Josephine Nivison Hopper

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. The top of this one is silly, which is good because it's not all silly and we need a little but a few weeks back, my husband and I went to Chicago to meet up with some friends. This was kind of in that magical calendar window where we were all vaccinated and the delta variant had not had its big surge yet, and we were trying to celebrate some stuff that we didn't get to do during uh, you know, the more everybody stay in their house parts of the pandemic. And one of the things we did during that trip was visit the Art Institute of Chicago. And my beloved had this list of art pieces that he wanted to see, which is unusual for him, like he likes art, but he doesn't have that like I gotta see this artist I got. He's more like, let's wander around and see what we like. And I it took me a little while to realize what he was doing and how he had selected the pieces that he wanted to see, and then I realized, honey, are we doing Ferris Bueller right now? And he was like, yes, we are, awesome. So he had made a list of all of the pieces of art from that section of the movie where they're at the art Institute, and he had even told my best friend, because she lives outside Chicago and knows where everything isn't that museum, and it just cracked me up. That's hilarious. That's maybe the lightest part of this episode, because one of those paintings was, of course Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, which is famous, and we went and looked at it, and it reminded me that Hopper has been on my list as a potential podcast topic for a very long time. Well, as I started my research, I realized that the episode that I really wanted to do was actually about his wife, Josephine Nivison. She he was an artist as well, but her art career kind of gets pretty murky to the point I'm almost vanishing after the two became a couple, and that story is kind of a Pandora's Box situation. Their relationship is often discussed in these really romantic terms as like this great artistic collaboration and they did collaborate, but it was not a great situation. So apologies upfront because this is a bummer episode for a few reasons. And one of those reasons is that we have to give a warning here that we were going to be talking about domestic violence. That is a hard topic. So do whatever you need to do as a listener, jump over this one if you need to. Uh. It also may change sure feelings about Edward Hopper's work if you love it, so fair warning. Josephine Versteel Nivison was born on March eighteenth, eight three in New York City. Their home life was pretty unconventional sometimes it's described as even chaotic. Her mother, Mary Anne, didn't really believe even rules, and her father, El Dorado, was a struggling musician and a music teacher. He was similarly inclined to having this really unstructured parenting style. The Nificence also moved a lot because their finances were just pretty thin all the time. Yeah. In one account, she also mentioned that her father had some anger issues as well, so it really was very chaotic. And Josephine was the second of three children. She had an older brother who died when they were still really just kids, and then a younger brother named Charles, when the family's only daughter was headstrong from infancy, it seemed. And at one point when a family friend was visiting when she was like just a year and a half old, and this family friend told Marianne that she really was going to need to curtail Josephine's temper. Mary Anne responded, quote, I'll do nothing of the sort. She may need it sometime. Josephine loved books as a child, but because she lived this sort of surreal and un able home life, the worlds that were in those books became her reality in a lot of ways. This was so much so that she later said, quote, what a shock for me to find out life is not like books. I who had done Shakespeare at ten and loved ideas for themselves with no background for digestions, so ideas stayed ideas and fastened themselves to my backbone. When Josephine, who went by Joe, was seventeen, she enrolled in Normal College of New York that is now Hunter College. It's part of the City University of New York system. And this was kind of intended to put Joe on a career path as a teacher. That was what Normal College, within all women's student body, specialized in. She studied literature and drama, as well as French and Latin, but art was already an important part of her life. She had some of her drawings published in the school's yearbook, The Wistarian and the school paper, which was called The Echo. After she finished at Normal School with her bachelor's degree, o moved not into teaching but to the New York School of Art. There she met Robert Henry, who became her teacher and mentor. In Henry painted a portrait of her. And this is a life sized portrait. It's titled The Art Student and it shows twenty two year old Nivison in full figure. She's standing with her body facing slightly to the left of the painting, but her gaze is squarely on the viewer. She's wearing what looks like a red floral dress with a white lace collar. We only see a little bit of it, and most of her figure is covered by a black smock. Her left arm, which is dangling in front of her, ends in a hand holding multiple artist brushes. This painting was made around the same time Josephine would have met her future husband, although the two of them didn't connect romantically until much later. Henry wrote about the