Josephine Nivison Hopper

Jo Nivison was an established artist before she married Edward Hopper. But her art career quickly became secondary to Ed's, and their life together, which is often described as a great collaboration, was really far darker than that.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. The top
of this one is silly, which is good because it's
not all silly and we need a little but a

(00:22):
few weeks back, my husband and I went to Chicago
to meet up with some friends. This was kind of
in that magical calendar window where we were all vaccinated
and the delta variant had not had its big surge yet,
and we were trying to celebrate some stuff that we
didn't get to do during uh, you know, the more
everybody stay in their house parts of the pandemic. And
one of the things we did during that trip was

(00:44):
visit the Art Institute of Chicago. And my beloved had
this list of art pieces that he wanted to see,
which is unusual for him, like he likes art, but
he doesn't have that like I gotta see this artist
I got. He's more like, let's wander around and see
what we like. And I it took me a little
while to realize what he was doing and how he

(01:04):
had selected the pieces that he wanted to see, and
then I realized, honey, are we doing Ferris Bueller right now?
And he was like, yes, we are, awesome. So he
had made a list of all of the pieces of
art from that section of the movie where they're at
the art Institute, and he had even told my best friend,

(01:25):
because she lives outside Chicago and knows where everything isn't
that museum, and it just cracked me up. That's hilarious.
That's maybe the lightest part of this episode, because one
of those paintings was, of course Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, which
is famous, and we went and looked at it, and
it reminded me that Hopper has been on my list

(01:46):
as a potential podcast topic for a very long time. Well,
as I started my research, I realized that the episode
that I really wanted to do was actually about his wife,
Josephine Nivison. She he was an artist as well, but
her art career kind of gets pretty murky to the
point I'm almost vanishing after the two became a couple,

(02:07):
and that story is kind of a Pandora's Box situation.
Their relationship is often discussed in these really romantic terms
as like this great artistic collaboration and they did collaborate,
but it was not a great situation. So apologies upfront
because this is a bummer episode for a few reasons.

(02:28):
And one of those reasons is that we have to
give a warning here that we were going to be
talking about domestic violence. That is a hard topic. So
do whatever you need to do as a listener, jump
over this one if you need to. Uh. It also
may change sure feelings about Edward Hopper's work if you
love it, so fair warning. Josephine Versteel Nivison was born

(02:48):
on March eighteenth, eight three in New York City. Their
home life was pretty unconventional sometimes it's described as even chaotic.
Her mother, Mary Anne, didn't really believe even rules, and
her father, El Dorado, was a struggling musician and a
music teacher. He was similarly inclined to having this really
unstructured parenting style. The Nificence also moved a lot because

(03:13):
their finances were just pretty thin all the time. Yeah.
In one account, she also mentioned that her father had
some anger issues as well, so it really was very chaotic.
And Josephine was the second of three children. She had
an older brother who died when they were still really
just kids, and then a younger brother named Charles, when

(03:33):
the family's only daughter was headstrong from infancy, it seemed.
And at one point when a family friend was visiting
when she was like just a year and a half old,
and this family friend told Marianne that she really was
going to need to curtail Josephine's temper. Mary Anne responded, quote,
I'll do nothing of the sort. She may need it sometime.
Josephine loved books as a child, but because she lived

(03:57):
this sort of surreal and un able home life, the
worlds that were in those books became her reality in
a lot of ways. This was so much so that
she later said, quote, what a shock for me to
find out life is not like books. I who had
done Shakespeare at ten and loved ideas for themselves with
no background for digestions, so ideas stayed ideas and fastened

(04:22):
themselves to my backbone. When Josephine, who went by Joe,
was seventeen, she enrolled in Normal College of New York
that is now Hunter College. It's part of the City
University of New York system. And this was kind of
intended to put Joe on a career path as a teacher.
That was what Normal College, within all women's student body,
specialized in. She studied literature and drama, as well as

(04:45):
French and Latin, but art was already an important part
of her life. She had some of her drawings published
in the school's yearbook, The Wistarian and the school paper,
which was called The Echo. After she finished at Normal
School with her bachelor's degree, o moved not into teaching
but to the New York School of Art. There she
met Robert Henry, who became her teacher and mentor. In

