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EDWARD HOPPER

AN INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY

This sprawling study of his career and marriage sets the great painter of modern bleakness in an important new light but fails to fully illuminate his psyche. Writing on Hopper's (18821967) youth, Levin (Art/Baruch College and Graduate School, CUNY) works up hints about his early cultural milieu and hypotheses about his family into tentative psychological sketches. Hopper, she suggests, was a puritan chauvinist whose rectitude masked deep insecurities. In perhaps her strongest sections, Levin treats Hopper's better-documented student years. A protÇgÇ of the legendary teacher Robert Henri, Hopper struggled to assert himself as a serious artist in the tradition of older contemporaries such as John Sloan. Sojourns in Paris shaped his erotic sensibilities while undermining his allegiance to the cultural nationalism then dominant in the American art world. At age 41, just as he began to receive serious recognition, Hopper married painter Jo Nivison. The diary that she kept during the remaining 40-plus years of Hopper's life serves as Levin's key source. While Edward produced his most successful works, Jo played a crucial role as model, collaborator, and goad. Her own career, however, remained stalled. Jo's resentment of Edward's crueltiesfrom his refusal to allow her to drive to his physical attacks on herreinforced her bitterness toward him and the art world generally for belittling her work. Jo's diary records the agony that Edward's painter's block brought them both. The deep motivation for his torturous pace remains an enigma here, however. While reporting Jo's diagnoses of Edward's sadism, Levin never really fleshes out the psychological profile that her early chapters promise. All the same, Levin provides a crucial reference work for further research on the master. Depressing, at times tedious, yet nonetheless compelling, this book bears well the inevitable comparison to one of Hopper's signature tableaus. (100 drawings and photos, not seen) (Author tour)

Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1995

ISBN: 0-394-54664-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995

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INSIDE THE DREAM PALACE

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF NEW YORK'S LEGENDARY CHELSEA HOTEL

A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.

A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.

Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.

A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.

Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013

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HUMANS OF NEW YORK

STORIES

A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.

Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.

Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.

A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.

Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4

Page Count: 432

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015

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