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Always Looking: Essays on Art
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.
In this book, readers are treated to a collection in which “the psychological concerns of the novelist drive the eye from work to work until a deep understanding of the art emerges” ( The New York Times Book Review ).
Always Looking opens with “The Clarity of Things,” the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities for 2008. Here, in looking closely at individual works by Copley, Homer, Eakins, Norman Rockwell, and others, the author teases out what is characteristically “American” in American art. This talk is followed by fourteen essays, most of them written for The New York Review of Books, on certain highlights in Western art of the last two hundred the iconic portraits of Gilbert Stuart and the sublime landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, the series paintings of Monet and the monotypes of Degas, the richly patterned canvases of Vuillard and the golden extravagances of Klimt, the cryptic triptychs of Beckmann, the personal graffiti of Miró, the verbal-visual puzzles of Magritte, and the monumental Pop of Oldenburg and Lichtenstein. The book ends with a consideration of recent works by a living American master, the steely sculptural environments of Richard Serra.
John Updike was a gallery-goer of genius. Always Looking is, like everything else he wrote, an invitation to look, to see, to apprehend the visual world through the eyes of a connoisseur.
In this book, readers are treated to a collection in which “the psychological concerns of the novelist drive the eye from work to work until a deep understanding of the art emerges” ( The New York Times Book Review ).
Always Looking opens with “The Clarity of Things,” the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities for 2008. Here, in looking closely at individual works by Copley, Homer, Eakins, Norman Rockwell, and others, the author teases out what is characteristically “American” in American art. This talk is followed by fourteen essays, most of them written for The New York Review of Books, on certain highlights in Western art of the last two hundred the iconic portraits of Gilbert Stuart and the sublime landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, the series paintings of Monet and the monotypes of Degas, the richly patterned canvases of Vuillard and the golden extravagances of Klimt, the cryptic triptychs of Beckmann, the personal graffiti of Miró, the verbal-visual puzzles of Magritte, and the monumental Pop of Oldenburg and Lichtenstein. The book ends with a consideration of recent works by a living American master, the steely sculptural environments of Richard Serra.
John Updike was a gallery-goer of genius. Always Looking is, like everything else he wrote, an invitation to look, to see, to apprehend the visual world through the eyes of a connoisseur.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
27 people are currently reading
373 people want to read
About the author
John Updike
863 books2,436 followersJohn 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 his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and death, and their inter-relationships.
He died of lung cancer at age 76.
He died of lung cancer at age 76.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
January 21, 2024
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this. I didn’t always agree with his assessment of artists (Magritte, for instance), but I appreciated his discussions even of these. He actually made me appreciate Lichtenstein more.
Want to read
March 6, 2014Description: In this posthumous collection of John Updike’s art writings, a companion volume to the acclaimed Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005), readers are again treated to “remarkably elegant essays” (Newsday) in which “the psychological concerns of the novelist drive the eye from work to work until a deep understanding of the art emerges” (The New York Times Book Review).
Always Looking opens with “The Clarity of Things,” the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities for 2008. Here, in looking closely at individual works by Copley, Homer, Eakins, Norman Rockwell, and others, the author teases out what is characteristically “American” in American art. This talk is followed by fourteen essays, most of them written for The New York Review of Books, on certain highlights in Western art of the last two hundred years: the iconic portraits of Gilbert Stuart and the sublime landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, the series paintings of Monet and the monotypes of Degas, the richly patterned canvases of Vuillard and the golden extravagances of Klimt, the cryptic triptychs of Beckmann, the personal graffiti of Miró, the verbal-visual puzzles of Magritte, and the monumental Pop of Oldenburg and Lichtenstein. The book ends with a consideration of recent works by a living American master, the steely sculptural environments of Richard Serra.
John Updike was a gallery-goer of genius. Always Looking is, like everything else he wrote, an invitation to look, to see, to apprehend the visual world through the eyes of a connoisseur.
Always Looking opens with “The Clarity of Things,” the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities for 2008. Here, in looking closely at individual works by Copley, Homer, Eakins, Norman Rockwell, and others, the author teases out what is characteristically “American” in American art. This talk is followed by fourteen essays, most of them written for The New York Review of Books, on certain highlights in Western art of the last two hundred years: the iconic portraits of Gilbert Stuart and the sublime landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, the series paintings of Monet and the monotypes of Degas, the richly patterned canvases of Vuillard and the golden extravagances of Klimt, the cryptic triptychs of Beckmann, the personal graffiti of Miró, the verbal-visual puzzles of Magritte, and the monumental Pop of Oldenburg and Lichtenstein. The book ends with a consideration of recent works by a living American master, the steely sculptural environments of Richard Serra.
John Updike was a gallery-goer of genius. Always Looking is, like everything else he wrote, an invitation to look, to see, to apprehend the visual world through the eyes of a connoisseur.
August 23, 2020
The book Always Looking: Essay on Art, by John Updike is a collection of essays written by an American literary called John Updike. The essays are about art works by some famous artists, such as Margritte, Joan Miro, Roy Lichtenstein, etc... This is the first book I read that is written by John Updike, so I am very new to his writing style. When reading the essays, I noticed that he starts the essay as like a guide that is leading the readers through the museum. Essays can be boring to read, but John Updike's writings are very appealing to read, because there are also photos of the art works that he is talking about in the essay. I decided to read this book, because I am really into art. I recommend this book to people who are interested in art and wants to know what other people think about the art works compared to their own.