(05:10):
Henry painted a portrait of her. And this is a
life sized portrait. It's titled The Art Student and it
shows twenty two year old Nivison in full figure. She's
standing with her body facing slightly to the left of
the painting, but her gaze is squarely on the viewer.
She's wearing what looks like a red floral dress with

(05:30):
a white lace collar. We only see a little bit
of it, and most of her figure is covered by
a black smock. Her left arm, which is dangling in
front of her, ends in a hand holding multiple artist brushes.
This painting was made around the same time Josephine would
have met her future husband, although the two of them
didn't connect romantically until much later. Henry wrote about the

(05:53):
moment that he was inspired to paint Joe's portrait, saying, quote,
she was standing in her old paints battered April at
the close of the lesson, with her paint brushes clutched
firmly in her little fist, listening to a conversation. She
seemed a little human question mark, and everything about her,
even the line of the dress, suggested the idea. I

(06:14):
wanted to paint her just as she was, and I
asked her to pose for me the next day. I
was afraid she couldn't assume the same pose and the
same look, But it happened that as she entered my
studio she fell into the same energetic, questioning attitude. I
had to paint very rapidly to get it. After Nivison
graduated from art school, she managed to make a living

(06:35):
as an artist, She said, Okay, she sold drawings to
various periodicals to make ends meet. That included the Evening
Post in the New York Tribune. She also taught art
and elementary schools, and that's a job that she held
for years. Yeah, she had more than a decade of
teaching experience in her life. But though she was teaching
kids the basics by day and how to express themselves

(06:57):
in her spare time, she was engaging with the avant
garde art scene in New York and specifically in Greenwich Village,
and she was into the arts beyond her painting, though
she also danced, and she eventually started appearing in plays
with the Washington Square Players. She also continued to be
mentored as an artist by Robert Henry, and in seven

(07:18):
she went to Holland to take landscape and portrait painting
classes that he was teaching there. She also went to
Paris and Italy on that trip, and the artwork she
saw in Europe really opened her eyes to the world
of modern art. Up to the age of thirty, Joe
continued to live at home, but in nineteen o nine,
when she was still in her late twenties, her father died,

(07:39):
and then her mother and brother moved to Rhode Island.
A few years later to live with her mother's sisters.
Joe at this point chose to stay in New York.
She loved New York and would later say in her
life like it was such a happy accident that she
an artist, got to be born in New York and
didn't have to fight her way there uh and she
lived with a non family roommate for the first time

(08:00):
her life. She seems to have been pretty happy during
this time. She was outgoing, she had a circle of
friends in the art community, but though she was very
progressive and really quite liberal in her views, she was
behaviorally quite conservative. She was not a party girl by
any means. She didn't drink, she didn't have any serious
romantic relationships, and when she had friends over for parties

(08:21):
she served tea instead of cocktails. She had her first
group show at the age of thirty one. That was
in nineteen fourteen, and this was no small affair in
terms of historical art placement. Alongside her work were pieces
by man Ray and William Zorak, as well as others.
She spent the second half of the nineteen teens teaching,

(08:41):
appearing on stage, and then in nineteen eighteen volunteering for
the Red Cross. She was shipped off to France, where
she was assigned to work in occupational therapy and the
hospital at baudas Are, but she got severe bronchitis and
was admitted to the hospital as a patient not long
after she arrived in late nineteen eighteen. By the end

(09:02):
of January nineteen nineteen, she was back in New York
for recovery, and after several weeks she was deemed unfit
to return to work in France. She had also during
this time lost her teaching job. She had taken a
leave of absence so she could do that Red Cross work,
but the Board of Education did not hold her job
for her, and so soon she was scrambling to make

(09:24):
ends meet. I have to wonder if some of this
isn't a calendar logistics issue, Like they're like, we didn't
know you were coming right back um where she was
expected to be gone for quite a while. So she
ended up having to move into a very tiny, cold
studio uh and managed to get some showings at a
bookshop in the Yale Club Building called Sunwise Turn. In

