The Bible says in Ephesians 4:28, “He who steals must steal no longer; but rather he must labor, performing with his own hands what is good, so that he will have something to share with one who has need.” I know that my labors as a researcher and my efforts to save the works by Hopper that passed through my hands justify my deeds. I have shared my profits with my wife and our three sons and a daughter and nine grandchildren—all needing educations, weddings, and security in life. Such valuables should not go to waste!
Marion remained in the family home until May 1965, when a burglar wearing a pink mask broke in, held a hand over her mouth, and forced her upstairs. Nearly eighty-five, her health went downhill. When the housekeeper hired by Edward and Jo insisted upon taking her vacation over the Fourth of July, they had to come and act as Marion’s nurses for a week. I volunteered to drive them up to Nyack from the city and then back home. On July 16, Marion was taken to the hospital and she died the next day. Once again, I drove to the city to fetch the elderly couple and conducted Marion’s funeral in Nyack.
Edward was not interested, so that Jo was left alone to sort through the house’s store of family heirlooms and old photographs. She spent about six weeks in Nyack. She told me that Marion had been “a pack rat like me . . . She not so fond of me, but from across the grave, I felt her gladness I wasn’t throwing our her treasures or selling the hundred-year-old birthplace.” She complained that Edward had abandoned her to the task, and had left her “breathing in the dust of a century.”
I bided my time until Jo and Edward left Nyack. I still had the key to the house filled with Hopper’s art, family papers, and antiques. As Edward’s health began to fail, I continued to remove works from the attic trove. My concern for a valuable antique Dutch cupboard inspired me to move it out of the empty house and to store it with a neighbor. Had the frail Edward or Jo come calling, I could claim that I had put it there just to keep it safe. But once the Hoppers’ three estates were settled, I planned to possess the object that I so desired. I alone cared for it. I deserved it.
Edward’s health continued to deteriorate. In December 1966, he was in so much pain that Jo had to call an ambulance to rush him to the hospital. She phoned and told me that he had had a double hernia operation. She said that she had to postpone the cataract surgery that she needed to correct her dimming vision. Edward was back in the hospital the following July. Also affected by glaucoma, Jo slipped in the studio as she was preparing to go to visit Edward in the hospital. She broke her hip and leg, joining him in the same hospital, where they remained for three months. Due to glaucoma, her eyes proved inoperable.
Released from the hospital in December 1966, the Hoppers found daily life hard to manage. They lived on the top floor of an old row house, up seventy-four steps. They were in no condition to check up on their possessions in the house in Nyack. Nine months after his hernia operation, Edward was back in the hospital with heart problems. He returned home, barely able to eat. On May 15, 1967, he died in his studio, two months short of his eighty-fifth birthday.
Abandoned by friends who had cared only for the more famous Edward, Jo had no one to turn to but me. I had conducted Edward’s funeral in Nyack. To do so, I had to fly back from Pittsburgh, which I was visiting at the time. Jo referred to me as a “13th disciple”—“a husky, good looking football coach content to shepherd a flock of Nyack ladies . . . doing needed and often arduous practical good offices for them that would include going out in the kitchen and making lunch for Marion.” For my services, she paid me $500 from the estate, a mere pittance for my sustained efforts in their behalf.
Jo was left vulnerable and alone. She was ill and her vision was impaired. She and Edward had no surviving family members. She knew that she should attend to probating the will and disposing of the property in Nyack, but she concluded that she was “all so alone and nearly blind” so that she “better let it alone.” She struggled to cope with daily life. Her leg was slow to heal and she felt like a prisoner on the top floor of that nearly empty building in the city. New York University had purchased the row house and, unable to evict the Hoppers, waited for their deaths to finish renovating.
