'Crisis of Marriage' Revealed in O'Keeffe, Hopper Art

Despite the popular notion that the three decades between the two world wars were a period of marital and family stability, it was a difficult and unsettling time for many middle-class Americans, says a Vanderbilt University professor.

Vivien Green Fryd, associate professor of art history and American and Southern studies at Vanderbilt University, comes to this conclusion after studying the art and marriages of two of the 20th century's most popular artists, Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper.

O'Keeffe, the modernist who painted cityscapes and flowers early in her career and later became famous for her oils of the Southwestern desert, was married to famed photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Theirs was an unconventional union that began as an affair while Stieglitz was still married to his first wife. Both partners had well-established artistic identities before and throughout their life together. Hopper, noted for his realist paintings of such commonplace American scenes as hotels, highways, gas stations and suburban homes, and his wife Jo Nivinson, who had been an artist in her own right before her marriage, represented on the surface the more traditional ideal of stable companionship.

By examining the marriages and art of O'Keeffe and Hopper, Fryd demonstrates how two interwar couples struggled with the first sexual revolution and changing definitions of marriage. "Their relationships indicate the types of fissures that would expand during the 1960s and continue to the present day, in which the institution of marriage remains a focus of contention and debate," Fryd writes in the recently published Art and the Crisis of Marriage (University of Chicago Press).

From 1920 to 1950, expectations for middle-class families changed radically due to urbanization, industrialization, the availability of contraception and more easily obtained divorces, Fryd says. Men and women alike struggled to understand the changing times.

"I thought if I looked into the period between the two world wars and examined what was being talked about in terms of marriage, I would find answers about these particular artists' artworks, which I thought addressed in some manner issues related to the artists' respective marriages," Fryd explains. "I never expected to discover, though, that the very institution of marriage was considered to be in crisis during this time."

As the United States continued its transformation from an agrarian to an urban nation, idealistic small towns, filled with close neighbors and single-dwelling homes, lessened as families crowded into densely populated city neighborhoods and apartment buildings. An increasing number of women attended college and secured gainful employment. The lines distinguishing between the male world of work and the female sphere of domesticity were blurred as never before.

Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz were seen as embracing the new, modern notion of marriage. In many ways, she embodied the period's New Woman, with her distaste for domestic work, her struggle to maintain an egalitarian relationship with her husband, and her continued devotion to her career.

"People idealized their relationship," Fryd explains. "But when you look into their letters, into their relationships, and into some of O'Keeffe's artwork, you find that they had a troubled relationship."

Although Edward and Jo Hopper seemed to share a fairly conventional marriage, theirs was a relationship filled with verbal and physical abuse. Her husband was generally unsupportive of Jo Hopper's lack of interest in the domestic sphere and her passion to be an artist in her own right. And, though the Hoppers did not have children, Jo thought of herself as having sacrificed her career as an artist upon marriage to her husband.

In addition to exploring the relationships of each couple, Fryd uses the works of O'Keeffe and Hopper to reflect the fears and hopes of other men and women of the time.

"O'Keeffe and Hopper represent two different relationship paradigms and are exaggerations of them," says Fryd. "The complexities of these couples' marriages intersect with what was being said about marriage at this time, a time when people had one foot in the old, traditional marriage and one foot in the new. They represent two couples dealing with this dilemma in two different ways, and their struggle embodies issues and confusions addressed during this period that are also manifest in their paintings."

At the aftermath of a great depression, the cold war and the nuclear bomb, times shifted again. The 'ideology of domesticity' enjoyed resurgence in popularity as men home from war reestablished themselves as family breadwinners, and women returned to the domestic arena. Couples married younger, the national birthrate increased, the divorce rate decreased, and the United States moved onto another chapter in its social history.

"That time between the two world wars formed the seed for the period in which we live today," says Fryd. "What's happening now is very much an exaggeration of what was happening during those three decades."