'Still Looking' Collects John Updike Essays On Art
Susan Stamberg
Updike describes this Hopper painting, People in the Sun, 1960, as "unreal," both in terms of its landscape and its characters. Edward Hopper/Smithsonian American Art Museum hide caption
Updike describes this Hopper painting, People in the Sun, 1960, as "unreal," both in terms of its landscape and its characters.
For decades now, John Updike has chronicled Middle America. Rabbit Run , Rabbit at Rest and The Witches of Eastwick are just a few of the many novels he has written. The 73-year-old author, acclaimed for his fiction, is also a prolific essayist.
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Welcoming august with a poem, this i believe, testing the limits of what i know and feel, all things considered, seek my face.
Updike's new book, Still Looking , collects pieces he has written on American art, many of which first appeared in The New York Review of Books . Susan Stamberg talked with Updike about his relationship with art, and about the artists he highlights in his new book.
Below is an excerpt from the essay Hopper's Polluted Silence , reviewing a 1995 Edward Hopper exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The essay is collected in the book Still Looking :
Hopper's colors turned cooler and chalkier as he aged: the warm brick- and plush-reds of his New York paintings receded. A western painting, People in the Sun (1960), is almost comically unreal -- unreal in the Thirties-syle street clothes of the fully garbed sunbathers, unreal in the un-Hopperesque lack of any architectural definition of their porch or platform, unreal in the applique-like strips of generalized desert landscape. It has no atmosphere but psychological atmosphere; the people, dressed for a luncheon party, seem to be on the deck of a boat without a glimpse of water, and, placed all on the left side of the canvas, appear to be sliding toward the sun. In Second Story Sunlight , painted the same year, the white gables and tall windows and ominous tree-mass are less surreal but feel cardboard-thin, slapped up as a setting for the two actresses, the gray-haired matron and the well-endowed bathing beauty. From their dreaming gazes they might be versions of the same woman, the older remembering the younger as the painter is remembering them both. Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself. Now in his late seventies, the old conjurer is calling up images with hardly a glance out the window. Chair Car (1965) shows not a fleck of scenery through the big glass panes, and its interior, without racks or a door handle and a as high-ceilinged as a little chapel, might have been painted by a man who never rode a train. But Hopper for forty years had been doing more than giving the visual news. Gail Levin's essay on Hopper's "Legacy for artists" quotes the sculptor George Segal as saying, "What I like about Hopper is how far poetically he went, away from the real world."
Without turning to an inner reality, Hopper could not have created Hoppers. they give us back a now-historic world, with its Automats and empty roads and gilded movie palaces, preserved by a still-potent intimacy. While the centrally housed video at the Whitney unignorably droned and shuffled its iconography of "American imagination," Hopper's quite personal silence spoke. Having stood before each of the fifty-nine canvases displayed on the third floor, this viewer at the elevator door had an impulse to run back in again, as at some lovelorn parting, and make the encounter yield a final word torn from the depths of what Henry James might have termed "the so beautifully unsaid."
Reprinted from the book Still Looking by John Updike. Copyright: (c) 2005 by John Updike. Published in arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Still Looking
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Always Looking: Essays on Art Hardcover – 6 Dec. 2012
Following on from the acclaimed Just Looking and Still Looking , Always Looking is an insightful collection of art criticism and a masterclass in appreciating art - from the great American man of letters, John Updike.
Always Looking treats readers to a series of elegant and sensitive essays on art, and includes writing on a comprehensive array of subjects, both American and European. In 'The Clarity of Things', Updike looks closely at Copley, Homer, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop, in order to explore what is 'American' in American art. From here he moves to masterpieces of American and European art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- from the sublime landscapes of Frederic Church and the series paintings of Monet and Degas, to the verbal-visual puzzles of Magritte and the steely sculptural environments of Richard Serra.
With more than two-hundred full-colour reproductions, Always Looking is an invitation to see the world afresh through the eyes of John Updike, a matchless connoisseur.
'Our time's greatest man of letters - as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short-story writer. His death constitutes a loss to our literature that is immeasurable'Philip Roth
'He was a modern master, a colossal figure in American letters, the finest writer working in English. He dazzled us with his interests and intellectual curiosity, and he turned a beautiful sentence' Ian McEwan
'Updike was that rare creature: an all-around man of letters, a literary decathlete who brought to his criticism an insider's understanding of craft and technique; a first-class appreciator of talent, capable of describing other artists' work with nimble, pictorial brilliance; an ebullient observer, who could bring to essays about dinosaurs or golf or even the theory of relativity a contagious, boyish sense of wonder' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. His novels, stories, and nonfiction collections have won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009.
Christopher Carduff, the editor of this volume, is a member of the staff of The Library of America. He is also the editor of Higher Gossip , a collection of John Updike's essays and criticism.
