EDWARD HOPPER

Portrait of a celebrated artist.

Art historian Shadwick makes an impressive debut with a comprehensive life of Edward Hopper (1882-1967) that considers the social, cultural, and political forces that shaped him as well as the myths created about him. Drawing on a rich trove of material newly available at the Whitney Museum of Art, Shadwick offers “context, proportion, and qualification” to the conception of Hopper as Puritan, individualistic, and quintessentially American. Although Hopper “prioritized the individual over the crowd, the personal over the social,” Shadwick argues that he felt a “passion for European culture”; he imbibed the “fumes of American nationalism,” but, by 1934, he distanced himself from American regionalist painters. Hopper grew up in the quiet Hudson River town of Nyack but gravitated to Manhattan to study at the New York School of Art, where his teachers included William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri. For many years, discouraged by a lack of recognition, he supported himself, resentfully, as a commercial artist. His personal life also gave cause for resentment: His marriage to artist Josephine Nivison in 1924 was dominated by conflict. Jo’s minutely detailed diaries reveal domestic tensions that sometimes erupted into abuse. Hopper’s reputation began to rise in the late 1920s with significant sales and, in 1933, an important retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which inaugurated decades of growing fame. Scrupulously following Hopper’s artistic development, Shadwick closely analyzes his works, many reproduced among the book’s 100 color and black-and-white images. He follows the couple on their travels, records the books each read, movies and plays they saw, exhibitions they attended, the juries Hopper served on, and the serious health problems that blighted their final years. In short, he has created a biography that deserves to be called definitive.

Prodigious research informs a penetrating study.