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John Updike, Just Looking: Essays On Art (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989) Reissued in paperback by MFA Publications in 2001 With a collection of about two-dozen accessible essays, Updike warms the waters for a quick dip into the artistic experience. He gives personal, often elegant observations of artwork through a series of easy-going themes, enlivened by nearly 200 color plates. Updike moves gently backwards from each piece's particular resonance into a lively discourse on its artist and milieu. He never pulls so far back from the art as to become pedantic or distantly academic. Rather, Updike relies on his discerning lens for human detail, taking us with him as he zooms inward. Admitting early on that "such an attitude may be outmodedly dandyish," Updike excludes work he considers "deliberately ugly and impermanent." In his playfulness, he is occasionally harsh, dismissing Renoir's later work as "on the verge of poster art." His essay on abstractionism, too, makes no pretense to understanding – Updike suggests that the vein connecting author and artist in a shared pursuit of palpable beauty may run thinly, and that the fault is the abstract artists'. "Inarticulate, but unembarrassed, we pass on," he says of such art, "as if the canvas has said to us, 'Have a nice day.'" Still, he is not dishonest. As he well knows, Updike is at his best peeling back layers of richness in luminous character portraits, and within the moody landscapes they inhabit. This is his own, rarely equaled talent as a writer, and the book seldom veers from this course. As the title suggests, Just Looking is simply a string of vivid and immediate encounters with art, seen through eyes keen enough to open our own. MORE: Joyce Carol Oates on John Updike as a visual writer |
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