I’m aware that the first posts on this website’s art gallery are ironically tone-deaf. Here is a place I claim to devote to feminine introspection but I’ve populated it with paintings made by straight, white men. 

I knew this, and a few other things when I started. The first being that this was the springboard my above-average art appreciation gave me.  I didn’t study art history, but I took every art elective I could and engage with art where I can find it.

Which brings me to my second point: there is a reason these painters and pieces are the ones I can recall off the top of my head. They’re the images with which our culture saturates our curriculums and museums. 

Because of that, I came to my third conclusion. I knew finding female painters, accessing their work in-depth, and unearthing their life stories from the wrong side of a paywall takes work. 

All that considered, I figured I would start with the men whose subjects resonate with me and uncover the lesser-known influences of their work and how they could or couldn’t understand the women they painted. 

From there I would find the artists who weren’t straight men and could paint the feminine and gender non-conforming experience in earnest. In learning about these people, I’ve been lead into some very dark places. Not only did I come across untold stories of famous women and relative unknowns who should have been famous, but I also found disturbing truths about men I thought I knew pretty well. 

One of which I’d already written three posts praising: Edward Hopper. 

The narrative I’d been given is that Edward was married to an artist, aloof and enigmatic, she sat as his model and valued her own space. It was this longing to be close to a complicated woman that motivated Hopper to immortalize loneliness in his art.  

When I found this podcast about the life, marriage, and career of the woman in question, Josephine Nivison Hopper, I realized the persona of Edward Hopper we’ve cultivated is hot freaking garbage. 

Listening to this will permanently warp your view of Edward Hopper’s work. It also illustrates a life filled with physical and sexual abuse, so please take care of yourself and avoid this episode if that’s not something you want to engage with. 

Before listening to this episode, I carried a deep admiration for Hopper’s work. There was longing in his muted pallets, acceptance in the beautified loneliness of desolate space, and romance with the inexorable abstrusity of someone else’s mind. 

But isn’t that the beauty of art? It’s the reason we’ve been given permission to kill off the artist in our minds.

We can still project ourselves onto the canvas and relate to a work on a level the creator could have never imagined. The responsibility that confers, however, makes us accountable for the truth. We might not always find it, but we should look. And when we come across the truth, no matter how nauseating the twisted shape of it is, we need to include it in the narratives we tell. 

I wouldn’t expect Edward Hopper’s work to come off the walls of The Art Institute of Chicago or have The Hopper House shuttered. It is about time, however, that we add Josephine Nivison Hopper, the abuse she suffered, and the influence she gave into the story we tell about the man she married. 

As for my own responsibility, all posts about his work have been edited to reflect both what I wish the piece was about and who the woman in the painting actually was.