(09:45):
the nineteen twenty New York Telephone Directory, Joe opted to
list her profession as artist. She also fibbed about her
age in the census that year. She shaved seven years
off to claim that she was twenty nine. She also
took another teaching job. She helped keep sick children at
Willard Parker Hospital up to date on their schoolwork. Unfortunately, though,

(10:07):
she caught diphtheria and that continued to affect her health
well into the summer. Joe moved into a new studio.
This was a fourth floor place with no bathroom in
the Vanderbilt Studios, and immediately she started showing her work.
They're kind of mounting her own mini shows, and she
also adopted a streetcat named Arthur during this time. Also

(10:30):
marked this really financially astute move on Nivisson's part. She
had thought and made this case that she had not
been told about the potential health risks of her teaching
assignment at the hospital's Ward School, and she ended up
negotiating for early retirement with lifetime disability pay at her
existing salary of seventeen hundred fifty dollars a year, because

(10:52):
she did have ongoing effects from that illness. But this
negotiation she did meant that she could just focus on
her art and not worry instantly about money, and that
included getting to make summer visits to artist colonies. In
Nevison's watercolors were included at a showing new gallery with
several other prominent artists once again, William zax work was

(11:15):
alongside hers, as well as paintings by Magret, Picasso and Modiliani.
She showed there again in the spring with two watercolors,
and her finances were pretty secure. Her art career was
really starting to gain some momentum. So coming up, we'll
talk about Joe and Edward Hopper becoming a couple. But
before we do, let's pause for a word from our sponsors.

(11:46):
In three, Josephine and Edward re met. We say that
because they had met several times before. They first met
in art school, as we mentioned earlier, and then they
had run into each other on Cape cod at various
artists other ring some of these summer retreats that she
had started going to. She really only remembered that on
a previous meeting she was kind of bummed that he

(12:07):
didn't dance, because she thought he had great dancing legs
and she loved to dance. She also had at least
some social interaction with him in New York, although it's
a little unclear exactly how well the two knew each
other before nine three, although they did both have art
in the same show in late nineteen two at the
benemez own gallery of decorative Arts, so their paths crossed repeatedly.

(12:31):
And to look at the people they were at this
point in nineteen twenty three, where they meet up in
a more permanent sort of way, you would think that
Joe Nivison would become the famous one and Edward Hopper
would be more likely to recede into the background of
art history. Joe had started visiting artist colonies during the summers,
usually in New England, and it was at one of

(12:52):
these colonies in Gloucester, Massachusetts, that she ran into Edward
Hopper in the summer of nineteen twenty three. At that point,
Hopper was making his living doing etchings. He considered himself
an illustrator rather than a painter. The first words that
he said to her at the colony were apparently, hey,
I saw your cat yesterday. Because Arthur always traveled with Joe.

(13:17):
She really really loved that cat. While the two of
them had not particularly sparked earlier in their lives in
any kind of way, meeting in their forties at this
point their early forties, for both of them, they became
very close friends, and they started working on their art
next to one another and Joe's work in watercolor, and
some uh you know, kind of prodding on her part

(13:37):
and encouragement led Ed to also start working in the
same medium. They went on dates, and they grew closer
and closer, making something of an odd couple because Ed
was quite tall and Joe was very petite. And when
they returned to New York the romance continued. They started,
among other things, to visit a Chinese restaurant that would
later be featured in Hopper's now famous painting Chop. Suey

(13:59):
hop For wrote Joe notes in French, which was a
language they would use together for the rest of their lives.
And the autumn of nineteen twenty three, which followed the
summer where the two artists had reconnected, Josephine had six
of her watercolor paintings accepted into a show at the
Brooklyn Museum. That show included painters like John Singer Sergeant

(14:19):
and Georgia O'Keeffe. When she and Ed became reacquainted, he
had last sold a painting in nineteen thirteen, and so
here it was a decade later. Nivison decided to help
him by putting in a good word for him with
the museum, and they included six watercolors he had produced
while working with her in Gloucester, and they bought one
of his paintings. Critics really raved over Ed's pieces, and

(14:43):
bullied by this validation, Edward decided he was going to
pursue painting in earnest and taper off of his work
as an illustrator. In the summer of nine four, Joe
and Ed went back to the Gloucester Art Colony where
they had reconnected, and this time they went as new weds.
There had been no engagement. The pair had a fight

(15:04):
on July nine over whether they would go to Gloucester,
which was Ed's choice, or to Cape Cod, where Joe
wanted to go, and this argument ended with an agreement
that they would go to Gloucester and that they would
get married that day. So they hastily grabbed a friend
to be best man, and they went in search of
a minister who would perform the ceremony. That took a while.