In Jo’s vulnerability, I saw opportunity. Few visited Jo after Edward’s death, but I took the trouble to. At the end of one visit, when her vision was compromised and she was barely able to move about the studio, I adopted one of Edward’s unsold canvases, a picture of City Roofs from 1932. It was abandoned and forlorn until I gave it a good home. I got Jo to change her will and write me into it. Unfortunately, she did not leave me any art and I did not know that she kept meticulous track of the whereabouts of Edward’s artworks. She continued to write in the ledger books that she had started soon after their marriage in which she recorded whenever works left the studio for exhibition, sale, or gifts. Later I claimed that she gave me City Roofs because I knew that she would have if she could have appreciated my efforts to save Edward’s work in Nyack. Instead, in her shaky hand, she had noted that this painting that I took had not been sold and was “here in studio.”
Jo Hopper died on March 6, 1968, twelve days before her eighty-fifth birthday and less than ten months after she had lost Edward. Upon hearing, I rushed to the neighbor to retrieve the Dutch cupboard that I had hidden there, successfully removing it from the estate for myself. No one remembers Jo’s funeral. There wasn’t one. Who would have attended?
When Jo’s will was probated, it was announced that Edward’s entire “artistic estate” had been left to the Whitney Museum. I kept on looking after the empty house and adding bit by bit to my little collection of early Hopper until the executor for the estate, a local lawyer in Nyack, put the house on the market in 1970, two years after Jo’s death. It was sold to a Mrs. Linet, who thought that she bought the house and its contents. I had asked her for a few meager things from the house, but she turned me down. She lost a fortune because she was greedy. Because of her stinginess, she forced me to act. I informed the estate lawyer and told him about the art in the attic. Neither the lawyer nor the Whitney Museum had bothered to check on what was in the Nyack house and so they knew nothing about those works.
Before the closing, my son and I removed the rest of the art from the attic. I kept some more art and all of the memorabilia and documents for my collection, but delivered the rest, on the advice of the executor, to Hopper’s art dealer, John Clancy. From there, the art eventually reached the museum. The buyer was surprised to find that there was no more art in that attic and sued the estate, canceling the sale. The odd bits of furniture left in the house were later put on auction to benefit the church.
After these last additions to my collection, I slowly began to put Hopper’s works up for auction. I wrote letters to warn the auction houses that the objects I consigned were to be sold anonymously. I did not yet want to call attention to myself. Eventually I learned that to get higher prices, I needed to give the remaining works a history of ownership by someone who knew the artist, because that would testify to their authenticity.
I was amazed when the Boston Museum of Fine Arts paid more than sixty thousand dollars for an early Hopper self-portrait that I had given to my friend, another underpaid preacher, to sell. I was surprised and pleased by the rising values for Hopper’s art. I had hundreds of drawings from the years of Hopper’s maturity as well as many early works, including some eighty paintings. What I lacked was any written evidence that either Edward or Jo Hopper ever gave me any work of art.
In 1972, I called Kennedy Galleries in New York. They dealt in American art. I had seen their ads for work by Hopper in art magazines at the library. They sent their employee to Nyack to assess my collection. I showed him only a small selection, not telling him that I had much more art. Without any qualms about how I got these works of art by this leading American artist, this prominent gallery offered me a consignment deal for everything that I showed them. That same day they wrote me a check for $65,000 as a deposit against future sales. I rushed to deposit the check in the
local bank and as soon as it cleared, I submitted a letter to the First Baptist Church and resigned. As I began my retirement, I was fifty-six years old. I would devote my remaining years to researching and marketing the work of Edward Hopper.
It turned out that my sales were competing against those of the Whitney Museum, which was slowly selling Edward’s work from Jo’s bequest. In 1976, the museum was called out for selling off what they referred to as “duplicates” of Edward’s art. The museum did not know what to do with so many Hoppers. The museum found itself attacked in The New York Times by its art critic, Hilton Kramer, who claimed that the museum was squandering its legacy. The Whitney certainly proved by this that they did not need the works in my collection.
Looking to stop the bad publicity, the museum obtained a grant from a foundation and hired a young art historian to research Edward Hopper and write a complete catalogue of his work, studying the objects in Jo’s bequest. The hiring of Gail Levin as curator of the Hopper Collection was praised in the New York Times by Hilton Kramer, who wrote, “She brings both a keen eye and a scholarly intelligence to the large task that awaits her.”
