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do with gender and unattainable standards of appearance, and that gets increasingly toxic and strangulating with age.
    But if Jeffries is performing Hopper’s characteristic gaze – cool, curious, detached – then Hitchcock is also at pains to show how voyeurism works to isolate the viewer as well as the viewed. In Rear Window voyeurism is explicitly presented as an escape from intimacy, a way of side-stepping real emotional demands. Jeffries prefers watching to participating; his obsessive scrutiny is a way of remaining emotionally aloof from both his girlfriend and the neighbours on whom he spies. It’s only gradually that he is drawn into investment and commitment, becoming literally as well as figuratively engaged.
    A rangy man who likes to spy on others, and who must learn to accommodate a flesh and blood woman in his life: Rear Window mimics or mirrors more than just the contents of Hopper’s art. It also reflects the contours of his emotional life, the conflict between detachment and need that was lived out in actuality as well as expressed in coloured streaks of paint on canvas, in scenes repeated over many years.
    In 1923, he re-encountered a woman with whom he’d studied at art school. Josephine Niveson, known as Jo, was tiny and tempestuous: a talkative, hot-tempered, sociable woman who’d been living alone in the West Village after the death of her parents, doggedly making her way as an artist, though she was crushingly short on funds. They bonded over a shared love of French culture and that summer began haltingly to date. The next year, they married. She was forty-one and still a virgin, and he was almost forty-two. Both must have considered the possibility that they would remain alone for good, having gone so far beyond the then conventional age for marriage.
    The Hoppers were only parted when Edward died in thespring of 1967. But though they were as a couple deeply enmeshed, their personalities, even their physical forms, were so diametrically opposed that they sometimes seemed like caricatures of the gulf between men and women. As soon as Jo gave up her studio and moved into Edward’s marginally more salubrious room on Washington Square, her own career, previously much fought for, much defended, dwindled away to almost nothing: a few soft, impressionistic paintings here and there; an occasional group show.
    In part this was because Jo poured her considerable energies into tending and nurturing her husband’s work: dealing with his correspondence, handling loan requests and needling him into painting. At her insistence, she also posed for all the women in his canvases. From 1923 on, every office worker and city girl was modelled for by Jo, sometimes dressed up and sometimes stripped down, sometimes recognisable and sometimes entirely rebuilt. The tall blonde usherette in 1939’s New York Movie, leaning pensively against a wall: that was based on her, as was the leggy red-haired burlesque dancer in 1941’s Girlie Show, for which Jo modelled ‘without a stitch on in front of the stove – nothing but high heels in a lottery dance pose’.
    A model, yes; a rival, no. The other reason Jo’s career foundered is that her husband was profoundly opposed to its existence. Edward didn’t just fail to support Jo’s painting, but rather worked actively to discourage it, mocking and denigrating the few things she did manage to produce, and acting with great creativity and malice to limit the conditions in which she might paint. One of the most shocking elements of Gail Levin’s fascinating and enormously detailed Edward Hopper:An Intimate Biography, which draws closely on Jo’s unpublished diaries, is the violence into which theHoppers’ relationship often degenerated. They had frequent rows, particularly over his attitude to her painting and her desire to drive their car, both potent symbols of autonomy and power. Some of these fights were physical: cuffings, slappings and scratchings, undignified