Decades ago, I wandered through an Edward Hopper exhibit in Boston, a naïve kid who didn’t know what she was looking at but knew viscerally that the paintings were something special. So special, in fact, that I spent what was probably some of my food budget on a small framed print of “Nighthawks” that I’ve kept to this day.

Recently at the Seattle Art Museum’s exhibit of “Edward Hopper’s Women,” I learned what so enthralled me about Hopper’s work: He was an uncommonly close and trained observer of people and places. Much like a reporter, Hopper watched and catalogued the urban changes of the 1920s and ’30s but instead of writing about what he saw, he painted.

Hopper’s focus of those changes was the modern young women, the subject in his capture of American city life.

“Edward Hopper’s Women” is on display through March 1 at SAM.

“He was painting the change in culture,” said Patricia Junker, SAM’s curator of American art. “Working women were now out and about eating alone. And women waitresses were new. So, we get a sense of who these women are by where they are. It supplies our imagination with questions.”

Certainly, these representative pieces inspire our imaginations and evoke lots of questions. It’s this ongoing dialogue we have with Hopper that makes these seemingly simple and everyday slices of American life so provocative.

Take the painting called “Automat” done in 1922, back in the day of Horn &Hardarts and vending machine dining, where patrons put in their nickels and pulled out plates of pie and macaroni and cheese. In “Automat,” a woman sits alone at a table.

“What is she doing on display like that in this window? It’s rather disturbing, and eating alone while willing up that invisible wall around her,” curator Junker pointed out while leading a group during a recent press tour of the exhibit.

Junker pointed out that Hopper was rather Victorian in his ways and held onto that baggage even while women were emerging around him.

In his paintings it’s as if “he looks at women in New York City in an almost leering way,” said Junker, who said Hopper was immensely shy and used cafes like studios.

Hopper, born in 1882, was a commercial illustrator until 1925 and taught himself to etch. In 1924, he had success with his first solo watercolor exhibition of seascapes. In 1924, he married painter Jo Nivison, who became the model for his figurative works.

In 1929, Hopper’s pivotal work “Chop Suey” solidified the artist’s “extended narrative of human vulnerability that evolved as Hopper studied women in new kinds of social spaces in New York,” Junker said.

“Chop Suey” portrays two women at a table in what was then a chop suey restaurant where this American-born meal of cheap vegetables and rice appealed to the working class clientele. The painting again makes us wonder: Who are these women? What are they talking about? What brought them together?

“There is an intense focus on the woman; everything he was started here,” Junker said. “It’s just a knock-out picture.”

Other highlights of the exhibit include “Compartment C, Car 293,” which depicts a woman riding alone on a train in her sleeping compartment, and “New York Movie,” which has the working female usher leaning against a wall, not looking at the movie screen but deep in her own thoughts. The painting juxtaposes a public place with a private moment.

Another vivid display of Hopper’s voyeurism can be seen in “Sunlight in Cafeteria,” where we see golden sunlight streaming through a restaurant window where a woman is seated but there’s a man sitting at another table staring at her.

“The narrative is really kind of creepy to me,” Junker said. “It’s a picture about light, but a man is leering at this woman. It’s about the circumstances of modern woman.”

Mimi Gates, SAM’s director, called the works “the iconography of modern woman” and “an inspired exhibit.”

Though Hopper’s painting “Nighthawks” is not among the works in this intimate exhibit, there are 10 of some of the artist’s most recognizable work, supplemented by a selection of photographs by Hopper’s contemporaries, including Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans and Ben Shahn.

Reporter Theresa Goffredo: 425-339-3424 or goffredo@heraldnet.com