(15:24):
They got turned down by a few because Ed was
apparently kind of kg whenever any of them asked about
their denomination. But by the end of the day they
were married, and so their trip to Gloucester that year
to paint was their honeymoon. This is such a weird
resolution to this argument to me, right, Like, it's one
of those things where the person who's like, they're really

(15:45):
their primary biographer in terms of covering their relationship and
not Hopper. It's like, you know, their reasons and their
logic for this whole thing was their own. They never
explained it to anybody, And I'm like, I got married
very quickly. This is a little Red Flagg to me. Yeah, yeah,
it's definitely not a compromise to go from either Gloucester

(16:07):
or Cape Cod too Gloucester. And also we're getting married
right this minute, Like yeah, so anyway, Um, They're often
described as having an artistic partnership with Joe as Ed's muse,
but this relationship was, by almost any standard, just very
very unhealthy. Joe and Ed Hopper seemed devoted to each

(16:30):
other in some ways, and particularly very publicly, but they
were also constantly locked in battle, and that battle often
turns to physical violence. From the very beginning of their marriage,
it seemed, going by Joe's journals, that Edward was just
dissatisfied with their roles. He had married a woman who
was finding some success in art. She was very independent,

(16:54):
and what he wanted was a housewife who had no
interests outside of pleasing him. And Joe realized that she
had married a man who would not ever want to
have a social life with anyone else, and that was
one of her great pleasures. Joe was also not particularly
inclined towards domesticity, as you'll recall, even in her own family,
the setup had been anything but traditional, So to suddenly

(17:18):
be expected to just cook and care for a man
who wanted a wife to be a domestic servant, that
was completely unexpected for her. She kept house but cooking
was just not happening. No, It appears in that argument
resolution of let's get married, they never had the what
do you want out of marriage discussion. Edward was also

(17:39):
jealous of Arthur and that she loved this cat so much.
He drew caricatures showing this jealousy. Arthur is depicted as
Joe's true love while ed waits on the floor for scraps.
Joe actually maintained her own studio space away from Edward
in the beginning of their marriage, in part just so
that she could keep Edward and Arthur apart, and it

(18:00):
was there that she would meet up with friends, never
at ed studio. In her journals, Joe wrote accounts about
their sex life that are just heartbreaking. They depict a
sexual mismatch that led to what amounts to assault on
her husband's part. According to her own account, she had
no real sexual experience when the two of them got married,

(18:21):
and she found that quote, the whole thing was entirely
for him, for his benefit. According to her journal, he
forbade her from speaking with other women about sex, so
she felt what she called subnormal, and she resigned herself
to not enjoying their sex life. She wrote, quote, I declared,

(18:42):
since that was the status quo of that, let him
have it all. I withdrew all my interests there was
my body. Let him take it. But I'd not consent
to be hurt too much, only a certain amount. Then
he set forth to build up, as neat, a little
job of inferiority complex for which I and my ignorance
was eligible. For Ed's part, he drew cartoons of himself

(19:06):
as the unfortunate husband of a frigid wife, vowing deeply
to Joe from the end of the bed while she
reads a book disinterested it makes me so sad, she
writes about herself, like in that hole. He doesn't want
her to talk to other people. Her logic is that
he is too embarrassed for other people to know that
he got a lemon. Just such a sad way to

(19:29):
perceive that whole situation for her, it breaks my heart. Uh.
The year the Hoppers married, Joe was invited to show
several of her pieces in Paris, and Edward also had
his first solo show that year at the gallery of
Frank km Wren. There were sixteen pieces of Ed's paintings included,
and they all sold. Wren represented Hopper for the rest

