Considering how two pairs of artists weathered marriage

ART AND THE CRISIS OF MARRIAGE: EDWARD HOPPER AND GEORGIA O’KEEFFE

By Vivien Green Fryd

University of Chicago Press, $40, 228 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY ALEXANDER ELIOT

This volume is handsomely produced and packed with intriguing illlustrations, but Vivien Green Fryd’s text made me cross. It so happens that I knew the artists in question. I liked them, and respsected them enormously. I don’t see why they should be chosen to illustrate “Art and The Crisis of Marriage” in general. Both Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe were extremely special people — great, in fact. So their marriages were in no way typical.

I hate panning other people’s texts, and so I finally decided to pass on this one. At that point the author Jane Winslow Eliot — my wife of 50 years — volunteered to read it. She found it rather morbidly fascinating. When we were young, Jane reminded me, there was indeed a crisis atmosphere to marriage, plus lots of bittersweet discussion about it. All the couples whom we knew were somewhat unhappy together. They tended to stray, spat, and at least threaten divorce.

Upon reading the book, along with Jane’s numerous comments, I must admit that its socio-historical context seems sound after all; and Ms. Fryd’s research is rich in detailed information as opposed to vulgar gossip. Even so, she gets a good many things wrong. For example, she credits somebody else for my Time magazine cover story on Hopper.

“Jo,” his dear chirpy sparrow of a wife, was a painter in her own right, but not especially talented. Much as I liked her I politely ignored her work, and other art critics did the same. She stood glowing bravely in her husband’s glum shadow. That cannot have been easy, but I contest the assumption that Jo and Edward must therefore have suffered a miserable married life. Such was never my impression of the pair. I saw them as intense, totally involved, lifelong partners in a tremendous enterprise. Namely, Hopper’s prodigious effort to depict familiar aspects of our 20th-century American experience as seen through his own profound sensibility — the yearning, burning eyes of Eros in limbo.

So long as one presumes to stare down other people’s masterpieces with a fish-cold, psychoanalytical or socioscientific eye, one won’t come close to enjoying — let alone understanding — them. I’m not saying this as a criticism, but simply because I feel it must be said. You can’t squeeze genius into any sociological bottle, nor will it be caught in anybody’s butterfly net of psychological speculation.

Ms. Fryd devotes page after page to a solemnly detailed account of how Hopper’s only moderately successful “Girlie Show” (for which Jo posed) was made. She calls it: “One more battleground within their troubled marriage … the work became an active agent in a dialectic between husband and wife, artist and model, beholder and subject, male and female, and painter and manager.”

Then comes a curious cat-leap into another picture: “Even when Hopper did representations of Jo unclothed for works that do not function as preliminary drawings for final paintings, these informal images defy his tendency to sexualize the female body. In “Reclining Nude” Jo appears unaware of her husband’s presence. Her relaxed, informal position, combined with the lack of emphasis upon her breasts, indicates that when Jo is not ‘on show’ Hopper could render her in less voluptuous and sexually charged modes.”

In “Reclining Nude” there’s no “emphasis” on the breasts because in fact her back is turned and her shapely fundament is featured instead. To my own eye, “Girlie Show” contains no sexual charge, whereas this quick sketch is the sexiest and tenderest imaginable tribute to Jo — and a small paen to conjugal intimacy as well.

The lovely, affectionate watercolor called “Jo in Wyoming” shows Jo painting a landscape from the front seat of their car, Hopper has taken a back seat, for once, in order to depict her.

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