The Lonely City - Olivia Laing

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alluring experience of urban living.

      His scenes – of women glimpsed through windows, of disordered bedrooms and tense interiors – were improvised from things he saw or half saw on long walks around Manhattan. ‘They are not factual,’ he said much later. ‘Perhaps there were a very few of them that were. You can’t go out and look up at an apartment and stand in the street and paint but many things have been suggested by the city.’ And elsewhere: ‘The interior itself was my main interest . . . simply a piece of New York, the city that interests me so much.’

      None of these drawings show crowds, of course, though the crowd is surely the signature sight of the city. Instead they focus on the experience of isolation: of people alone or in awkward, uncommunicative couples. It’s the same limited and voyeuristic view that Alfred Hitchcock would later subject James Stewart to in the Hopperesque Rear Window, a film that is likewise about the dangerous visual intimacy of urban living, of being able to survey strangers inside what were once private chambers.

      Among the many people Stewart’s character L. B. Jeffries watches over from his Greenwich Village apartment are two female figures who might have walked straight out of a Hopper painting. Miss Torso is a sexy blonde, though her popularity is more superficial than it initially appears, while Miss Lonelyhearts is an unhappy, not quite attractive spinster, consistently displayed in situations that attest to her inability to find either companionship or contentment in solitude. She’s seen preparing dinner for an imaginary lover, weeping and consoling herself with alcohol, picking up a stranger, then fighting him off when his advances go too far.

      In one excruciating scene, Jeffries watches through a zoom lens as she makes herself up in a mirror, dressed in an emerald green suit, before putting on large black glasses to assess the effect. The act is intensely private, not intended for spectators. Instead of displaying the polished exterior she’s so painstakingly produced, what she inadvertently reveals instead is her longing and vulnerability, her desire to be desirable, her fear that she’s running short on what remains for women a chief currency of exchange. Hopper’s paintings are full of women like her; women who appear to be in the grips of a loneliness that has to do with gender and unattainable standards of appearance, and that gets increasingly toxic and strangulating with age.

      But if Jeffries is performing Hopper’s characteristic gaze – cool, curious, detached – then Hitchcock is also at pains to show how voyeurism works to isolate the viewer as well as the viewed. In Rear Window voyeurism is explicitly presented as an escape from intimacy, a way of side-stepping real emotional demands. Jeffries prefers watching to participating; his obsessive scrutiny is a way of remaining emotionally aloof from both his girlfriend and the neighbours on whom he spies. It’s only gradually that he is drawn into investment and commitment, becoming literally as well as figuratively engaged.

      A rangy man who likes to spy on others, and who must learn to accommodate a flesh and blood woman in his life: Rear Window mimics or mirrors more than just the contents of Hopper’s art. It also reflects the contours of his emotional life, the conflict between detachment and need that was lived out in actuality as well as expressed in coloured streaks of paint on canvas, in scenes repeated over many years.

      In 1923, he re-encountered a woman with whom he’d studied at art school. Josephine Nivison, known as Jo, was tiny and tempestuous: a talkative, hot-tempered, sociable woman who’d been living alone in the West Village after the death of her parents, doggedly making her way as an artist, though she was crushingly short on funds. They bonded over a shared love of French culture and that summer began haltingly to date. The next year, they married. She was forty-one and still a virgin, and he was almost forty-two. Both must have considered the possibility that they would remain alone for good, having gone so far beyond the then conventional age for marriage.

      The Hoppers were only parted when Edward died in the spring of 1967. But though they were as a couple deeply enmeshed, their personalities, even their physical forms, were so diametrically opposed that they sometimes seemed like caricatures of the gulf between men and women. As soon as Jo gave up her studio and moved into Edward’s marginally more salubrious room on Washington Square, her own career, previously much fought for, much defended, dwindled away to almost nothing: a few soft, impressionistic paintings here and there; an occasional group show.

      In part this was because Jo poured her considerable energies into tending and nurturing her husband’s work: dealing with his correspondence, handling loan requests and needling him into painting. At her insistence, she also posed for all the women in his canvases. From 1923 on, every office worker and city girl was modelled for by Jo, sometimes dressed up and sometimes stripped down, sometimes recognisable and sometimes entirely rebuilt. The tall blonde usherette in 1939’s New York Movie, leaning pensively against a wall: that was based on her, as was the leggy red-haired burlesque dancer in 1941’s Girlie Show, for which Jo modelled ‘without a stitch on in front of the stove – nothing but high heels in a lottery dance pose’.

      A model, yes; a rival, no. The other reason Jo’s career foundered is that her husband was profoundly opposed to its existence. Edward didn’t just fail to support Jo’s painting, but rather worked actively to discourage it, mocking and denigrating the few things she did manage to produce, and acting with great creativity and malice to limit the conditions in which she might paint. One of the most shocking elements of Gail Levin’s fascinating and enormously detailed Edward Hopper:An Intimate Biography, which draws closely on Jo’s unpublished diaries, is the violence into which the Hoppers’ relationship often degenerated. They had frequent rows, particularly over his attitude to her painting and her desire to drive their car, both potent symbols of autonomy and power. Some of these fights were physical: cuffings, slappings and scratchings, undignified struggles on the bedroom floor that left bruises as well as wounded feelings.

      As Levin observes, it is almost impossible to form a judgement of Jo Hopper’s work, since so little of it has survived. Edward left everything to his wife, asking that she bequeath his art to the Whitney, the institution with which he’d had the closest ties. After his death, she donated both his and the majority of her own artistic estates to the museum, even though she’d felt from the moment of her marriage that she’d been the victim of a boycott by the curators there. Her disquiet was not unwarranted. After her death, the Whitney discarded all her paintings, perhaps because of their calibre and perhaps because of the systematic undervaluing of women’s art against which she’d railed so bitterly in her own life.

      The silence of Hopper’s paintings becomes more toxic after the revelation of how violently he worked to suppress and check his wife. It isn’t easy to square the revelation of pettiness and savagery with the image of the suited man in polished shoes, his stately reticence, his immense reserve. Perhaps his own silence was part of it, though: some inability to communicate in ordinary language, some deep resentment around intimacy and need. ‘Any talk with me sends his eyes to the clock,’ Jo wrote in her diary in 1946. ‘It’s like taking the attention of an expensive specialist’ – behaviour that compounded her feeling of being ‘a rather lonely creature’, cut off and excluded from the artistic world.

      Just before the Hoppers got together, a fellow artist jotted down a pen-portrait of Edward. He started with the visual elements: the prominent masticating muscles, the strong teeth and big, unsensuous mouth, before moving on to the cool static way he painted: blocking things out, retaining control. He noted Hopper’s sincerity, his vast inhibitions and his wit, writing: ‘Should be married. But can’t imagine to what kind of a woman. The hunger of that man.’ A few lines on he repeated the phrase: ‘But the hunger of him, the hunger of him!’

      Hunger is also what’s communicated in Hopper’s cartoons, in which he abases himself before his primly elevated wife, a starving man, crouching on the floor while she eats at the table or kneeling in pious self-abnegation at the foot of her bed. And it flickers on and off in his paintings too, in the vast space he makes between men and women who share the same small rooms. Room in New York, say, which ripples with unexpressed frustration, unmet desire, violent restraint. Perhaps this is why his images are so resistant to entry, and so radiant with feeling. If the statement I declare myself in my paintings is to be taken at face value, then what is being declared is barriers and boundaries, wanted

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