(19:50):
of his life. Joe's identity shifted significantly with her marriage
to Hopper, and in some ways that was slowly. In
other ways the changes were very a erupt A year
after they got married, Arthur had disappeared. An exhaustive search
for him had proved fruitless, so she gave up her studio.
She moved everything into the same space that Edward was

(20:13):
using because his career was on the rise, he needed
all the space that he had, so her paintings went
into basement storage when she finished them, along with most
of the items that she had moved with. It's really
almost the perfect metaphor for her identity as her own person.
During this time, she seemed to put herself away to

(20:33):
just live in Ed's world. When visitors came to the studio,
she wasn't allowed to show them what she had been
working on. Things were not all gloom. The two traveled
to Santa Fe in lieu of a New England summer trip.
Hopper didn't really find much inspiration in the US Southwest,
but he did have Joe pose for him for the

(20:54):
painting interior, which was later called model reading. If you
look for his paintings under the interior, you will get
a bunch of them, So nowadays it's kind of usually
said interior with model reading in parenthesis after it. And
this was the start of a dynamic of their relationship
that would become very important to both of them over
the years. Uh They also socialized during this trip, which

(21:16):
was a lot of fun for Joe, and while it
wasn't always smooth, it does seem like overall they both
enjoyed it. They had several similar trips throughout their marriage.
When they returned home, Ed turned in his last illustration
work and he was at that point officially exclusively a painter,
and although he was really starting to do well selling

(21:37):
his paintings, the Hoppers did not live extravagantly in the least.
Their Washington Square studio was on the top floor of
a building, and it was really rudimentary as a living space.
It had a skylight that made it a good workspace
for art, but in terms of other stuff, there was
no refrigerator, no toilet. They had to haul coal up

(21:59):
the stair to the fourth floor where they were to
have heat. The life that they lived there was also
not exactly filled with social activities. Most of their time
was spent alone, just the two of them in this
small space, eating their meals out of cans, and then
just growing increasingly irritated with one another. I feel like

(22:19):
this living set up without the context of their like
their their relationship issues there that were already having, like
that small of a space with two people in it,
and those meager circuits like that would have probably bread
some frustrations in the best of circumstances. Well, And it's
one of those things too, where they had both been
living on their own for so long, like they were

(22:42):
both in their forties when they got married, So to
suddenly like, I share everything with you would have been
an adjustment, like you said, even if everything about their
relationship was perfect other than that, and then in this
like to be packed in a little tiny space together
not good. In Nix, Joe had her first showing under

(23:03):
the name Josephine Hopper at the Whitney Museum. She had
another showing at the Whitney Studio Club the next year,
and one of the watercolors that she showed there was
called movie Theater. That same year, Ed painted a piece
called two on the Aisle that was the first of
his movie theater paintings, a theme for which he would

(23:23):
become famous. And it kind of seems like he got
the idea from her. While she continued to paints, it
fell off in frequency. At one point she wrote in
her diary quote, why don't I paints? Why? Indeed? On what? From?
Out of what inner gladness? Ed's career was prioritized always
he drew a literal line in their studio that she

(23:47):
was not allowed to cross, and unlike in that nineteen
three summer where they had worked side by side, she
was not supposed to come near him while he worked
his supplies were for him and him alone. There was
a very obvious jealousy and competitiveness in his behavior. If
she started to paint when he hadn't been feeling like it,

(24:09):
he had to jump up and paint yeah. As Hopper's
career began to release Skyrocket in his mid forties, Josephine,
who had made the introductions around the art world that
made that rise possible, started to manage all of the
administrative duties of his work. She continued to reach out
to art dealers on his behalf, kind of working as

(24:30):
his agent for any sales he was making outside of
that gallery arrangement he had, and she also managed his schedule.
If he had an exhibit, it was her job to
make sure the lighting and the placement of the art
was correct, and it was also her job to address
and deflect negative criticism. She seems to recognize Ed's future
importance in the place of US art history, and she

(24:53):
documented his work both as a matter of bookkeeping and
just to have a really thorough record. As he completed paintings,
she entered each one into a detailed log. She kept
an account book that described the work and included all
the relevant data about it the date that it was
started and completed, the arrangements of any loan outs that

