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Book review

Fine writing on fine art

Novelist John Updike turns his attention to American art in its finite rather than abstract sense, crafting essays of his own insights.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published December 16, 2005

Still Looking by John Updike

Most times, reading art reviews of exhibitions long gone is analogous to hearing a play-by-play rehash of a great baseball game you never saw. About halfway through, you realize this is something irretrievable, so why bother with the secondhand experience?

John Updike's Still Looking is a different story. Updike is an accomplished and admired writer of contemporary fiction, and he applies his considerable gifts to observations about art in 19 essays written mostly as moonlighting gigs for the New York Review of Books. It's a followup, of sorts, to Just Looking, a collection from the 1980s.

Updike does a lot of research, making connections with other artists and movements, putting things in larger social contexts, but his is not a scholarly approach. He's a yarn-spinner rather than wool-gatherer, and his descriptions are more chatty strolls through cultural moments in time than comprehensive docent tours of galleries.

The essays would not be nearly as much fun without copious color plates illustrating his points. But it's really the writing that gives Still Looking such entertainment value. All essays deal with American art from the 18th through 20th centuries.

"American Sublime" was a 2002 exhibition of 19th century American landscapes, a genre largely nonexistent before that time. By way of explanation and as an introduction to the art Updike writes, "The Puritans averted their eyes from the forest, with its red-skinned deviltry, and their pragmatic successors like Benjamin Franklin were concerned with lightning's harnessable power but not its thrilling scenic value. . . . Who would want to buy a picture of trees, rocks and poison ivy . . .? America needed Wordsworth, and his native apostles William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, to begin to love their rugged and interminable land."

This isn't a new insight, but it's beautifully expressed.

He's gently unkind about a 1994 exhibition of American impressionists and realists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, addressing a peeve I share, about "hectoring" wall texts that seem to go on forever and can make a museum experience feel more like a cram course than a personal journey of discovery.

Updike is straightforward about his predilection for representational art and, when assessing abstract art, is more comfortable with those he can describe in imagistic terms. Arthur Dove's Abstraction No. 2, for example, "has seemingly cut all ties with the realm of representation. Even so, its central form, the shape of an axhead, strongly suggests an unhappy face - a hydrocephalic version of (Edvard) Munch's Scream." He prefers Jackson Pollock's Cathedral, its "curving lines that trace on a sensitive plate the flight of atomic particles," to the "coagulated" look of Pollock's Autumn Rhythm.

Not surprising then, his empathy for Winslow Homer, "painting's Melville . . . but without the bitter truncation of Melville's career," and Edward Hopper, whose work "excels in making us aware of the elsewhere, the missing, the longed-for."

And, really, not surprising either is Updike's affection for Andy Warhol, the final subject of the book, "an ill-educated dyslexic who became the wittiest image-maker since (Marcel) Duchamp and the wittiest voice in art since Whistler." He praises the "uncanny, unearthly beauty and rightness" and the "concentrated innocence" of the silk-screened celebrities and soup cans, and Warhol, "the benign, wan apostle of surface and nullity, reconciling us to a cluttered world emptied of more than superficial content."

The best writing refutes the sound bite, and extracting briefs from Updike's prose is a disservice to his finely calibrated sentences linked into elegant paragraphs that flow across the pages.

So I'll pull no more quotes. Well, maybe one more, but not from Updike. It's from Gertrude Stein, borrowed for his introduction, and conjoins his love of art and writing:

"Everybody must like something and I like seeing painted pictures. There is no reason for it but . . . I can always look . . . and slowly, yes slowly, I will tell you about it."

- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com

Sunday in Perspective/Books: Writer John Updike talks about Still Looking, his taste in art and his role as a "grateful amateur" as he strolls through the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

[Last modified December 15, 2005, 10:23:03]