Always Looking

October 8, 2012
The previously uncollected art writings of the prolific and award-winning novelist and critic Updike, who died in 2009, are compiled in this handsome volume. The essays explore works by artists including Monet, Klimt, Degas, Miró, Magritte; the major movements of Impressionism, Surrealism, Pop art, and Minimalism; and the habits and tastes of the collectors who shape our understanding of fine art’s place in American culture. The reviews, most of which appeared in the New York Review of Books and the New Republic, continue the analytical approach employed in the celebrated collections Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005) by unspooling like narrations of a museum ramble with Updike at your side. Through Updike’s lens of novelistic psychology, some of the best-known biographies of 19th and 20th century art history take on a wholly original cast. Our guide is eternally curious; informal but well-informed; adept at describing color, line, or brushstroke without falling back on jargon or metaphor. Whether he’s transported by a Monet landscape or thrown off-balance by Richard Serra’s torqued elliptical sculptures, Updike is always honest about how he is personally affected by the artwork. As the final document of Updike’s sensitive and passionate approach to art, this book reinforces the late writer’s great lesson: that we should always be looking. Illus. Agent: The Wylie Agency.

January 1, 2013

This posthumous collection of Updike's essays on art serves as a companion volume to Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005). The book opens with a sweeping consideration of "Americanness" in painting that takes readers from the Colonial period to the 1970s. However, tending as Updike did towards the monographic, the majority of essays here consist of sustained readings of canonical male Western artists: Stuart, Degas, Cezanne, and Miro, among others. Updike possessed a gift for narrativizing the viewing experience, and while readers will certainly benefit from the copious contextual and historical information that he provides, the book's strongest passages are his lucid descriptions of single works. The force of these passages is amplified by the numerous high-quality image reproductions that encourage readers to repeatedly compare the prose to the painting being discussed. VERDICT This will greatly appeal to fans of John Updike as well as those seeking thoughtful literary reflections on significant works of modern art.--Jonathan Patkowski, CUNY Graduate Ctr.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2012

After Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005), here's a final, posthumous volume from a writer whose art criticism was as good as his fiction. The 15 essays are taken mostly from the New York Review of Books, though readers will also find "The Clarity of Things," the 2008 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities and an encompassing statement of Updike's approach to criticism. With more than 200 color illustrations to go with commentary on artists ranging from Degas to Serra. Bravo!

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2012
Final musings on mostly modern art by the prolific lion of American letters. This posthumous collection of essays by Updike (Higher Gossip, 2011, etc.) has been gorgeously collected and edited by Carduff and elevated by reproductions of the artwork under review. The author was an infamous gallery-crawler with a sensitive eye for American art, and his scrupulous aestheticism is on full display here. The book opens with a sad preface in the wake of the author's death in 2009; Updike offers a full and honest remembrance of a photo of himself reading a Mickey Mouse comic at the age of 9. What follows are 13 richly illustrated essays on various art exhibitions ranging from the opening salvo, "The Clarity of Things," deconstructing the National Endowment for the Humanities' Picturing America collection, to "The Art of our Disorder," a look at a 2005 exhibition of American surrealists. But Updike reserves his most acute analysis for collections by individual artists, including Claude Monet, Joan Miro and others. These essays, like those in his earlier collections, Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005), are incisive in their examinations of individual artwork but don't carry the self-conscious or cynical air that accompanies much postmodern art criticism. One exemplary essay, "Degas Out-of-Doors," takes the great French impressionist out of his traditional context: "His eccentric perspectives, his truncated compositions, his increasingly daring juxtapositions of color make us reflect, in modern style, upon the operations of perception--or, more precisely, upon the synthetic tensions that occur when a vision in three dimensions is reduced to a two-dimensional colored surface." In "Bridges to the Invisible," Updike delves into the New Objectivism of Max Beckmann, but also gives a rich description of descending into the Guggenheim's Soho cousin, which inhabited a converted warehouse rather than its celebrated main emporium on the Upper East Side. A rich trove of insights for art lovers of all stripes.

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November 1, 2012
In the third volume of his Looking series of art-essay collections, following Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005), and published posthumously, Updike expands on his articulation of the complex pleasures of intense scrutiny. He is sensuously receptive and discerningly critical as he peers closely and steps back for a more encompassing gaze to assess how each artist brings paint to life. Most of the essays are scintillating and learned biographical and aesthetic responses to major museum exhibits of such artists as douard Vuillard, Ren' Magritte, Max Beckmann, Joan Mir, and Richard Serra. But in The Clarity of Things, his 2008 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, Updike discusses Picturing Americaa set of 40 reproductions created by the American Library Association and the National Endowment for the Humanities for use in schools and libraries, taking fresh approaches to Gilbert Stuart, Winslow Homer, and Norman Rockwell and posing and answering the question, What is American about American art? For all their immediacy, Updike's vital works of art criticism are timeless.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)