(25:15):
may have Sometimes Hopper would write the paintings titles in
the book, but Joe would always annotate it with a
description of the image to make it clear what the
painting actually was. She was also pretty aware that as
her husband had found his footing as an artist and
made a name for himself in his career, that she
had gone in the opposite direction. She wrote, quote for

(25:37):
the female of the species, it's a fatal thing for
an artist to marry. Her consciousness is too much disturbed.
She can no longer live sufficiently within herself to produce.
But it's hard to accept this. If you've looked at
any of Edward Hopper's paintings from after he and Josephine
became romantically involved, you have seen Joe. Although she did

(26:00):
always looked like herself, she really became his only model.
So whether you're seeing an usher in a movie theater
in New York movie or the woman drinking late night
coffee with a gentleman in the Diner and Nighthawks, that's
all Joe. There's speculation that just as he was jealous
of her, in so many ways, this might have been

(26:20):
something that Joe insisted on due to her own jealousies
about her husband. It also seems that to some degree
this was a way for Joe to be part of
her husband's success since she wasn't being allowed success of
her own. Yeah, she also seemed to just enjoy that,
like in those moments she became the focus of his work,

(26:40):
like he paid attention to her in a way that
was not unkind. She wrote about being very, very proud
of posing for him and of being part of his
work in that way, and she really did seem to
love this aspect of their lives. She and ed collaborated
on the back stories of the characters that she inhabited
for his work, even giving them character names that only
they knew. We're going to get into some of the

(27:03):
darker aspects of Joe and Ed's marriage, so before we do,
we're going to take a break and have a word
from the sponsors that let us keep telling stories like
this one. After roughly the first decade of the Hoppers marriage,

(27:25):
things became more troubled. The conflicts between them heightened, as
Edward had done in the early stage of their marriage.
He once again began sketching critical caricatures and cartoons of
the two of them, including one called non Anger Man
pro Anger Woman. This shows him literally like a saint,
complete with a halo. It looks like a cartoon version

(27:47):
of a painting of a saint you might see, while
Joe is made to look like an irate, tiny pixie
haranguing him. Their relationship was strained even more when Joe,
who was frustrated, started to casually share details of their
life with some of Ed's colleagues and patrons. Since she
was handling a lot of his business, she noted when
he was lethargic and not productive, or even just that

(28:08):
he wasn't feeling well. They had started visiting South Truro
on Cape Cod in the summers, and they decided to
build a house there in the nineteen thirties, and of
course this came with its own stresses, particularly during the construction,
and as they're strange, often abrasive dynamic had developed over
the years. It had also, as we mentioned earlier, grown

(28:30):
physically violent. In her journals, Joe describes the two of
them getting into altercations really regularly. When they closed up
their Greenwich studio in May of nineteen thirty four for
the summer. She references the tense pre travel situation between
the two of them in her journal, writing quote E

(28:50):
feeling watched all his symptoms to the for all negotiation
and prohibition. I driven to scratch and bite he handed.
There's one, so his insistent driving in of the spurs
every time I glance at my list. When their tenth
anniversary arrived, there wasn't really a celebration, and two days

(29:12):
later Ed suggested that he could drive to pick up
his mother and sister to visit their newly finished house
in South Truro. She had been hoping the house would
be done in time for them to have a party,
and that did not work out. She was so frustrated
at the idea that, in the midst of still moving
and getting the house settled, he thought it would be
fine for her to also have to cook for and

(29:33):
look after guests. That Joe wrote to a friend about
all of this. It is also tied up in how
angry Ed seemed to get when she found a bolt
of inspiration to paint. So as I'm reading this excerpt
from this letter, know that she's kind of like merging
these two issues they're having into one. She writes, quote
ed is the very center of my universe. If I'm

(29:53):
on the point of being very happy, he sees to
it that I'm not. If I am happy, ever, and
not too ex austed, I might want to paint. He's
better fed, more blithomely fed during the infrequent periods when
I do paint, but it riles him. She also wrote
to his family and said that it was just a
really bad time for visitors, which caused more strife between them.