The article spoke to me, since I realized that to assure the sale of the works in my collection, I needed Miss Levin to authenticate all of the Hoppers that I still had. As soon as I read this piece, I immediately went to see her. I lost no time, piling a small selection of the works that I had collected into a suitcase and taking it right into her office at the Whitney. I appeared as my retired self: calm, rested, suntanned, and since it was such a balmy late June day, I wore Bermuda shorts.
I explained to Miss Levin that I had been a close friend of Edward and Jo Hopper’s. I opened my suitcase and revealed a selection of Hopper’s boyhood works. A new curator still in her twenties, she was interested and curious in all that I brought in. Then she started in asking me for any inscriptions, personal notes, in short anything that would have documented how I obtained these works of art that I told her had been gifts. I told her I had nothing to show.
As she pursued her research, she would later discover that Jo carefully recorded the gifts that Edward Hopper gave to her and to others in the record books that she kept whenever works left the studio. The only exception turned out to be documented by Jo in her diary. I had not yet realized this unfortunate detail. But on that day, Miss Levin had barely started her research. She had no reason as yet to suspect me.
That summer Miss Levin made an appointment to visit my wife, Ruth, and me in our vacation home in Newport, New Hampshire. I purchased it with sales of some of Hopper’s works, but she did not need to know that. She came up from New York to see the works in our Hopper collection stored there, but I kept many of them hidden from her on that first visit. I did not want to overwhelm this naïve but inquisitive young lady or provoke too many more questions.
Miss Levin was too curious. She questioned how we happened to have so many of the sketches for Hopper’s mature paintings. She surmised correctly that these would not have been stored in the Nyack attic with Hopper’s boyhood works. My wife, Ruth, told her by way of explanation, “As one of the legatees, Reverend Sanborn was allowed to buy from the contents of the New York studio after the art had been sent to the Whitney. The entire contents were valued at just over $100. We took advantage of that offer to purchase a low boy, a high boy, and several other pieces of antique Dutch furniture. Lo and behold, we found underneath the dresser-drawer linings stacks of Hopper’s drawings.” Miss Levin seemed satisfied with that explanation.
She followed up by visiting us in our winter home in Melbourne Beach, Florida, where I kept more of my Hopper collection. She arranged to have a professional photographer record at the museum’s expense each of our Hoppers for the complete catalogue of his work that she was producing for the museum. This would authenticate them for posterity. She was doing just what I needed her to do.
That same winter, Lawrence Fleischman of Kennedy Galleries organized a show of Edward Hopper’s works. All of the early works and some of the later drawings were from my collection. He added other works bought elsewhere and did not acknowledge my singular efforts in his catalogue. I felt annoyed by this and would not do further business with him. He enlisted both Miss Levin and Lloyd Goodrich, who had directed Hopper’s shows at the Whitney, to write essays in the catalogue. Neither one wrote about me.
When Miss Levin organized her first show of Edward Hopper at the Whitney in 1979, I loaned many of his illustrations and some drawings from my collection. I had saved them from the Nyack attic, when no one else was interested in what was there. I was surprised to read that although she thanked me, she did not acknowledge me as the close friend of Edward and Jo Hopper that I had told her I had been. All along she appeared to doubt what I had told her. Why then should I share my Hopper documents with her as she requested?
I had kept all of the Hopper family photographs and documents from the attic for my own collection. I got the letters that Hopper wrote home to his family from Paris and the illustrated letter that he sent to his mother from his trip to Santa Fe in 1925, shortly after he married Jo. I also got two of Hopper’s record books, one of which I sold to Kennedy Galleries. It turned out Lloyd Goodrich gave the Whitney those record books that Jo had left to him in her will. My two never made it into the estate.