moment that he was inspired to paint Joe's portrait, saying, quote, she was standing in her old paints battered April at the close of the lesson, with her paint brushes clutched firmly in her little fist, listening to a conversation. She seemed a little human question mark, and everything about her, even the line of the dress, suggested the idea. I wanted to paint her just as she was, and I asked her to pose for me the next day. I was afraid she couldn't assume the same pose and the same look, But it happened that as she entered my studio she fell into the same energetic, questioning attitude. I had to paint very rapidly to get it. After Nivison graduated from art school, she managed to make a living as an artist, She said, Okay, she sold drawings to various periodicals to make ends meet. That included the Evening Post in the New York Tribune. She also taught art and elementary schools, and that's a job that she held for years. Yeah, she had more than a decade of teaching experience in her life. But though she was teaching kids the basics by day and how to express themselves in her spare time, she was engaging with the avant garde art scene in New York and specifically in Greenwich Village, and she was into the arts beyond her painting, though she also danced, and she eventually started appearing in plays with the Washington Square Players. She also continued to be mentored as an artist by Robert Henry, and in seven she went to Holland to take landscape and portrait painting classes that he was teaching there. She also went to Paris and Italy on that trip, and the artwork she saw in Europe really opened her eyes to the world of modern art. Up to the age of thirty, Joe continued to live at home, but in nineteen o nine, when she was still in her late twenties, her father died, and then her mother and brother moved to Rhode Island. A few years later to live with her mother's sisters. Joe at this point chose to stay in New York. She loved New York and would later say in her life like it was such a happy accident that she an artist, got to be born in New York and didn't have to fight her way there uh and she lived with a non family roommate for the first time her life. She seems to have been pretty happy during this time. She was outgoing, she had a circle of friends in the art community, but though she was very progressive and really quite liberal in her views, she was behaviorally quite conservative. She was not a party girl by any means. She didn't drink, she didn't have any serious romantic relationships, and when she had friends over for parties she served tea instead of cocktails. She had her first group show at the age of thirty one. That was in nineteen fourteen, and this was no small affair in terms of historical art placement. Alongside her work were pieces by man Ray and William Zorak, as well as others. She spent the second half of the nineteen teens teaching, appearing on stage, and then in nineteen eighteen volunteering for the Red Cross. She was shipped off to France, where she was assigned to work in occupational therapy and the hospital at baudas Are, but she got severe bronchitis and was admitted to the hospital as a patient not long after she arrived in late nineteen eighteen. By the end of January nineteen nineteen, she was back in New York for recovery, and after several weeks she was deemed unfit to return to work in France. She had also during this time lost her teaching job. She had taken a leave of absence so she could do that Red Cross work, but the Board of Education did not hold her job for her, and so soon she was scrambling to make ends meet. I have to wonder if some of this isn't a calendar logistics issue, Like they're like, we didn't know you were coming right back um where she was expected to be gone for quite a while. So she ended up having to move into a very tiny, cold studio uh and managed to get some showings at a bookshop in the Yale Club Building called Sunwise Turn. In the nineteen twenty New York Telephone Directory, Joe opted to list her profession as artist. She also fibbed about her age in the census that year. She shaved seven years off to claim that she was twenty nine. She also took another teaching job. She helped keep sick children at Willard Parker Hospital up to date on their schoolwork. Unfortunately, though, she caught diphtheria and that continued to affect her health well into the summer. Joe moved into a new studio. This was a fourth floor place with no bathroom in the Vanderbilt Studios, and immediately she started showing her work. They're kind of mounting her own mini shows, and she also adopted a streetcat named Arthur during this time. Also marked this really financially astute move on Nivisson's part. She had thought and made this case that she had not been told about the potential health risks of her teaching assignment at the hospital's Ward School, and she ended up negotiating for early retirement with lifetime disability pay at her existing salary of seventeen hundred fifty dollars a year, because she did have ongoing effects from that illness. But this negotiation she did meant that she could just focus on her art and not worry instantly about money, and that included getting to make summer visits to artist colonies. In Nevison's watercolors were included at a showing new gallery with several other prominent artists once again, William zax work was alongside hers, as well as paintings by Magret, Picasso and Modiliani. She showed there again in the spring with two watercolors, and her finances