(30:16):
Joe writes his things to send to a darker place
between them, where violence is a lot more common that quote.
If he cuffs, I'll scratch. What else is there to do?
In protest? Edward, as we mentioned earlier, was a lot
larger than Joe, was about twice her size and weight
in addition to being much taller. She wrote that she

(30:38):
quote always found tallman exciting, not when they use that
extra span of arm length to swat me. Though Edward
additionally was constantly critical of Joe's painting, and when he
experienced a creative block that criticism became more cruel, and
this wounded her deeply. She wrote that being hit by

(31:00):
him was quote not as bad as meanness, there is
also really quite a sad metaphor that evolved between wife
and husband regarding their work. They didn't have kids, and
they started calling their paintings their children, which sounds kind
of cute on the surface and if you don't have context.
But as Josephine starts to use this metaphor to describe

(31:21):
her own work, the disparity of equality in their marriage
becomes clear. She starts calling her own paintings little bastards
and stillborn infants, and talks about how she's not in
a mental space where she could produce a healthy anything,
and she describes them to galleries as not being very good,
but adds that she loves them just like a mother would.

(31:42):
Ed's paintings she refers to as heirs. Joe's journal entries
as she and Ed reached twenty years of marriage together
are just deeply heartbreaking. She recognizes the loss of her
life to a marriage that seemed to bring neither herself
nor her husband much joy. In a letter to a friend,
she wrote that she had kept her nose out of

(32:04):
the art world and that she quote has come through
with absolutely nothing. She also wrote about how she felt
that ed had always controlled her. It had come out
at this point in their marriage that he had wished
that she would have just stopped painting when they married,
and she felt completely betrayed by this. She wrote, quote,

(32:25):
he certainly knew all the subtle ways of killing the
art instinct in me. The shock of learning that he
had any such wish way back when we were first
married nearly did the thing so incredible, so unspeakably low down,
and so in direct contradiction of all his attitude before
we married. The ghastliness of this one can't quite ever outlive.

(32:48):
Joe was in her early sixties at that time, and
seeing her husband's struggle to find inspiration, she grew even
sadder that she had given up so much of herself
and his interest. She wrote, quote, I've probably changed. I
used to have so many friends, but then I've been
seeing only his friends of late years, and people annoyed

(33:09):
at him for turning them down on juries to take
it out on me. Naturally, she knew the pain of
not being selected by her husband on a jury. He
had also turned down her work in a similar situation.
When the couple marked twenty five years of marriage together,
Joe said that they should get a quote quadrigare a

(33:31):
medal for distinguished combat. Ed in response, created a coat
of arms for them, featuring a rolling pin and a
ladle in reference to household items that they had used
to strike one another. In her journal at the time,
she notes sadly all that she felt she had lost
in their quarter century together, writing quote time passing, passing,

(33:51):
drop by drop of one's lifeblood, hair, grain, fashions changing
an entirely new slant on art rampant, and twenty five
years of my life gone. When Joe was seventy five,
she got a spring exhibit at a gallery run by
Herman Gulak. Ten of her paintings were included, and she
was elated to see all of her pieces together on

(34:14):
what she called, quote such a beautiful, serene wall, all
to myself and the pictures field they've gone to heaven.
Hopper did not go to the opening. He said that
his back was bothering him, but in a turnabout of
some of his earlier assessments of Joe's paintings, Edwards said
that hers was the only good work in the showing.

(34:37):
He sent several catalogs from the show to friends and
press with notes about Joe's work. Joe was described as
ecstatic anytime she visited the gallery, and she would twirl
around in delight. Her work was featured in the Christian
Science Monitor and The Villager, and reviews noted her paintings
as transforming and elevating the scenes of domestic interiors. We

(35:00):
have quoted a whole lot from Joe's journals, and it
is often really unpleasant, and to be honest, I left
out some of the more upsetting parts because you get
the idea. But as is often the case in unhealthy relationships,
when there is abuse, there is often codependency, and people
can become convinced that their love is more important than
any of the other stuff, even when that other stuff

(35:22):
is just awful. And this is also reflected in Joe's writings.
She wrote things like quote ed is the very center
of my universe. It's such blessedness that Edward and I
have each other. Surely I'll be allowed to go when
he does. It seems that from the very beginning, Joe
Nivison and Edward Hopper were so terribly mismatched, and they

(35:45):
brought out the absolute worst in each other. But they
also never entertain the thought of just not being together,
and that conflict of love and hate was also something
that Joe was definitely grappling with. She also wrote quote,
I can scarcely stay and e H, but how possibly
live without him? She did live without him, but only briefly.

