Content provided in partnership with
Icons of the West: Frederic Remington's Sculpture. - book reviews
Art Journal, Fall, 1997 by Roberta K. Tarbell
The fatalistic, melancholic Edward Hopper (1882-1967), who told Brian O'Doherty in 1963 that "Ninety percent of [artists] are forgotten ten minutes after they're dead,"(1) would have been astounded at the crowds at and the publicity for Edward Hopper and the American Imagination, the exhibition of his masterworks at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and for the four books about him published in 1995.(2) Of these, Gall Levin's catalogue raisonne of his illustrations, paintings, and watercolors is the most scholarly and encyclopedic monograph ever produced on the artist and a landmark publication for the history of art. The reader encounters the largest number of unpublished works and enjoys the greatest sense of discovery in the volume of his 357 documented watercolor paintings, which possess a haunting immediacy and a freshness different from the more staged compositions of his oils. The long-term value of the large-scale, high-quality reproductions in this volume is especially obvious to those who saw Paul Cezanne's faded watercolors in his retrospective exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art last year.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
Although the selection of the works to be included in a catalogue raisonne is the result of sophisticated connoisseurship, archival documentation, and scientific and technical analyses, it ultimately rests upon the author's intuitive and reasoned decisions. Gall Levin, a professor of art history at Baruch College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York, is the acknowledged expert on Edward and Josephine Hopper. For the last twenty years, she has assiduously investigated their art, lives, and archives. A prodigious and productive researcher, writer, curator, and professor, her meticulous documentation of Hopper's pictorial works is presented in three volumes and a CD-ROM.
The pristine character of the finished catalogue and the superb quality of its six hundred color illustrations mask the formidable obstacles of decades of work. Levin traveled thousands of miles internationally to examine works (some of which were ultimately fakes); faced difficulties in locating and/or gaining access to archival materials, works, and photographs; wrestled with the problems of establishing the chronological order within each medium; and made judgment calls on the authorship of paintings. She defines her authorial role in the introduction to her comprehensive biography of Edward Hopper, also published in 1995:
By definition, a catalogue raisonne employs methodical scholarship to gather and digest in systematic form all that can be known of an artist's work and life. Beginning the project at the [Whitney] museum [in 1976], I expected to find Hopper's papers, including the letters he kept, the photographs, books, and phonograph records that he and his wife owned: in short the evidence of his intellectual and cultural activity. I searched in vain.(3)
With her talent for tracking down elusive archival materials, Levin nevertheless amassed an impressive body of new primary and secondary resources for this authoritative catalogue raisonne.
During her tenure as curator of the Hopper Collection at the Whitney from 1976 to 1984, Levin produced three exhibition catalogues on the artist: Edward Hopper: The Complete Prints (1979), Edward Hopper as Illustrator (1979), and Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist (1980)? Hopper's association with organizations sponsored by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney predated the museum's founding in 1930 and was facilitated especially through the encouragement of his friends Guy Pene du Bois and Lloyd Goodrich. First as curator and then as director of the Whitney (1935-68), Goodrich thrust the reclusive painter's work before the public's eyes.(5) In Edward Hopper: Selections from the Hopper Bequest to the Whitney Museum of American Art (1971), he wrote that most of the two thousand pictures bequeathed had never been recorded, exhibited, or reproduced, a deficiency Levin has remedied.(6)
Her ongoing and unique contributions to Hopper scholarship include not only rigorous documentation and publication of countless works never before represented in the literature, but also manifest the convictions of her own generation of revisionist scholars. Fully recognizing the importance of Jo Hopper as an artist, chronicler, and registrar, which Goodrich had discounted, Levin consulted Jo Hopper's diaries and handwritten Record Books of Edward Hopper's works, to which he added occasional comments. Levin also determined that a few of the works in the Hopper Collection were executed by Jo Hopper, instead of by her husband, to whom they had been attributed. In addition, although Hopper had so little regard for his published illustrations that he left no written documentation of them, and although Goodrich found them unworthy of attention, Levin recognized their aesthetic and historical significance. She even tracked down his commissioned works for periodicals, which were undocumented in proofs or original drawings in the Hopper Collection. Unusually knowledgeable about American and European art of the last one hundred years, Levin is at her best when she places Hopper in his cultural and art-historical contexts.
