Obituary
By Josephine Nivison Hopper, 1968
American Impressionism
*** Before you read, please know that this article will reference physical and sexual abuse.
Feel free to let Sally narrate this one for you.
Growing up, Josephine Nivison had a pestering Aunt advise her mother to “curtail her temper”, to which her mother wisely responded: “I’ll do nothing of the sort, she may need it sometime.”
The events of Josephine’s life made her deeply angry so, all things considered, a temper wasn’t unhelpful to have. However, Jo suffered the consequences of a world where women were (as they still are) acceptable targets for the abuse of an insecure man. Rage, righteous or otherwise, was not be enough to protect Jo. What she really needed was emancipation.
Had she not been captive to a system that legally prioritizes a man’s pride over a woman’s existence, Jo could have lived her life with agency. And as a result, American art could have inherited the vibrant legacy of a forward-thinking woman. Instead, we are left only with her obituary, pages of private calls for help, and a misplaced admiration for her husband, Edward Hopper.
Born with the surname Nivison, Josephine died twice without it. Once in 1924 when she took the last name that would legally, and emotionally force Jo Nivison into her first grave. And again, on a damp day in March 1968, when Josephine’s body caught up with her maiden soul, and she passed away one last time.
While Obituary was painted during Jo’s final year, it reads as if she spent her waning days unbothered by death, mourning, instead, the life she’d lost decades before. With her last work, Josephine finally created an obituary for the woman who’d long since been buried alive under a thin band of gold.
It’s distressing, yet fitting that this painting is one of two The Whitney Museum displays of hers on their website. Fitting and wholly unnecessary since Josephine bequeathed the sum total of the couple’s work to the museum over 50 years ago after she died. Of course, Edward’s work they listed methodically, but Obituary and a watercolor portrait of another man are the only works from Josephine’s catalog that the public has access to. That is if you don’t count the pieces the museum misattributed to Edward.
These sort of careless omissions lead people to believe that Josephine Nivison was the muse of an enigmatic artist. What’s being slowly revealed to us, however, is that Edward wasn’t inspired by Josephine, he victimized her, stealing whatever he needed from her to be cast as the master we see him as today.
While it’s true Josephine sat as the model for pretty much every person in Hopper’s work, she wasn’t a semi-creative prop, she was primed to be an artist herself.
Before her marriage, she was an up-and-coming painter in the Greenwich Village Avant-Garde scene. It’s during this time in her life that she became mentee to Robert Henri, but Nivison didn’t settle on just painting alone. She also acted with the Washington Square Players, sold drawings to The Evening Post and New York Tribune, and taught art in New York Schools.
Josephine remained a driven visionary even after contracting Diphtheria as a result of her teaching job. Although the illness affected her health until her death, it became an ironic silver lining when Jo made the bold move to sue the New York school system for their role in subjecting her to the illness. She won, becoming financially independent from then on. Now liberated from work, Josephine took an unbridled dive into the depths of her artistic self.
Nivison began visiting artists’ colonies across the northeastern United States, developing her talents, honing her voice, and connecting herself to the art world. While these travels introduced her to herself they are unfortunately the reason she met the monster she would later marry.
Having had an unremarkable meeting once before, Jo reconnected with Edward Hopper in 1923 at an artist colony in Gloucester, Massachusetts. By 1924 they were married. The engagement appeared to be the resolution to an argument that broke out when Jo wanted to vacation in Cape Cod despite Hopper preferring they go back to Gloucester. It’s unclear to everyone but them how or why it happened, but after the disagreement, they ended up in Gloucester, married.
The visual clues in Obituary and Josephine’s private letters make it clear she was gripped by life-long remorse over the marriage. At the beginning of their courtship, Edward seemed to have a green thumb that tended her garden well. Quickly after their nuptials though, Jo came to realize that Edward hated both who she was and the woman she aspired to be. The artist Ed married, and the master she could become inspired him to jealousy, perhaps because he knew deep down that Josephine possessed a genius that might outshine his.
By channeling his envy for her into cruelty, Hopper eradicated every ounce of artistic instinct Jo had, either by belittling it or taking it for himself. His competitive nature wasn’t just a sadistically subtle manipulation of Jo’s self-worth, it was also childishly obvious. If he couldn’t stop Jo from painting outright, then he’d drop anything and everything to work in the studio if she was in there alone.