were pretty secure. Her art career was really starting to gain some momentum. So coming up, we'll talk about Joe and Edward Hopper becoming a couple. But before we do, let's pause for a word from our sponsors. In three, Josephine and Edward re met. We say that because they had met several times before. They first met in art school, as we mentioned earlier, and then they had run into each other on Cape cod at various artists other ring some of these summer retreats that she had started going to. She really only remembered that on a previous meeting she was kind of bummed that he didn't dance, because she thought he had great dancing legs and she loved to dance. She also had at least some social interaction with him in New York, although it's a little unclear exactly how well the two knew each other before nine three, although they did both have art in the same show in late nineteen two at the benemez own gallery of decorative Arts, so their paths crossed repeatedly. And to look at the people they were at this point in nineteen twenty three, where they meet up in a more permanent sort of way, you would think that Joe Nivison would become the famous one and Edward Hopper would be more likely to recede into the background of art history. Joe had started visiting artist colonies during the summers, usually in New England, and it was at one of these colonies in Gloucester, Massachusetts, that she ran into Edward Hopper in the summer of nineteen twenty three. At that point, Hopper was making his living doing etchings. He considered himself an illustrator rather than a painter. The first words that he said to her at the colony were apparently, hey, I saw your cat yesterday. Because Arthur always traveled with Joe. She really really loved that cat. While the two of them had not particularly sparked earlier in their lives in any kind of way, meeting in their forties at this point their early forties, for both of them, they became very close friends, and they started working on their art next to one another and Joe's work in watercolor, and some uh you know, kind of prodding on her part and encouragement led Ed to also start working in the same medium. They went on dates, and they grew closer and closer, making something of an odd couple because Ed was quite tall and Joe was very petite. And when they returned to New York the romance continued. They started, among other things, to visit a Chinese restaurant that would later be featured in Hopper's now famous painting Chop. Suey hop For wrote Joe notes in French, which was a language they would use together for the rest of their lives. And the autumn of nineteen twenty three, which followed the summer where the two artists had reconnected, Josephine had six of her watercolor paintings accepted into a show at the Brooklyn Museum. That show included painters like John Singer Sergeant and Georgia O'Keeffe. When she and Ed became reacquainted, he had last sold a painting in nineteen thirteen, and so here it was a decade later. Nivison decided to help him by putting in a good word for him with the museum, and they included six watercolors he had produced while working with her in Gloucester, and they bought one of his paintings. Critics really raved over Ed's pieces, and bullied by this validation, Edward decided he was going to pursue painting in earnest and taper off of his work as an illustrator. In the summer of nine four, Joe and Ed went back to the Gloucester Art Colony where they had reconnected, and this time they went as new weds. There had been no engagement. The pair had a fight on July nine over whether they would go to Gloucester, which was Ed's choice, or to Cape Cod, where Joe wanted to go, and this argument ended with an agreement that they would go to Gloucester and that they would get married that day. So they hastily grabbed a friend to be best man, and they went in search of a minister who would perform the ceremony. That took a while. They got turned down by a few because Ed was apparently kind of kg whenever any of them asked about their denomination. But by the end of the day they were married, and so their trip to Gloucester that year to paint was their honeymoon. This is such a weird resolution to this argument to me, right, Like, it's one of those things where the person who's like, they're really their primary biographer in terms of covering their relationship and not Hopper. It's like, you know, their reasons and their logic for this whole thing was their own. They never explained it to anybody, And I'm like, I got married very quickly. This is a little Red Flagg to me. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely not a compromise to go from either Gloucester or Cape Cod too Gloucester. And also we're getting married right this minute, Like yeah, so anyway, Um, They're often described as having an artistic partnership with Joe as Ed's muse, but this relationship was, by almost any standard, just very very unhealthy. Joe and Ed Hopper seemed devoted to each other in some ways, and particularly very publicly, but they were also constantly locked in battle, and that battle often turns to physical violence. From the very beginning of their marriage, it seemed, going by Joe's journals, that Edward was just dissatisfied with their roles. He had married a woman who was finding some success in art. She was very independent, and what he wanted was a housewife who had no interests outside of pleasing him. And Joe realized that she had married a man who would not ever want to have a social