Essays on American Art - by John Updike

Hard Cover - 240 pages - 2005 - 10.3" x 8.3"

Cover price is $55.00

When, in 1989, a collection of John Updike’s writings on art appeared under the title Just Looking, a reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle commented, “He refreshes for us the sense of prose opportunity that makes art a sustaining subject to people who write about it.” In the sixteen years since Just Looking was published, he has continued to serve as an art critic, mostly for The New York Review of Books, and from fifty or so articles has selected, for this richly illustrated book, eighteen that deal with American art.

After beginning with early American portraits, landscapes, and the transatlantic career of John Singleton Copley, Still Looking then considers the curious case of Martin Johnson Heade and extols two late-nineteenth-century masters, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. Next, it discusses the eccentric pre-moderns James McNeill Whistler and Albert Pinkham Ryder, the competing American Impressionists and Realists in the early twentieth century, and such now-historic avant-garde figures as Alfred Stieglitz, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Elie Nadelman. Two appreciations of Edward Hopper and appraisals of Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol round out the volume.

Review:

Updike's art criticism is free of abstraction and jargon and radiant in its curiosity and discernment. He can't help but bring a novelist's gift for psychological insight to his discussions of art, even as he expertly considers technique and aesthetics. American art is his passion, and within that realm, it is painting that he loves best, although he has included a judicious discussion of Alfred Stieglitz, the most painterly of photographers. Updike begins with a witty discussion of American portraiture and John Singleton Copley, then celebrates American landscape painting in his most rousing pieces, discussing with deep feeling the idea of the sublime during the oh-so-brief era in the New World when "nature reigned untamed" and offering agile responses to the paintings of Frederic Edwin Church, Martin Johnson Heade, and Winslow Homer. Forthright in his castigation of museum exhibitions burdened with dunning commentary, incisive in his interpretation of John Sloan and Arthur Dove, and brilliant in his response to Edward Hopper, Updike is receptivity personified, writing about art with ardent attention, knowledge, and profound appreciation. Updike's immersion in art assures us that there are oases, still, from the crassness of commercial images. Donna Seaman - Booklist