Lovely design combines with extensive research to produce a compact, lucid biography of one of the 20th-century’s foremost American painters. Rubin follows up Andy Warhol: Pop Art Painter (2006) with another accessible narrative studded with full-color reproductions of the art under discussion. Hopper emerges as an artist practically from the cradle, youthful efforts presaging the exacting career to come. His development at art school and his interactions with contemporaries Rockwell Kent, Guy Pène du Bois and George Bellows receive thorough attention, as does his mid-life romance with another former classmate, Josephine Nivison, who married Hopper and served as model, colleague and partner for the rest of his life. Art criticism joins with biography to provide commentary on both the trajectory of his career and individual compositions themselves, the reader’s attention always drawn back to Hopper’s masterly use of light. Text and illustrations appear against soft pastel backgrounds that themselves vary light with shadow in exquisite complement to the subject. Thumbnail biographies of Hopper’s contemporaries appear in the backmatter, as does a bibliography, notes and a list of museums where readers can find Hopper’s work. (Biography. 8-12)