life with anyone else, and that was one of her great pleasures. Joe was also not particularly inclined towards domesticity, as you'll recall, even in her own family, the setup had been anything but traditional, So to suddenly be expected to just cook and care for a man who wanted a wife to be a domestic servant, that was completely unexpected for her. She kept house but cooking was just not happening. No, It appears in that argument resolution of let's get married, they never had the what do you want out of marriage discussion. Edward was also jealous of Arthur and that she loved this cat so much. He drew caricatures showing this jealousy. Arthur is depicted as Joe's true love while ed waits on the floor for scraps. Joe actually maintained her own studio space away from Edward in the beginning of their marriage, in part just so that she could keep Edward and Arthur apart, and it was there that she would meet up with friends, never at ed studio. In her journals, Joe wrote accounts about their sex life that are just heartbreaking. They depict a sexual mismatch that led to what amounts to assault on her husband's part. According to her own account, she had no real sexual experience when the two of them got married, and she found that quote, the whole thing was entirely for him, for his benefit. According to her journal, he forbade her from speaking with other women about sex, so she felt what she called subnormal, and she resigned herself to not enjoying their sex life. She wrote, quote, I declared, since that was the status quo of that, let him have it all. I withdrew all my interests there was my body. Let him take it. But I'd not consent to be hurt too much, only a certain amount. Then he set forth to build up, as neat, a little job of inferiority complex for which I and my ignorance was eligible. For Ed's part, he drew cartoons of himself as the unfortunate husband of a frigid wife, vowing deeply to Joe from the end of the bed while she reads a book disinterested it makes me so sad, she writes about herself, like in that hole. He doesn't want her to talk to other people. Her logic is that he is too embarrassed for other people to know that he got a lemon. Just such a sad way to perceive that whole situation for her, it breaks my heart. Uh. The year the Hoppers married, Joe was invited to show several of her pieces in Paris, and Edward also had his first solo show that year at the gallery of Frank km Wren. There were sixteen pieces of Ed's paintings included, and they all sold. Wren represented Hopper for the rest of his life. Joe's identity shifted significantly with her marriage to Hopper, and in some ways that was slowly. In other ways the changes were very a erupt A year after they got married, Arthur had disappeared. An exhaustive search for him had proved fruitless, so she gave up her studio. She moved everything into the same space that Edward was using because his career was on the rise, he needed all the space that he had, so her paintings went into basement storage when she finished them, along with most of the items that she had moved with. It's really almost the perfect metaphor for her identity as her own person. During this time, she seemed to put herself away to just live in Ed's world. When visitors came to the studio, she wasn't allowed to show them what she had been working on. Things were not all gloom. The two traveled to Santa Fe in lieu of a New England summer trip. Hopper didn't really find much inspiration in the US Southwest, but he did have Joe pose for him for the painting interior, which was later called model reading. If you look for his paintings under the interior, you will get a bunch of them, So nowadays it's kind of usually said interior with model reading in parenthesis after it. And this was the start of a dynamic of their relationship that would become very important to both of them over the years. Uh They also socialized during this trip, which was a lot of fun for Joe, and while it wasn't always smooth, it does seem like overall they both enjoyed it. They had several similar trips throughout their marriage. When they returned home, Ed turned in his last illustration work and he was at that point officially exclusively a painter, and although he was really starting to do well selling his paintings, the Hoppers did not live extravagantly in the least. Their Washington Square studio was on the top floor of a building, and it was really rudimentary as a living space. It had a skylight that made it a good workspace for art, but in terms of other stuff, there was no refrigerator, no toilet. They had to haul coal up the stair to the fourth floor where they were to have heat. The life that they lived there was also not exactly filled with social activities. Most of their time was spent alone, just the two of them in this small space, eating their meals out of cans, and then just growing increasingly irritated with one another. I feel like this living set up without the context of their like their their relationship issues there that were already having, like that small of a space with two people in it, and those meager circuits like that would have probably bread some frustrations in the best of circumstances. Well, And it's one of those things too, where they had both been living on their own for so long, like they were both in their forties when they got married, So to suddenly like, I share everything with you would have been an adjustment, like you said, even if everything about their relationship was perfect other