
realism. Both men, it can be said, triumphed through the appeal their work =
had
for a growing army of readers, viewers, rather than through the favor of the
intellectual custodians of their respective professions (those who run
departments of medicine, those who choose paintings for display, write about
them).For many years Gail Levin has devoted her considerable and thoughtful
energy to the study of Hopper's work and life.
She has written essays on his life and presented his work to us in volume a=
fter
volume -- his career as an illustrator, an engraver, an artist whose painti=
ngs
gradually engaged with the moral and social imagination of so many of us. S=
he
is, actually, the one who has given us the definitive presentation of Hoppe=
r's
art, the Catalogue Raisonne, and now she is his=
most
ambitious biographer -- with the important help of his artist wife, Josephi=
ne Nivison Hopper, "Jo" to Hopper (who depicte=
d her
in some of his drawings and paintings). Indeed, it is hard to imagine this
long, thorough, revealing and quite provocative book without the constant v=
oice
of Jo, whose daily diary entries inform page after page -- a running chroni=
cle
of a great artist's life, but also, of an exceedingly tempestuous marriage,
which lasted and worked, no matter its strenuous strai=
ns.Hopper
was born in Nyack, N.Y., to a family of modest circumstances. The name is of
Dutch origin. All his life he looked up to Rembrandt; both were wizards with
"light," able to use it as an instrument of compelling character
analysis. Hopper never attended college -- he was yet another American
autodidact. He read broadly, deeply; studied with artists in New
York; went to Europe as a y=
oung
man, but thereafter shunned those trans-Atlantic trips so appealing to arti=
sts
(and others of relative privilege). For a while -- for decades, actually --=
he
was a salesman of sorts; he went from magazine to magazine, with his portfo=
lio,
in search of assignments as an illustrator. He did so, of course, to make a
living -- but he never gave up the desire to paint, to be an artist at the =
beck
and call of his own spirit, rather than that of commerce. Even as he did
pictures aimed at selling products or helping readers become visually invol=
ved
with the stories they were reading, he repaired in his heart to his studio,
where he struggled with forms and shapes, with pigments, with light and
shadows, and not least, with ideas, which he chose to tether to a
representational reality.TODAY ANY description =
of, or
response to, his paintings (especially the best-known among them, such as
"Nighthawks," "Early Sunday Morning," "Office at
Night," "Summer Evening," "Gas," "Solitude,&q=
uot;
"Hotel Lobby," "Chop Suey,"
"New York Movie," "Sunlight in a Cafeteria") has to con=
tend
with the heavy weight of a criticism that draws on "existentialism,&qu=
ot;
or on the dreary banalities generated by a secular preoccupation with
psychology and sociology. Yet, there was a time, well before the influence =
of
Camus and Sartre had reached our shores, and well before the social sciences
loomed so large on our campuses and beyond, when an obscure painter was mer=
ely
taking keen, persistent note of how we get along in this hugely materialist,
industrial society. Without saying a word, he gave us what he had witnessed,
and he, a genius, could singularly convey.Even =
now,
time spent with his pictures can bring fresh meaning to tired words such as
"alienation," "loneliness"; even now, his talent as a
painter rescues his work, and us, the beholders of it, from a generation of
socially and psychologically labored interpretation. His powerfully suggest=
ive
inwardness, his reflective breadth and depth, his disciplined craftsmanship,
his restless, sharply knowing interest in a nation, its people, their ways =
with
one another -- all of that still offers him a certain immunity from the kil=
ling
possibilities of cultural attention, whereby someone is "summed up,&qu=
ot;
and soon enough abandoned for the next objects of fashionable interest. Hop=
per lingers,
survives even critical acclaim. Himself taciturn, a master at rendering the
inarticulate, the yearnings and worries we have learned to hide from oursel=
ves,
never mind others, he brings us mood and revelation with a pointed intensity
that makes a mockery of contemporary psychological, sociological (or religi=
ous)
language. And there lies the magic of art: to bring us, in the words of Hen=
ry
James (whose novels he loved) "the manners, the manners" in such a
way that we are left free to muse and wonder and make connections on our own.This lucid, almost hovering biography (season aft=
er
season set down for us) is worthy of its subject, his approach to art. We a=
re
denied, here, the temptations of an art criticism all too fluidly, abstract=
ly
sure of itself; denied, too, an overwrought, intrusive psychology, ready at=
the
quick, to classify, label, demonize reductively. Wisely, generously, this
biographer lets Jo herself present her day-to-day struggles with her mighty,
inscrutable, tenaciously determined husband -- a continuing, detailed narra=
tive
by a protagonist, and at times, an antagonist. For over four decades these =
two
artists lived together, loved and inspired one another, and not least, lock=
ed
horns. Theirs was the mystery of an attachment that lasted, no matter its
serious flaws. All the while, Jo observed him, the artist observer, and
described what she saw feverishly, painstakingly, in a torrent of declarati=
ons,
exclamations, abbreviations, asides. Hers is a diarist's chronicle that
proceeds at a fast clip, now summoned by a biographer able to provide us a
context for all those dark nights of a steadfast marriage's soul: Jo as
Edward's ally, his model, his nagging scold, as
watchful of him as he was of everyone else."Befor=
e
the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its
arms," Freud volunteered in a self-addressed warning, an unusual momen=
t of
resignation (speaking of a biographer's restraint -- he was writing about
Dostoevsky). Gail Levin has given us, with obvious erudition and admiration,
Hopper the "creative artist" and Hopper the reclusive, cranky,
brilliantly thoughtful, impossibly egoistic, highly industrious man, no less
limited in mind and heart than the rest of us. A constant wanderer across o=
ur
American scene (by foot, by train, by automobile), he took our close measur=
e,
documented the headlong, sprawling, anxious nature of our early and middle
years of this American century; bequeathed us, in his pictures, a landscape=
of
our edgy, worried assertive selves at home, on the road, at work. In this
engaging, instructive biography, we meet him and his wife Jo, learn of their
emotionally intense time together, follow their careers, and, no small feat=
on
the part of their biographer, are left with respect for those two, respect =
for
what they separately and jointly accomplished -- a tribute to them and the =
one
who hands them over to us.
Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist and the author, most recently, of "=
The
Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism," teaches a course at Harvard o=
n Edward
Hopper and Raymond Carver.