Photo courtesy of SAM
“Chop Suey” by Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper, the prominent American realist painter and printmaker, is known for his renderings reflecting his personal vision of modern American life.
In the Hopper iconography, women, in particular, feature prominently. The artist focused on the country’s women over a period of four decades, scrutinizing them endlessly in an attempt to understand the conditions and historical events that led to their changes in societal stature and place. He was fascinated with his subjects – their sexuality, vulnerability and frailty – and spent hours observing them within a variety of social spaces.
In Seattle Art Museum’s new exhibit, “Edward Hopper’s Women,” visitors have the opportunity to view some of the artist’s most significant works as they pertain to his interest in documenting the changing role of women. The driving force behind this exhibition is the promised bequest of Hopper’s seminal painting, “Chop Suey,” to the museum from one of Seattle’s distinguished art patrons and SAM trustee, Barney Ebsworth.
“Chop Suey” (1929) is one of the artist’s most familiar and beloved paintings and it is often considered as a defining work in his career. In the picture, two women are featured dining in a type of ubiquitous restaurant known to New Yorkers for its unique meld of Chinese-American fare. Places like this were known for their cheap, but good food, and efficient, no-nonsense service. They became especially popular with the working girls, who began frequenting them at lunchtime.
The fact that these women dined at such restaurants, unescorted by men, was significant in of itself. It represented a desire to break free from old fashioned societal taboos and demonstrated an independent and adventurous spirit.
“Chop Suey” provides the ideal focus for SAM’s exhibit for considering Hopper’s enduring fascination with the modern woman during the late 1920s.
According to Patricia Junker, Curator of American Art at SAM and organizer of the exhibit, the artist’s visual narrative on women is an epic tale of American history. She writes, “War and economic necessity changed the place of women in American society and sent them out of the home, into the workplace, and on the road to seek a better life. Like the Victorian-era buildings that he also painted and made famous, Hopper’s women are figures suspended in time, subjects that embody enduring associations with girlhood, motherhood, and home and hearth, but now – as occupants of offices, cheap restaurants, movie theaters, rooming houses, or motel rooms – they are women strangely out of place.”
The exhibit is a compilation of 10 paintings, which in addition to “Chop Suey, include such iconic works as “Automat,” “New York Restaurant,” “Sunlight in a Cafeteria,” “Summer Evening,” “Compartment C, Car 293” and “New York Movie,” as well as several related etchings.
The collection is also supplemented by a selection of photographs (from the museum’s permanent collection) by Hopper’s contemporaries, such as Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans and Ben Shahn, among others.
According to Junker, the exhibited works allow visitors the opportunity to appreciate the universality of the artist’s themes and the ability of the art to communicate effectively and powerfully over time. They point to an obsession with the human condition that occupied Hopper throughout his entire career and led to his most acclaimed and representational works.
“Few people in the Seattle area have probably seen these paintings,” says Junker. “Though many of us have seen photographs and reproductions of the works, they have most likely not seen them in the flesh. And they are truly wonderful. We are fortunate to have them here.” Each of Hopper’s paintings tells a story. There’s an established place and a cast of characters that help set the mood, and then there’s a drama that unfolds in the viewer’s imagination. The subjects have a sense of mystery about them and they emanate palpable tension. Junker explains that this is testament to the intensity of Hopper’s gaze. She says that the artist was a very close observer of people and place, a voyeur, who used to go to the cafes at night and sit and people watch for hours at a time. He would stare shamelessly at anonymous individuals caught in unguarded, private moments, unaware that others were looking at them.
Of interest to note is though human behavior intrigued Hopper, he wasn’t comfortable engaging with anyone except his closest friends. He studied people intently, but always from afar. In “Automat,” for example, Hopper’s subject is not the restaurant itself, but rather the young woman who sits by herself at a table for two. She appears to be completely lost in thought and one is compelled to wonder about her situation. Is she waiting for a friend? Is the Automat a sanctuary for her? When will she depart?
In “Compartment C, Car 293,” a lone woman is seen in a Pullman sleeper car. She is traveling by herself and like the woman in “Automat,” she averts her eyes. We question where she is going and why she is traveling on her own. Her story is left to our imagination and we can fill in the details with as much narrative as we choose. We feel compelled, however, to create interesting scenarios which satisfy our curiosity.
Also included in the exhibit are two portraits, one, a self portrait of Hopper, and the other, “Jo Painting,” a rendition of the artist’s wife, Josephine Hopper, who served as the model for all of her husband’s representations of women, but this is the only oil portrait of her. She was also a painter and a contemporary, but as Hopper’s model, she took on many female roles assigned to her. Interestingly, these roles did not translate into life outside the studio walls, where in reality, the couple’s relationship was characterized as stormy and tumultuous.
The series of black and white photographs accompanying the exhibit help to animate the figures in Hopper’s paintings and expose human nature in the raw, while establishing a sense of time and place. Like Hopper’s paintings, they have the ability to elicit powerful associations and emotional responses.