In 1980, Miss Levin opened her second big Hopper show at the Whitney Museum, “Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist.” Once again she gave me what I considered inadequate credit for my extensive work on Hopper. In the end, I had loaned her some of Hopper’s letters and other documents and she had quoted from them and even made copies of them without getting my permission to do so. I went to see her boss, the museum’s director, Tom Armstrong. He wanted the main record book that I still had in my possession. I said, “Well, we can talk.” It turns out that Miss Levin was claiming to her boss that I had stolen the works that I had taken from Hopper’s studio and the Nyack attic. Armstrong and I agreed that this should never become public. He offered to fire Miss Levin if I gave up the record book and some other things. We made a deal. The rest, as they say, is history. My role as a collector of Edward Hopper is now secure. My children and grandchildren will take care of my legacy.
Gail Levin served as curator of the Edward Hopper Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1976 to 1984. Her project of a catalogue raisonné of Hopper’s work was published by W. W. Norton and Co. for the Whitney in 1995.
Arthayer R. Sanborn, Jr. died on November 18, 2007 at the age of 91, in his home in Celebration, Florida. Of the others named in this story, only the author remains alive.
WARREN MOORE is Professor of English at Newberry College, in Newberry, SC. His novel Broken Glass Waltzes was published in 2013, and he has had stories appear in a variety of small and online magazines, and in 2015’s Dark City Lights. He lives in Newberry with his wife and daughter, and thanks his father (who introduced him to Hopper) and his mother (who introduced him to Marge).
Office at Night, 1940
22 × 25 in. (56.4 × 63.8 cm). Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis;
Gift of the T.B. Walker Foundation, Gilbert M. Walker Fund, 1948
OFFICE AT NIGHT
BY WARREN MOORE
Margaret heard the train rumble by as Walter looked at the papers on the desk. The cord on the window shade swung, whether from the train’s vibrations or from the breeze through the window, she didn’t know. She couldn’t feel either, nor did she feel the blue dress—her favorite—clinging to her curves. All she saw was Walter, and all he saw were the files in the pool of light from the desk lamp.
She had put the papers in the file cabinet and rested her arm atop the folders what seemed like—could have been—a lifetime ago. The phrase brought a faint smile to Margaret’s face. Any time could be a lifetime, depending on how long you lived. And she had thought from time to time that she and Walter might have a lifetime together. Before she had died.
Margaret Dupont had never liked her name. She wo
uld have liked a movie star name like Jean or Bette, but her name? It made people think of the woman from the Marx Brothers movies. She stuck with it, though, because she had to, after all, and she liked her middle name, Lucille, even less. She had been named after a maiden aunt who had died young, and from time to time, she wondered if there had been a jinx on the name. But her grandmother liked the name, and as a cousin told Margaret when she was a teenager, “I guess she just wore your mother down.” Yep—she could imagine her mother in the hospital, exhausted, saying, “What the hell, Margaret it is.” She wouldn’t have said it out loud, though—Mother wasn’t going to talk like that in public, any more than she’d take a step with a lit cigarette. It wasn’t ladylike.
But Margaret hadn’t been ladylike as a child, either, and that was probably one of the reasons she and Mother had gone for weeks at a time without speaking sometimes. Mother was small; Margaret was big, like her daddy, who had been big enough to hitch to a plow by the time he was nine, which is when he stopped going to school. Mother got a couple more years in before she had to leave school, and a few years later, she married Daddy and came to the city. Margaret had come along a few years later, the second and last child—so big it nearly killed her mother, a claim she heard too often.
Margaret was big for her age—“Large Marge,” bigger than most of the boys, even, at least until she got sick. Scarlatina, the doctors told her parents, and it weakened her heart and slowed her growth, but she was lucky to have gotten off that easily—not everyone lived through that. But she stuck with life, because she had to, and it hadn’t even occurred to her that there was a choice. And her growth slowed, but even then she was too tall, almost six feet, for heaven’s sake, and what kind of boy would want a big old thing like that? But she had to miss a year of school and make it up after, so she was a year older than the other kids in high school, and so that much bigger, even. “Large Marge,” and clumsy to fit it. She had thrown a knee out of joint at a school dance, but the embarrassment of crumpling to the gymnasium floor had hurt worse than the knee’s displacement.
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