The pre-eminent authority on Hopper, Levin published Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography last September. The 659-page volume has received widespread acclaim, including a New York Times review that calls the work "masterly," "absorbing," and "generous in its amplitude."

This year also marked the publication of Levin's Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonne (W. W. Norton & Co.) and The Poetry of Solitude: A Tribute to Edward Hopper (Universe Books.)

Hopper, the celebrated painter of the darker side of modern life, is both critically esteemed and well-known to wider audiences for many memorable images, including the often parodied Nighthawks, the 1942 painting depicting lonely city dwellers at a diner counter.

Publication of Levin's works, together with a hit exhibition on Hopper at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art last summer, placed the UTC humanities chair holder at the center of a major event in the art world--what Newsweek calls "the most complete look yet" at Hopper, who lived from 1882-1967.

A native of Atlanta, Levin is professor of art history at Baruch College and the graduate school of the City University of New York.

The following are excerpts from an interview with Levin conducted by Chattanooga Times reporter Emily McDonald and Carolyn Mitchell of the UTC University Relations staff.

Q: How do you account for Edward Hopper's popularity?

A: He's an artist people can look at and immediately respond to. I think what they're responding to is the alienation he felt from modern life, and that alienation makes him quintessentially modern. He's so timely because today people are beginning to wonder if technology has gone too far and to question what technology is doing to our lives. Hopper was asking the same things.

When he paints that house by the railroad, the old Victorian-style house with the mansard roof, being passed up by progress as the railroad track goes into the city, he definitely is nostalgic for small-town America, which was disappearing with the tremendous growth of the urban centers. You sense this loss too in Sherwood Anderson, whose fiction Hopper admired, and Lewis Mumford, the architectural and cultural critic, who, also like Hopper, disdained the skyscraper.

Q: Your biography describes the turbulent marriage between Hopper and Jo Nevison Hopper, also an artist. Despite their conflicts, could Hopper have created the work he did without Jo's influence?

A: I think Hopper would have had a much more tranquil life without Jo and made a lot less art. Somebody said she stung him to life. He was such an introvert and so depressed. Without a gregarious wife, full of energy and eager for him to make art -- because he was impossible to live with when he wasn't [painting], which was most of the time -- we'd have a lot less art. He was competitive with Jo. He was so often without anything he wanted to paint, so she would start painting and that would get his competitive juices flowing, particularly if she started painting in his studio.

Q: Hopper didn't encourage his wife's painting at all?

A: On the contrary, he discouraged her actively. There are moments she'd say to him, 'Isn't it great to have a wife that paints?' and he'd say, 'It stinks.' And he would attack women artists in general, saying 'Mary Cassatt was nothing. She got it all from Degas.'

Q: Did Hopper make a lot of money from his paintings?

A: The Hoppers lived on so little in their Washington Square apartment that he accumulated quite a bit. But the prices his paintings went for then are so vastly different from what they are today. At the end of his life, his paintings were up to $15,000. But today a Hopper painting would be well over a million dollars. I wouldn't want to say how many millions.

Q: The domestic discord you discovered in Jo's diaries was a surprise to you. What are some of the other major revelations the diaries yielded?

A: One of my big discoveries is the meaning of light for Hopper. People love the way he makes so much of sunlight and of illumination at night. When a handyman the Hoppers had on Cape Cod died, Edward was quoted by Jo as saying, "Poor Tommy Gray. He can't see the sunlight anymore." And he would say this about different people. And I began to realize that the sunlight was the life force for Hopper and therefore when he paints sun in an empty room, it's very poignant. The depiction of light is fundamental to being alive for Hopper.

Q: You have been praised for your volume on Hopper's commercial illustrations. Did he enjoy this part of his work?

A: Hopper made a living for two decades as a commercial illustrator before he became an artist. But he hated to illustrate. He hesitated. He'd walk around the block several times not wanting to go in with his illustrations. Norman Rockwell, on the other hand, illustrating in the same period, loved to make things on commission. Hopper hated it. He was too much of an individualist. He didn't want to have to create anything that somebody else wanted. He felt an artist paints his personality and inner psychology and you couldn't force that. He said, 'I hated to draw people gesturing and grimacing. What I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house.'

Q: Why was there no earlier Hopper biographer?

A: During Hopper's lifetime, a man from The New Yorker wanted to do a profile on Hopper, and Mrs. Hopper really scotched that. She didn't want them subject to a public x-ray. She said artists' lives are basically boring, and on the face of it, the Hoppers would seem boring. But when you look at the psychic struggle this man went through to create his powerful art and the emotional interaction with his wife, it's quite an eventful life really.