For most of his life, Edward Hopper lived and worked on the top floor of a walk-up building overlooking Washington. He had no refrigerator or toilet and had to climb 74 steps with sacks loaded with charcoal to keep warm. First alone, then with Josephine Verstille Nivison, an old art school classmate whom everyone called Jo, whom he married in 1924. She was 41 years old, making her way in the art world and still a virgin; He was about to turn 42 and was a failed artist who couldn't sell a painting. They did not separate until the painter's death, in the spring of 1967, remaining in that tiny studio isolated from the world, like two hermits, eating cans (Jo refused to cook), entangled in each other, engaged in violent discussions that They often came to blows. In the diaries found by historian Gail Levin, Jo confesses that on one occasion "it bit him to the bone" and describes his sexual life as a horror, with rapes and "attacks from behind", slaps and uncontrolled beatings that left him with large bruises.
An abyss separated them. Lanky, rigid and restless in appearance, Hopper was a lonely and taciturn soul, emotionally frozen and repressed, like some of the protagonists of his paintings; Jo was a tiny woman with a strong temperament, sociable and talkative. Before her marriage she had exhibited at the New Gallery alongside Modigliani, Picasso and Magritte, and it was on her recommendation that the Brooklyn Museum included Hopper in a collective and bought his first work in ten years. But as Hopper's career took off on the path to overwhelming success, his withered until it was almost completely diluted. His watercolors became “poor stillborn babies.” Jo was in charge of Hopper's correspondence, kept a record of his works, and was the model for all of his paintings, clothed, naked, sometimes recognizable and sometimes disfigured, collapsed in an office, sitting at a bar counter absorbed in her thoughts or dancing in heels on a cabaret stage. She locked in her paintings.
She loved Hopper and spoke of his works as “her children,” but he did everything in his power to stop her from painting, discouraging her, criticizing her, and making fun of her “nice little talent.” “Isn't it nice to have a wife who paints?” she asked him once. “It stinks,” he replied. In Hopper: An American Love Story, Phil Grabsky's film screened this weekend at the Dart festival, we see the tenderness, fury, rivalry, disdain, resentment, rejection, dependence and misery of a relationship in which one only manages to be by silencing the voice of the other. There are many ways to die. Jo she did it struck down under the scorching light of her husband's paintings, she away from everyone, abandoned to her fate in the midst of the terrible sadness of her urban landscapes.