than that, and then in this like to be packed in a little tiny space together not good. In Nix, Joe had her first showing under the name Josephine Hopper at the Whitney Museum. She had another showing at the Whitney Studio Club the next year, and one of the watercolors that she showed there was called movie Theater. That same year, Ed painted a piece called two on the Aisle that was the first of his movie theater paintings, a theme for which he would become famous. And it kind of seems like he got the idea from her. While she continued to paints, it fell off in frequency. At one point she wrote in her diary quote, why don't I paints? Why? Indeed? On what? From? Out of what inner gladness? Ed's career was prioritized always he drew a literal line in their studio that she was not allowed to cross, and unlike in that nineteen three summer where they had worked side by side, she was not supposed to come near him while he worked his supplies were for him and him alone. There was a very obvious jealousy and competitiveness in his behavior. If she started to paint when he hadn't been feeling like it, he had to jump up and paint yeah. As Hopper's career began to release Skyrocket in his mid forties, Josephine, who had made the introductions around the art world that made that rise possible, started to manage all of the administrative duties of his work. She continued to reach out to art dealers on his behalf, kind of working as his agent for any sales he was making outside of that gallery arrangement he had, and she also managed his schedule. If he had an exhibit, it was her job to make sure the lighting and the placement of the art was correct, and it was also her job to address and deflect negative criticism. She seems to recognize Ed's future importance in the place of US art history, and she documented his work both as a matter of bookkeeping and just to have a really thorough record. As he completed paintings, she entered each one into a detailed log. She kept an account book that described the work and included all the relevant data about it the date that it was started and completed, the arrangements of any loan outs that may have Sometimes Hopper would write the paintings titles in the book, but Joe would always annotate it with a description of the image to make it clear what the painting actually was. She was also pretty aware that as her husband had found his footing as an artist and made a name for himself in his career, that she had gone in the opposite direction. She wrote, quote for the female of the species, it's a fatal thing for an artist to marry. Her consciousness is too much disturbed. She can no longer live sufficiently within herself to produce. But it's hard to accept this. If you've looked at any of Edward Hopper's paintings from after he and Josephine became romantically involved, you have seen Joe. Although she did always looked like herself, she really became his only model. So whether you're seeing an usher in a movie theater in New York movie or the woman drinking late night coffee with a gentleman in the Diner and Nighthawks, that's all Joe. There's speculation that just as he was jealous of her, in so many ways, this might have been something that Joe insisted on due to her own jealousies about her husband. It also seems that to some degree this was a way for Joe to be part of her husband's success since she wasn't being allowed success of her own. Yeah, she also seemed to just enjoy that, like in those moments she became the focus of his work, like he paid attention to her in a way that was not unkind. She wrote about being very, very proud of posing for him and of being part of his work in that way, and she really did seem to love this aspect of their lives. She and ed collaborated on the back stories of the characters that she inhabited for his work, even giving them character names that only they knew. We're going to get into some of the darker aspects of Joe and Ed's marriage, so before we do, we're going to take a break and have a word from the sponsors that let us keep telling stories like this one. After roughly the first decade of the Hoppers marriage, things became more troubled. The conflicts between them heightened, as Edward had done in the early stage of their marriage. He once again began sketching critical caricatures and cartoons of the two of them, including one called non Anger Man pro Anger Woman. This shows him literally like a saint, complete with a halo. It looks like a cartoon version of a painting of a saint you might see, while Joe is made to look like an irate, tiny pixie haranguing him. Their relationship was strained even more when Joe, who was frustrated, started to casually share details of their life with some of Ed's colleagues and patrons. Since she was handling a lot of his business, she noted when he was lethargic and not productive, or even just that he wasn't feeling well. They had started visiting South Truro on Cape Cod in the summers, and they decided to build a house there in the nineteen thirties, and of course this came with its own stresses, particularly during the construction, and as they're strange, often abrasive dynamic had developed over the years. It had also, as we mentioned earlier, grown physically violent. In her journals, Joe describes the two of them getting into altercations really regularly. When they closed up their Greenwich studio in May of nineteen thirty four for the summer. She references the tense pre travel situation between the two of them in her journal, writing