Gail Levin organised the first retrospective of Edward Hopper’s work in Britain for the Hayward Gallery in 1981. Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography was published in 1998.
RELATED ARTICLES
5 February 1981
The Loneliness Thing
10 May 2001
The Marx Brothers
14 December 1995
Pulp
12 May 1994
All of Denmark was at his feet
8 April 1993
Mary, Mary
11 March 1993
The Numinous Moose
5 December 1991
Terrible to be alive
RELATED CATEGORIES
Art and architecture, Painting, Biography and memoirs, Biography, 1900-1999, 1900-1945, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1946-1949, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1950-1959, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1960-1969, Americas, North America, USA
Vol. 26 No. 12 · 24 June 2004
pages 32-33 | 2322 words
Mr and Mrs Hopper
Gail Levin
- Edward Hopper edited by Sheena Wagstaff
Tate Gallery, 256 pp, £29.99, May 2004, ISBN 1 85437 533 4
Edward Hopper languished into his forties as a commercial illustrator. He got his first break thanks to a boost from a fellow artist called Josephine Verstille Nivison, who in the fall of 1923 got the Brooklyn Museum to include him in a group show to which she had been invited to contribute. He married her the following year. Success of a sort followed. Hopper’s painting of a tall, old-fashioned house, cut off by the modern encroachment of a railroad track, was the first painting acquired by the new Museum of Modern Art, and he had his first retrospective there three years later, in 1933. His watercolours and canvases were snapped up by patrons and museums almost as soon as they were finished. He had major museum shows.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 26 No. 17 · 2 September 2004
From Elizabeth Thompson Colleary
The Whitney Museum of American Art did not, as Gail Levin has it in her piece on Edward Hopper, 'discard whatever it thought was Nivison's' (LRB, 24 June). The museum owns more than two hundred pieces by Hopper's wife, Josephine Nivison. It loaned or gave many of her oil paintings to hospitals in New York City to hang in offices and reception areas. Some were discarded. However, the watercolours and a few oils have been kept in storage at the museum alongside works from the permanent collection. Though none of Nivison's work is on display at the museum, four of her Whitney paintings are being loaned for a group exhibition that will open at Brigham Young University in January.
Elizabeth Thompson Colleary
College of New Rochelle, New York
Vol. 26 No. 18 · 23 September 2004
From Gail Levin
Elizabeth Thompson Colleary's response to my review of Edward Hopper at the Tate misrepresents the facts (Letters, 2 September). All of Josephine Nivison's canvases, which she bequeathed to the Whitney in 1968, were discarded – either put in the trash or given to local hospitals with no strings attached. They were not loaned, as Colleary claims, and none can be traced at any of the hospitals today. The works bequeathed by Nivison now at the Whitney survived only because they were accidentally identified as by her husband, or overlooked and therefore not discarded, and almost all of these are on paper. I am not aware that the Whitney has accessioned for its permanent collection any work by Nivison, although a recent bequest by her friend, the artist Felicia Meyer Marsh, includes some of Nivison's small oil paintings.
Gail Levin
City University of New York
