Walter Wells: Author of Edward Hopper Biography is Awarded Umhoefer Prize

Walter Wells, emeritus professor of English at California State University, Dominguez Hills, has been awarded the 2009 Umhoefer Prize for Achievement in the Humanities. The award, which was announced in February, was granted by Minnesota’s Arts and Humanities Foundation, for Wells’s 2007 book, “Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper.” Wells shares the Umhoefer award with the book’s editors, David Anfam and Julia Rolf of the Phaidon Press in London. More than 1,000 works of literature, drama, the visual and performing arts, music, history, philosophy, photography and cinema are considered for the award each year.

A self-described “interdisciplinarian,” Wells says that looking closely at art enhances our understanding well beyond the subject at hand.

“It extends our experience, vicariously, into other places, other times, other life conditions and circumstances,” he says. “Art transports us into other realms, sometimes realistically, sometimes symbolically, or abstractly. But in every case it increases that knowledge we gain by experience.

“Whereas our knowledge of politics, mathematics, economics, of nuclear physics, such as it is, comes through accrued understanding,” Wells notes, “our knowledge of fundamental human conditions, of complex emotional states, of internal
conflicts and the like, is knowledge we gain, not necessarily by understanding them, but by undergoing them. Art– whether painting, literature, the theatre, film, dance, or the symphony – multiplies those experiences. Without the knowledge of cerebral understanding, and that of experience – we walk haltingly.”

Last fall, Wells spoke on Hopper’s work at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which holds several of the artist’s better-known paintings. This April, Wells presented a talk at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, on the satirical “documentaries” of Michael Moore. His article, “What’s an Investor to Do?” was featured in the April 21 issue of the University of Chicago’s UChicago News for Alumni and Friends. Wells, who lives in London, is currently preparing several book projects, including a study of film and propaganda, and one on the late literary journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski.

- Joanie Harmon