quote E feeling watched all his symptoms to the for all negotiation and prohibition. I driven to scratch and bite he handed. There's one, so his insistent driving in of the spurs every time I glance at my list. When their tenth anniversary arrived, there wasn't really a celebration, and two days later Ed suggested that he could drive to pick up his mother and sister to visit their newly finished house in South Truro. She had been hoping the house would be done in time for them to have a party, and that did not work out. She was so frustrated at the idea that, in the midst of still moving and getting the house settled, he thought it would be fine for her to also have to cook for and look after guests. That Joe wrote to a friend about all of this. It is also tied up in how angry Ed seemed to get when she found a bolt of inspiration to paint. So as I'm reading this excerpt from this letter, know that she's kind of like merging these two issues they're having into one. She writes, quote ed is the very center of my universe. If I'm on the point of being very happy, he sees to it that I'm not. If I am happy, ever, and not too ex austed, I might want to paint. He's better fed, more blithomely fed during the infrequent periods when I do paint, but it riles him. She also wrote to his family and said that it was just a really bad time for visitors, which caused more strife between them. Joe writes his things to send to a darker place between them, where violence is a lot more common that quote. If he cuffs, I'll scratch. What else is there to do? In protest? Edward, as we mentioned earlier, was a lot larger than Joe, was about twice her size and weight in addition to being much taller. She wrote that she quote always found tallman exciting, not when they use that extra span of arm length to swat me. Though Edward additionally was constantly critical of Joe's painting, and when he experienced a creative block that criticism became more cruel, and this wounded her deeply. She wrote that being hit by him was quote not as bad as meanness, there is also really quite a sad metaphor that evolved between wife and husband regarding their work. They didn't have kids, and they started calling their paintings their children, which sounds kind of cute on the surface and if you don't have context. But as Josephine starts to use this metaphor to describe her own work, the disparity of equality in their marriage becomes clear. She starts calling her own paintings little bastards and stillborn infants, and talks about how she's not in a mental space where she could produce a healthy anything, and she describes them to galleries as not being very good, but adds that she loves them just like a mother would. Ed's paintings she refers to as heirs. Joe's journal entries as she and Ed reached twenty years of marriage together are just deeply heartbreaking. She recognizes the loss of her life to a marriage that seemed to bring neither herself nor her husband much joy. In a letter to a friend, she wrote that she had kept her nose out of the art world and that she quote has come through with absolutely nothing. She also wrote about how she felt that ed had always controlled her. It had come out at this point in their marriage that he had wished that she would have just stopped painting when they married, and she felt completely betrayed by this. She wrote, quote, he certainly knew all the subtle ways of killing the art instinct in me. The shock of learning that he had any such wish way back when we were first married nearly did the thing so incredible, so unspeakably low down, and so in direct contradiction of all his attitude before we married. The ghastliness of this one can't quite ever outlive. Joe was in her early sixties at that time, and seeing her husband's struggle to find inspiration, she grew even sadder that she had given up so much of herself and his interest. She wrote, quote, I've probably changed. I used to have so many friends, but then I've been seeing only his friends of late years, and people annoyed at him for turning them down on juries to take it out on me. Naturally, she knew the pain of not being selected by her husband on a jury. He had also turned down her work in a similar situation. When the couple marked twenty five years of marriage together, Joe said that they should get a quote quadrigare a medal for distinguished combat. Ed in response, created a coat of arms for them, featuring a rolling pin and a ladle in reference to household items that they had used to strike one another. In her journal at the time, she notes sadly all that she felt she had lost in their quarter century together, writing quote time passing, passing, drop by drop of one's lifeblood, hair, grain, fashions changing an entirely new slant on art rampant, and twenty five years of my life gone. When Joe was seventy five, she got a spring exhibit at a gallery run by Herman Gulak. Ten of her paintings were included, and she was elated to see all of her pieces together on what she called, quote such a beautiful, serene wall, all to myself and the pictures field they've gone to heaven. Hopper did not go to the opening. He said that his back was bothering him, but in a turnabout of some of his earlier assessments of Joe's paintings, Edwards said that hers was the only good work in the showing. He sent several catalogs from the show to friends and press with notes about Joe's work. Joe was described as ecstatic anytime she visited the gallery, and she would twirl around in delight. Her work was