Born: 18 March 1883, United States
Died: 6 March 1968
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Josephine Nivison
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Jo Nivison Hopper was a talented artist whose support of her husband Edward was vital to his success. Her appearance in many of his paintings also led others to see her as a muse rather than an artist in her own right. A 2022 documentary, Hopper: An American Love Story, explored how Hopper owed much of his career to his wife, as she put her artistic ambitions on hold to promote his. Indeed, Hopper’s career struggled for more than ten years until he reconnected with Jo—whom he’d first met in art school—in 1923, and she began managing his career. She helped get several of his works into a 1923 Brooklyn Museum exhibition, which drew the positive attention of critics. “There is no Edward Hopper without Jo Nivison,” Hopper director Phil Grabsky told Smithsonian Magazine. As for her own work, Nivison bequeathed her entire artistic estate (both her works and her husband’s) to the Whitney Museum of American Art. For many years, it was thought that the Whitney had discarded most of Jo’s pieces, until writer Elizabeth Thompson Colleary discovered about 200 of them in the Whitney’s basement in 2000. Other works have since resurfaced as her reputation has become more well-known. Yet even an exhibition of her watercolours at the Edward Hopper House Museum in 2021 was titled Josephine Nivison Hopper: Edward’s Muse.