- Print length 224 pages
- Language English
- Publisher Hamish Hamilton
- Publication date 6 Dec. 2012
- Dimensions 21.3 x 2.1 x 26.1 cm
- ISBN-10 0241145848
- ISBN-13 978-0241145845
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Just looking : essays on art
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John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts.
Always Looking: Essays on Art. Hardcover - November 27, 2012. by John Updike (Author), Christopher Carduff (Editor) 4.6 34 ratings. See all formats and editions. A dazzling collection of "remarkably elegant essays" (Newsday) on art—and the companion volume to the celebrated Just Looking and Still Looking—from one of the most gifted ...
John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts.
Just looking : essays on art by Updike, John. Publication date 2001 Topics Artists -- Psychology, Visual perception, Communication in art Publisher Boston, Mass. : MFA Publications, a division of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston : Distributed Art Publishers [distributor] Collection
John Hoyer Updike was an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for ...
These 23 essays on traditional and modern art show John Updike at his most eclectic, entertaining, and enlightening. Originally published in 1989 and until now unavailable in any edition, Just Looking had become one of Updike's rarest and most sought-after titles. It collects the best of the novelist and critic's multifarious musings on art and artists, museums and popular culture, the lives ...
American novelist, poet, and critic John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on March 18, 1932. He received an A.B. degree from Harvard University, which he attended on a scholarship, in 1954. After graduation, he accepted a one-year fellowship to study painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England.
John Updike. Alfred A. Knopf, $35 (210pp) ISBN 978--394-57904-7 The wit and sharp observation one expects from novelist/short story writer/poet/essayist Updike are found in these 23 pieces on art ...
"Always Looking," Updike's third and last (he died in 2009) collection of essays about art, includes reviews of museum exhibitions that he wrote for The New York Review of Books and The New ...
Always Looking. : John Updike. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Nov 27, 2012 - Art - 224 pages. A dazzling collection of "remarkably elegant essays" (Newsday) on art—and the companion volume to the celebrated Just Looking and Still Looking—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century.
The 73-year-old author, acclaimed for his fiction, is also a prolific essayist. Updike's new book, Still Looking, collects pieces he has written on American art, many of which first appeared in ...
John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of ...
Following on from the acclaimed Just Looking and Still Looking, Always Looking is an insightful collection of art criticism and a masterclass in appreciating art - from the great American man of letters, John Updike.. Always Looking treats readers to a series of elegant and sensitive essays on art, and includes writing on a comprehensive array of subjects, both American and European.
Just looking : essays on art ... Just looking : essays on art by Updike, John. Publication date 1989 Topics Artists -- Psychology, Visual perception, Communication in art Publisher New York : Knopf : Distributed by Random House Collection printdisabled; internetarchivebooks; inlibrary
Always Looking: Essays on Art. John Updike, edited by Christopher Carduff. Knopf, $45 (224p) ISBN 978--307-95730-6. The previously uncollected art writings of the prolific and award-winning ...
The fact that John Updike's essays engage the reader enough to agree or argue with them is a testament to how vivid they are. ... 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 ...
the chronological arrangement of some of john updike's essays on art collected here, offers an unexpected historical glance at american portraiture, severed by the shift in interest toward european art of the 19th century. the lost thread of portraiture, found again, when interest in art on the american shores reclaimed our national interest ...
Examines the delights of paintings and sculptures through a gallery of twentythree illustrated essays. The wit and sharp observation one expects from novelist/short story writer/poet/essayist Updike are found in these 23 pieces on art, supplemented by 193 plates.
John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts.
UPDIKE, John. Just Looking: Essays on Art [Limited Edition, Signed] New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. First Edition. Limited Issue, one of 350 numbered copies signed by the author, this being copy no.164. Square quarto; 3/4 marbled paper over black cloth, with titles stamped in gilt on spine; publisher's black cloth slipcase; 210,[2]pp; illus ...
In 18 remarkable essays, John Updike has collected together his thoughts and observations on American art. Beginning with early American portraits and landscapes, he goes on to extol two late-nineteenth-century masters, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, considers the eccentric pre-modern James McNeill Whistler, discusses the competing American Impressionists and Realists of the early twentieth ...
A foundational 1984 decision had required courts to defer to agencies' reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes, underpinning regulations on health care, safety and the environment.
Still Looking: Essays on American Art. Hardcover - November 8, 2005. by John Updike (Author) 4.3 21 ratings. See all formats and editions. Book Description. Editorial Reviews. From a master of American letters and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series comes a richly illustrated book of eighteen insightful essays about American art ...
Note: Still Looking is the second of three art books Updike would pen over the course of his career.The others are: Just Looking and Always Looking: Essays on Art This volume focuses exclusively on American Art, while the other two range across the broader international landscape. I recommend all three, if possible, as they form a continuum of ...