featured in the Christian Science Monitor and The Villager, and reviews noted her paintings as transforming and elevating the scenes of domestic interiors. We have quoted a whole lot from Joe's journals, and it is often really unpleasant, and to be honest, I left out some of the more upsetting parts because you get the idea. But as is often the case in unhealthy relationships, when there is abuse, there is often codependency, and people can become convinced that their love is more important than any of the other stuff, even when that other stuff is just awful. And this is also reflected in Joe's writings. She wrote things like quote ed is the very center of my universe. It's such blessedness that Edward and I have each other. Surely I'll be allowed to go when he does. It seems that from the very beginning, Joe Nivison and Edward Hopper were so terribly mismatched, and they brought out the absolute worst in each other. But they also never entertain the thought of just not being together, and that conflict of love and hate was also something that Joe was definitely grappling with. She also wrote quote, I can scarcely stay and e H, but how possibly live without him? She did live without him, but only briefly. Edward Hopper died on May fifteenth, nineteen sixty seven, and their apartment at three Washington Square North. He was five. Ten months later, on March six, night, Josephe Nivison Hopper also died. She was buried with her husband in his hometown of Nyack, New York. And when she died, Joe left the entire body of her work and eds to the Whitney Museum of American Art. This was a massive bequeathment, including three thousand pieces. But this kind of turned out to be a tragedy of its own because for a long time, a lot of Joe's work was lost because the museum didn't see her as the important artist. There was a list of her work, but a lot of the paintings themselves no one could find. Some of Joe's work was attributed actually to ed and some of her pieces about eight dozen were kind of given away as gifts to various places like office buildings and hospitals. However, while researching Joe for a book and two thousand, writer Elizabeth Thompson Callery found two hundred of her paintings still in the basement of the Whitney. Even now, though it's hard to find Joe's work online, I know when I was looking for artwork to share in our social media for this did not find a lot. The Whitney has two on their website. One is a watercolor portrait of Bertram Hartman. The other is an undated oil painting of wilted flowers titled Obituary. Both of them feature cats as secondary elements to the composition. Maybe that is a nod to the long lost Arthur. Other paintings have surfaced, including in a large gift to the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in twos which included art by both Joe and ed and the museum has since mounted an exhibit of their work in tandem. That gift came from a private collector. In recent years, as Joe's story has become more well known, there have been a few additional exhibitions of her work, including one at the Edward Hopper House Art Center. In Nyack. If you're interested in reading more of Joe's journals, they're quoted extensively by art historian and author Gail Levin in her book Edward Hopper and Intimate Biography. Yeah, those journals are not publicly available. She got access to them in the archives where they are um and it's interesting because it's an ostensibly a biography of Edward Hopper, but it really is very much about the two of them and is kind of the first instance where Joe's story really plays out through her own words. Very frustrating episode, search and work on which we'll talk about some more behind the scenes. I'm sure do you have some listener mail. I do, and I wanted to do a funny one because this was such a bummer episode. This is from our listener, Jessica. She reads Hi, Tracy, and Holly. I recently listened to the unearthed July edition and you're related behind the scenes episode. I was tickled by your passionate discussion of library fines and can definitely relate by the way, but it also reminded me of a library story of my own. Many years ago. I was living with a boyfriend from Washington State when he had been in school in Spokane. He had gone with a friend to get a library card at the local public library, and for some reason I think having to do with proper I d they refused to give him a library card. This became a big joke amongst his friends he the most mild mannered guy, was too dangerous and suspicious to be issued a library card. Many moons later, he accompanied me to the Library of Congress, where I was getting a reader's card to do some research for a paper I was writing for law school. Since he was there and I think they wouldn't let him come with me unless he had one, he applied for a reader's card as well and got one. As soon as we left. He took a picture and sent it to his friends quote, I can get a library card for the Library of Congress, but not the Spokane Public Library. Thanks as always for the work you put into entertaining history lovers like me. It's nice to know I'm not alone in my nursery. Jessica, thank you for this. It's so charming and was a perfect way to uh mitigate some of the down earnus of this episode. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History pretty much everywhere, And if you haven't subscribed yet but you're thinking that's a good idea, we do too. You can do that on the I heart radio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.