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ALWAYS LOOKING

Name: ALWAYS LOOKING
Author: John Updike
ISBN: 978-0307957306

ESSAYS ON ART

by John Updike edited by Christopher Carduff ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 27, 2012

A rich trove of insights for art lovers of all stripes.

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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 Miró 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.

Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2012

ISBN: 978-0307957306

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012

Categories:

ART & PHOTOGRAPHY

- BOOK REVIEW
HIGHER GOSSIP
by John Updike edited by Christopher Carduff

- BOOK REVIEW
MY FATHER’S TEARS
by John Updike

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WIDOWS OF EASTWICK
by John Updike

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THE SITWELLS

AND THE ARTS OF 1920S AND 1930S

edited by Joanna Skipwith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1995

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Could chance have chosen a better family name than Sitwell for people who spent much of their life posing for portraits? Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell were aristocratic English aesthetes, people with money and leisure time during the halcyon days of modernism and its tailcoat movements. Edith, a poet and friend of Gertrude Stein's, also wrote a biography of Alexander Pope. Osbert, according to this account, did the literary equivalent of sitting for a portrait in that he provided some of the inspiration for D.H. Lawrence's character Sir Clifford Chatterly. Sacheverell was a poet. This book, the accompaniment to The Sitwells and the Arts of the 1920s and 1930s at London's National Portrait Gallery, is filled with drawings, paintings, and photographs of the Sitwells and their shifting circles by artists of the period, including Cecil Beaton, Wyndham Lewis, and Max Beerbohm.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995

ISBN: 1-85514-140-X

Page Count: 240

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994

Categories:

ART & PHOTOGRAPHY

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ON THE BEATEN TRACK

TOURISM, ART, AND PLACE

by Lucy R. Lippard ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1999

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A lively essay in cultural geography that delves into the question of how tourist attractions are invented and sold. There’s something about the phenomenon of “rubbernecking,” scorned by literary travel writers, that appeals to art critic Lippard (The Lure of the Local, 1997); rubbernecking, the evil opposite of sophisticated travel, “implies a willingness or desire on the part of the tourist to stretch, literally, past her own experience, to lean forward in anticipation, engagement, amazement, or horror.” Amazement and horror are key words, for, Lippard continues, domestic tourists like nothing quite so much as to visit the sites of massacres or bloody battles, to say nothing of strip mines, Wild West cemeteries, alligator farms, and other monuments to violence and mayhem. They come to the west, Lippard writes with inspired overstatement, “looking for places destroyed by shifting economies: Indian ruins, ghost towns, abandoned farms, deserted mines, and nineteenth-century spaces frozen in the governmentally managed wildernesses”; they go (or went, before the cleanup) to New York to gawk at the city’s bad seed in Times Square; they go to popular museums across the land to take in weird dioramas and improbable interpretations of history. Lippard gets a little scattershot at times, spending much of her narrative on performance and plastic art that few domestic tourists would ever care to see; but she has a fine, irreverent style and an eye for the bizarre, complemented by dozens of well-chosen photographs to back her points. Above all, she has fun with her subject, as when she writes of an Armageddon theme park now under construction outside Tel Aviv and slated to be finished in 2000. The park, she says, “is aimed at fundamentalist Christians who believe Christ will arrive for his second coming in the year 2007—a lot of work for a park that will last only seven years.” Lippard’s leisurely stroll through some of the wackier venues of our day makes for enjoyable reading.