“Isn’t it nice to have a wife who paints?” A rhetorical question asked by Jo Hopper of her illustrious husband, Edward. “It stinks”, was the reply.
According to critic Waldemar Januszczak in his TV series ‘Big Sky, Big Dreams, Big Art, Made In The USA’, Jo once said that talking to Eddie was like throwing a stone into a well, except you don’t hear the thud when it reaches the bottom. Alas, it seems their 43 years long marriage was not a happy one, or was it?
Josephine Nivison Hopper - Self portrait
Edward came across as a dour, reticent, towering figure who constantly belittled and denigrated his assertive, diminutive wife, who responded with verbal assaults of her own. Sometimes those assaults became physical with cuffings, slappings and scratchings between them quite common.
An article by Stephen May in Artnews suggests that their hostility towards each other was based on resentments; Jo because her own artistic career (she studied under Robert Henri) was overshadowed by Edward’s, and Edward because he felt Jo was an inadequate wife.
Sometimes, in the wake of an argument, Edward would dash off a quick sketch when Jo was out of the room and leave it on the table for her to find when she returned. At their 25th wedding anniversary, Jo suggests they deserve a medal for distinguished combat. Edward’s boyhood home in Nyack, New York is now the Edward Hopper House Centre and contains an exhibition documenting their feisty marriage under the title “Edward Hopper’s Caricatures: At Home With Ed and Jo”.
Edward Hopper - The Sacrament of Sex (female version)
At the time she married Hopper, Josephine Nivison was 41, still a virgin (and possibly him too) and had an arts career going back 16 years. She had exhibited alongside Mogdigliani, Picasso, Man Ray and Maurice Prendergast. In 1924, the year they got married, she exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum together with Georgia O'Keeffe and John Singer Sargent and was singled out for praise. Jo recommended Edward Hopper's work to the curators of that show, and when they bought one of his paintings after the exhibition had ended, it was only the second he had sold in 10 years. As a result of the exposure she had secured for him, Hopper was given a sell-out solo show by the gallery which would represent him for the rest of his life.
Jo Hopper - Gloucester Railroad Gate 1928 - Watercolour
Their marriage was described as hermitic, and as Edward’s painting flourished, Jo’s waned. She became so involved in her husband’s work that she came to see it as a collaboration, and she insisted on being the sole model for every woman he painted. Her previous training as an actress may have helped here. Speaking to a curator once, she referred to her own paintings as 'poor little stillborn infants, too nice to have been such friendless little Cinderellas. I don't much like them, but how sad for them if even I forsake them!’
Jo Hopper - Self Portrait, 1956
She kept careful records of every painting Hopper produced and sold, she wrote practically all his correspondence, and she began writing her diaries just months before his first major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. It is thought she perceived this as a ticket to posterity.
Jo died in 1968, a year after Edward, having bequeathed the entirety of Ed’s work and hers to the Whitney Museum of American Art. The gift of some three thousand pieces was without precedent in the history of museums at the time. The Whitney decided to keep just 3 of Jo’s paintings and supposedly trashed the rest, keeping only a list.
But not so. To be found in New York City hospital lobbies, reception areas and waiting rooms are Jo Hopper’s paintings, entrusted to the Whitney but regifted to spaces where women wait or pass through.
An exhibition of both the Hoppers’ work was held at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in Massachusetts in 2017.
References;
The Paris Review
Artnews.com
The Guardian
Waldemar Januszczak - Big Sky, Big Dreams, Big Art: Made In the USA