(36:07):
Edward Hopper died on May fifteenth, nineteen sixty seven, and
their apartment at three Washington Square North. He was five.
Ten months later, on March six, night, Josephe Nivison Hopper
also died. She was buried with her husband in his
hometown of Nyack, New York. And when she died, Joe
left the entire body of her work and eds to

(36:30):
the Whitney Museum of American Art. This was a massive bequeathment,
including three thousand pieces. But this kind of turned out
to be a tragedy of its own because for a
long time, a lot of Joe's work was lost because
the museum didn't see her as the important artist. There
was a list of her work, but a lot of
the paintings themselves no one could find. Some of Joe's

(36:52):
work was attributed actually to ed and some of her
pieces about eight dozen were kind of given away as
gifts to various places like office buildings and hospitals. However,
while researching Joe for a book and two thousand, writer
Elizabeth Thompson Callery found two hundred of her paintings still
in the basement of the Whitney. Even now, though it's

(37:13):
hard to find Joe's work online, I know when I
was looking for artwork to share in our social media
for this did not find a lot. The Whitney has
two on their website. One is a watercolor portrait of
Bertram Hartman. The other is an undated oil painting of
wilted flowers titled Obituary. Both of them feature cats as

(37:33):
secondary elements to the composition. Maybe that is a nod
to the long lost Arthur. Other paintings have surfaced, including
in a large gift to the Provincetown Art Association and
Museum in twos which included art by both Joe and
ed and the museum has since mounted an exhibit of
their work in tandem. That gift came from a private collector.

(37:56):
In recent years, as Joe's story has become more well known,
there have been a few additional exhibitions of her work,
including one at the Edward Hopper House Art Center. In Nyack.
If you're interested in reading more of Joe's journals, they're
quoted extensively by art historian and author Gail Levin in
her book Edward Hopper and Intimate Biography. Yeah, those journals

(38:19):
are not publicly available. She got access to them in
the archives where they are um and it's interesting because
it's an ostensibly a biography of Edward Hopper, but it
really is very much about the two of them and
is kind of the first instance where Joe's story really
plays out through her own words. Very frustrating episode, search

(38:43):
and work on which we'll talk about some more behind
the scenes. I'm sure do you have some listener mail.
I do, and I wanted to do a funny one
because this was such a bummer episode. This is from
our listener, Jessica. She reads Hi, Tracy, and Holly. I
recently listened to the unearthed July edition and you're related
behind the scenes episode. I was tickled by your passionate

(39:06):
discussion of library fines and can definitely relate by the way,
but it also reminded me of a library story of
my own. Many years ago. I was living with a
boyfriend from Washington State when he had been in school
in Spokane. He had gone with a friend to get
a library card at the local public library, and for
some reason I think having to do with proper I
d they refused to give him a library card. This

(39:28):
became a big joke amongst his friends he the most
mild mannered guy, was too dangerous and suspicious to be
issued a library card. Many moons later, he accompanied me
to the Library of Congress, where I was getting a
reader's card to do some research for a paper I
was writing for law school. Since he was there and
I think they wouldn't let him come with me unless
he had one, he applied for a reader's card as

(39:49):
well and got one. As soon as we left. He
took a picture and sent it to his friends quote,
I can get a library card for the Library of Congress,
but not the Spokane Public Library. Thanks as always for
the work you put into entertaining history lovers like me.
It's nice to know I'm not alone in my nursery. Jessica,

(40:09):
thank you for this. It's so charming and was a
perfect way to uh mitigate some of the down earnus
of this episode. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History podcast at iHeart radio
dot com. You can also find us on social media
as Missed in History pretty much everywhere, And if you
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(40:30):
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