In reality, Edward should have been grateful for Josephine’s talent considering he discovered a lot of what made his art famous through his proximity to her. It was her connections that got him back into the art scene, and her encouragement convinced him to switch from illustrations to watercolors. As they worked together Ed adopted her themes of movie theaters and isolated farmhouses, making them quintessentially Hopper-esque by the end of his career.
It’s no coincidence that when they had their second meeting in 1923, Josephine had 6 watercolors in a show at the Brooklynn Art Museum, while Ed hadn’t sold a painting in over a decade. By the time they died though, Edward Hopper was a legend while Jo Nivison barely existed.
This wasn’t just a passive consequence of the patriarchy, it was a concerted effort on Edward’s part.
Despite the pivotal ways Jo’s artistic labor accelerated Hopper’s career, Edward detested that she hadn’t given up painting when they married. He was jealous, yes, but he also expected her to take up the roles of housewife and domestic worker. When she didn’t, he expressed his resentment by demeaning her paintings and physically abusing her.
His growing fame did nothing to satisfy his turbulent insecurities or rethink his unreasonable expectations. Instead, his competitiveness grew. Edward went so far as to draw a literal line down the center of their shared studio. Anything on his side was for his use only, and when Jo finished a piece, it had to be moved into the basement immediately. Another rule Edward enforced forbid Jo from showing her work to the visitors they hosted in the studio.
But his sickening directives didn’t stop there.
Having been a virgin when she married Edward, Josephine knew little of sex. Ed made sure it stayed that way by barring her from discussing the topic with other women. As a result, Jo felt “sub-human” and relinquished any and all sexual pleasure. Her body, as she described it, belonged to him. During the decades they were married, Edward Hopper behaved as if he owned Jo. And by the end of her life, most of Josephine’s sexual experiences could be classified as assault.
It’s clear Josephine Nivison wants you to know that this is how she actually died. When she painted Obituary, she knew that the woman they’d burry alongside the darling of American realism would be another person entirely.
History’s obituary would be about this other woman, the one Edward painted her to be. This woman is the charmingly creative wife of a brilliant artist, smart enough to inspire him to greatness but never good enough to outshine him.
To us, she’s hardly remembered as a person. Edward’s art has reduced her to a pair of legs casting odd shadows on a rented bed and exposed skin glistening in the first rays of light an Arizona sunrise.
We’ll think of her sitting belly-up at a diner counter, standing naked at her window, or reading in a Santa Fe hotel room. But Josephine knows that her real self isn’t on gallery walls. She’s invisible to us; stolen by a wedding ring, hidden behind a curtain, and layered in the pages of her journals.
In a way, Obituary lets Josephine be remembered in her own image.
She saw herself as a posy of wildflowers, cut to size in mid-spring and left to wilt. In this painting she can live on as a pair of gulls floating freely with the New England sea breeze. Here, she’ll forever keep the company of her beloved cat, Arthur in a home that’s finally unburdened itself of Edward’s jealous hate.
To say it’s a shame that there are so few details about the real Jo or Ed for that matter is a criminal understatement. But while she may be long since departed, we can still uncover the women Josephine Nivison was and the man Edward Hopper wasn’t.
Not only can we take a piece of her pain with us by spending an empathetic moment with her Obituary, we can also amplify the voices speaking out on Josephine Nivison’s behalf.
I personally came across her story via the phenomenal podcast, Stuff You Missed in History Class, but the creators, Tracy V Wilson and Holly Frey based their research on the private letters Gail Levin published in her Edward Hopper biographies. For a shorter read, Senta Trömel-Plötz also wrote about Nivison’s private traumas for Fembios.
Each of these women’s work slowly recovers Josephine from the violent erasure inflicted on her by marrying a fragile man. It’s a fate shared by plenty of women less famous, less rich, and less white than Jo. Posthumously salvaging Josephine’s narrative will not dismantle the system that shaped hers and their lives.
We still live in a society that doesn’t believe women when they are victims of abuse and find it’s more convenient to just label their trauma response as hysteria. Until our laws and narratives around abuse change, nothing else will.
Hopefully though, telling stories like Josephine’s will motive us to recognize red flags when we see them and second guess the stories we’ve been told about people who haven’t used their own voice to tell them.
