Edward Hopper Chop Suey
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Understanding Chop Suey by Edward Hopper

Chop Suey (1929) is a great example of the psychological depth that Edward Hopper's work is known for. It freezes an everyday scene from a time when America was changing quickly. Some of his contemporaries were interested in the flashy flapper crowd, but Hopper was more interested in the quieter, everyday dramas that happened in places like Chinese restaurants, automats, and diners.

Chop suey comes from the Cantonese phrase tsap sui, which means "bits and pieces." By the middle of the 1920s, chop suey restaurants had become popular luncheonettes where people from the new working class could grab a bite to eat.

Hopper's oil paintings were often a mix of different things he saw and did. Chop Suey may have been inspired in part by two restaurants he went to in the 1920s.

The Far East Tea Garden was on the second floor of 8 Columbus Circle on New York City's Upper West Side. Hopper and his wife Josephine went there often when they were first married. The Hoppers spent the summer of 1927 in Portland, Maine, at the Empire Chop Suey, which had a sign that looked a lot like the one in the painting. It was 24 feet tall and weighed 600 pounds. Neither business still stands.

In Chop Suey, two women are sitting at a table, and another couple can be seen in the background, but only partially. The bright white tables are all empty, and the only thing that looks Chinese is the teapot on the table next to it. Hopper's tables never have food on them. Since Hopper was known to not like food, he and his wife often made dinner from canned food. What he thought was important were the places where people ate and drank.

Hopper's paintings of women in restaurants show how their roles and views changed in the United States in the late 1920s. Chop suey joints were places where the new female workers were welcome. In fact, the painting is centered on the woman who is facing the viewer. But instead of basking in the light coming in from the restaurant window, she looks thoughtful and avoids making eye contact with either the person watching or her friend.

All three women in the scene were posed by Josephine Hopper. She seems different from the woman sitting right next to her. Hopper's habit of using light almost like a theater spotlight adds to this feeling of distance and adds to an unsettling feeling of being alone.

All of Hopper's restaurant paintings are about these young women from the working class. This helps viewers understand something important about the modern city where he painted. They also show the social and sexual tensions that arose when men and women took on new roles in public. Hopper's character studies of 1920s New York café women are some of his most psychologically and sexually charged.

Hopper uses color and light as much as he does mood. In the background, bands of bright white light cut through swaths of cool blue, making a pattern on the walls that is almost abstract. The bright red, white, and blue of the sign outside really stands out against the warm colors in the foreground.

Chop Suey foreshadows Pop Art by using the bright signs of city streets. Hopper's exploration of the commercialization of dining in the 1920s also foreshadows the themes of Pop Art a half-century later.

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