Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keeffe (review)

In this fascinating book Vivien Green Fryd explores the often contentious juncture of career, marriage, and sexuality through the figures of Edward Hopper (1882-1967) and Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) and their spouses, Josephine Nivison Hopper (1883-1968) and Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). Three of these are among the most notable figures in the history of American art, and the author makes an important scholarly contribution to what is already a considerable literature on these artists.

While other writers have considered the relationship between personal experience and creativity, in its grounding in the scholarship of sexuality (among other contemporary issues) Fryd's volume will be of particular interest to the readers of this journal.¹ The illustrations she has selected "embody, crystalize, and reinforce issues related to their marriages—works that, at the same time, intersect with the changing concept, actually the crisis of the modern family within the white middle class in the United States" (1-2). As America became increasingly industrialized, family life came "under pressure from modernization and the first sexual revolution" (7). Fryd's examination of "gender, family, marriage, and sexuality" through the lens of visual culture is effective (10). While her choice of central figures has necessarily focused her discussion on heterosexual relationships and marriage, her work provides a model for discussing any connection between two creative individuals.

Art and the Crisis of Marriage has seven chapters, each of which is divided into subsections that both frame the discussion and present a taxonomy of the key issues. In the first two chapters Fryd sets out the textual issues and terms that inform her discussion throughout. In chapter 1, "The Making of a Modern Marriage," she explores the topic from multiple perspectives, drawing particularly upon scholarship in the fields of literature, popular culture, and the social sciences. Between 1920 and 1950 the lives of heterosexual couples were affected by "urbanization, mechanization, working women, divorce, and contraception" as well as by changing modes of transportation and residence, "the car and the apartment house" (19). As marriage became more democratized, the balance of friendship and sex emerged as a central issue for both spouses. Using contemporary discussions of what was then regarded as a crisis in the institution of marriage, she effectively contextualizes the four artists' lives, work, and personal relationships. In chapter 2, "Two Marriages: Edward and Josephine Nivison Hopper, and Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz," Fryd carefully explores the texture of these relationships, including the impact of extramarital affairs. The two husbands "were almost exact contemporaries" (3), and the wives, Jo and Georgia, had a surprising amount in common: both were based in New York (though they had strong connections outside the city), married rather late, remained childless, modeled for their husbands, and assumed the role of business manager within the relationship.

The next two chapters are devoted to Edward Hopper. In chapter 3 Fryd considers "The Home, the Hotel, the Road, and the Automobile," themes prominent in Hopper's oeuvre. What was the relative impact on married urbanites of single-family homes and multidwelling apartments? Did the automobile represent freedom, or was it "the most powerful force behind the destabilization of the family" (67)? Essential to understanding Hopper's paintings and his own conflicted marriage, she believes, is knowledge of the isolation, alienation, and loneliness embedded in modern industrialized America. In chapter 4, "Shifting Power Dynamics and Sexuality: Edward Hopper's Girlie Show and Office at Night," Fryd examines two major paintings, one portraying public sexual entertainment, the other treating sexual politics within the modern workplace. These paintings were emblematic of bitter power struggles within Hopper's marriage, for in permitting herself to be subsumed by his career, Jo, who was the model in both paintings, allowed her own work to wither. While on the...