Walter Wells: Emeritus Professor Publishes Book on Enigmatic Painter

Walter Wells parts the curtain on the world of one of America’s most enigmatic painters in Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper (London: Phaidon Press, 2007). In the book, the California State University, Dominguez Hills emeritus professor of English underscores the similarities between the visual and literary arts for his readers.

“Aesthetics knows a lot of overlap,” he says. “The first time I brought a few Hopper slides into the classroom, I did so to compare and contrast their implications to several poems by Walt Whitman. Later, when I began teaching film and propaganda in the humanities program, I found I had more to say about painters, photographers and filmmakers, whose rhetoric I found far from mutually exclusive from that of poets, novelists, and dramatists.”

Wells says that art critic Peter Schjeldahl calls the typical Hopper painting “the breathless midpoint of an unknown story.”

“With Hopper, it was his implicit narratives, caught suspended and frozen on the canvas, that first attracted me to him as a critical subject,” says Wells. “Exploring those unknowns is a major part of Silent Theater.”

Wells points out that “Another interesting conjunction between writers and painters is their frequent recourse to archetype, those images from our collective store that require no decoding - fire as passion; the green of springtime as innocence, or rebirth, or regeneration; sunset, which Shakespeare called ‘Death's second self’; or the ocean tide as the eternal and unending, as it is in Matthew Arnold's wonderful poem, ‘Dover Beach.'"

The concept of cross-sensory imagery, or synaesthesia, is a phenomenon that Wells uses to illustrate the power of Hopper’s work.

“Ordinarily, of course, we see what we see, hear what we hear, taste what we taste,” he says. “Artists, however, have the power to cross and tangle our senses with imagery that makes us taste what we see, hear what we feel, give us odorful color, melodious flavor, or a chill wind perceived as a wailing siren or a quavering blue light. Synaesthesia can be powerfully engaging. It’s one of the qualities that makes a ‘silent’ painting like 'Early Sunday Morning' so electrifying an image. Notice how its tenement buildings, storefronts, that middle awning, and especially that barber pole all lean perceptibly away from a sun whose rays seem to strike with the force of a strong wind.”

In writing Silent Theater, Wells tied his admiration of Hopper’s work to its growing worldwide appeal.

“I’ve long found a number of his pictures personally compelling, for reasons that, initially, I didn't quite understand,” he admits. “So it's not a stretch to see one of the motives behind the book as that of self-discovery. But a number of other people feel the same way. So to understand Hopper's art a little better, and what it is that makes it as widely appealing, wasn't simply navel-gazing but a search for some broader and genuinely interesting academic insight, into both art and art appreciation.”

Silent Theater took Wells five years to write. “The book took shape,” he says, “around a recognition of the numerous connections between Hopper's art and the themes and outlooks of certain important writers --Emerson, Melville, Hemingway, Ibsen, among others-- and grew from there.”

Returning to his initial desire to examine his attachment to Hopper’s work, Wells points out that, “No artist's strategies for bridging the distance between his own psyche and a viewer's are better developed than his. The images endure because the realities they depict are quickly superseded for viewers by the deeper veins of shared experience into which they tap. Edward Hopper taught us a new way of seeing both the twentieth century and ourselves.”

Wells has written several books, including Tycoons and Locusts: A Regional Look at Hollywood Fiction of the 1930s (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), Mark Twain’s Sure-Fire Programmed Guide to Backgrounds in American Literature (Scales Mound: Educulture, Inc., 1977) and Communications in Business (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Co., Inc., 1968, 1977, 1981, 1985, 1988). He also served as editor of an audiobook series for the Educulture Press and has written reviews and features for the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

Wells, who arrived at CSU Dominguez Hills during its beginnings in 1967, remembers with humor the fledgling university that grew from its temporary location in an apartment building across the street.

“We were so small that Sam Wiley (emeritus professor of physics) and I brought physics and literature together into the same shared office,” he quips.

Although he saw many changes in 31 years on the CSUDH campus until his retirement in 1998, Wells says the one thing that did not change at all was “the faculty's ongoing commitment to students above all else. Never, through a series of administrations, did that commitment waver.”

Wells also remembers that the CSUDH student body was “interesting from the start, older than the undergraduate average by a good bit, more experienced in life, and more culturally diverse.” This diversity became the university’s hallmark, according to Wells, even at the state capitol.

“I remember sitting across a table from Ronald Reagan, then governor, at an educational conference in Sacramento one afternoon,” he recalls. “It was 1969, still at the crest of nationwide student protest. Acknowledging me as the representative from what was then Cal State College, Dominguez Hills, he said, ‘You know, you guys give me more problems than anyone else in the system,’ and he laughed. I laughed too, taking it as a compliment.”

- Joanie Harmon-Whetmore

Image above:

Edward Hopper, (American, 1882-1967)
Early Sunday Morning, 1930
Whitney Museum of American Art
www.amico.org