December 16, 2018
Educational essays on the National Endowment for the Humanities and American Library Association program Picturing America, whose posters hang in our English and Social Studies offices at Niles North; Gilbert Stuart, portrait-painter of presidents; Frederic Edwin Church and his custom built Hudson River home Olana; Monet; Degas's landscapes; strange Edouard Vuillard; lurid Klimt; haunted Max Beckmann; Miro (Hemingway bought a farm landscape -- Updike creates the connection "like Hemingway's early prose, the painting is possessed by an ecstasy of simple naming, a seemingly innocent directness that is yet challenging and ominous"); Magritte, Lichtenstein and Serra.
Of Church and his study "Horseshoe Falls" of Niagara: "The brushwork in the sketch brilliantly renders the speed and translucency and weight of the water sliding over the drastically foreshortened curve of the falls. Notice, especially, the dancing white strokes that, on the far edge of the curve, convey the lines of ripples on the descending current....the activity of the brush becomes the activity of the water; painting and its subject merge. A kind of doom presents itself; we invest the river about to topple and crash, its submission to relentless gravity so empathetically pictured, with a soul; the grandeur is of ruin. Church's love of visual fact and close detail carries him here into a perhaps unintended mode, the instinctive American mode of naturalism, whose trend is to the tragic."
On Monet and his "Morning on the Seine, Near Giverny (Mist)" series: "Of these nine paintings, eight, executed in 1896-97 are identical in composition: the left-hand third of the nearly square canvas is taken up with foreground vegetation; the remaining two-thirds are horizontally divided by the river's bosky horizon, and the water reflects a widening irregular piece of sky, creating symmetrical wings of pallor. This sky, always a morning sky, ranges in tint from pale blue, with hints of cloud and dawn's rose, through the palest of violets to a misty white. The greens of the foreground vegetation go blue with distance; when the day is foggy, they quite fade....In no two of the series is the atmosphere the same; in all of the eight the tonal modulations of the intervening moisture-laden air, each matched by a subdued reflection in the surface of the Seine, are magisterial. Without a touch of anecdote--no figure, no boat, no individualized tree--an intensely dramatic mood is created, and a palpable space that invites us deep into it. The sensation of peaceful pleasure--indeed, of triumphant harmony--induced by these bulbous blue shapes derives equally from the lofty justice of the depiction and the abstract cunning of the composition's Rorschach-test symmetry."
Of Church and his study "Horseshoe Falls" of Niagara: "The brushwork in the sketch brilliantly renders the speed and translucency and weight of the water sliding over the drastically foreshortened curve of the falls. Notice, especially, the dancing white strokes that, on the far edge of the curve, convey the lines of ripples on the descending current....the activity of the brush becomes the activity of the water; painting and its subject merge. A kind of doom presents itself; we invest the river about to topple and crash, its submission to relentless gravity so empathetically pictured, with a soul; the grandeur is of ruin. Church's love of visual fact and close detail carries him here into a perhaps unintended mode, the instinctive American mode of naturalism, whose trend is to the tragic."
On Monet and his "Morning on the Seine, Near Giverny (Mist)" series: "Of these nine paintings, eight, executed in 1896-97 are identical in composition: the left-hand third of the nearly square canvas is taken up with foreground vegetation; the remaining two-thirds are horizontally divided by the river's bosky horizon, and the water reflects a widening irregular piece of sky, creating symmetrical wings of pallor. This sky, always a morning sky, ranges in tint from pale blue, with hints of cloud and dawn's rose, through the palest of violets to a misty white. The greens of the foreground vegetation go blue with distance; when the day is foggy, they quite fade....In no two of the series is the atmosphere the same; in all of the eight the tonal modulations of the intervening moisture-laden air, each matched by a subdued reflection in the surface of the Seine, are magisterial. Without a touch of anecdote--no figure, no boat, no individualized tree--an intensely dramatic mood is created, and a palpable space that invites us deep into it. The sensation of peaceful pleasure--indeed, of triumphant harmony--induced by these bulbous blue shapes derives equally from the lofty justice of the depiction and the abstract cunning of the composition's Rorschach-test symmetry."
March 27, 2018
I have not read much Updike. Waay back in undergrad days I read his story "A&P", seething teen suburbia in a vanished grocery for a Mod Am Lit course. That's it.
"Always Looking" is the last title in a collection of three books of essays on art, aand I enjoyed reading his essays on big exhibits. He dislikes those headphones which tell you where to look, and not to keen on surrealists. I enjoyed his wit, and learned something about Magritte which gives me context on viewing his paintings.
"Always Looking" is the last title in a collection of three books of essays on art, aand I enjoyed reading his essays on big exhibits. He dislikes those headphones which tell you where to look, and not to keen on surrealists. I enjoyed his wit, and learned something about Magritte which gives me context on viewing his paintings.
February 4, 2017
awesome collection of essays. I now appreciate more artists such as Federic E. Church, Klimt, Miro & Rene Magritte
August 3, 2019
I love hearing Updike's voice in any setting... And, my God, is he an astute, intelligent art critic.
November 20, 2019
Each chapter is an essay giving a review of artist or art movement. Updike gives good insights that are useful and interesting. It does not read like one of his novels, however.
June 24, 2020
It exposed me to Max Beckman, who I was not previously acquainted with. Still, I not think Updike's writing is truly philosophical, but is "readerly" philosophical, for the Sunday newspaper set.
March 26, 2013
Tasteful, intelligent.
notes:
preface: childhood photo on porch, "a majestic amount of steam in the kitchen"
"photo looks posed...poignant & tender"
17..Eakins..man in single scull...stippled waves
95..Vuillard..suffered from comparison w/Bonnard..
102..an aura of sanctity, of respect for the toll that ordinary living took on him, tinges his friends' reminiscences
110..Klimt..the drawings contributed to the iconography of the forbidden...depicted women in onanistic raptures, voluptuous theme of lesbianism
123..Beckmann...painting pure and simple..packed human groupings
127..shallow space crammed to the point of claustrophobia w/bleakly staring, unrelated figures
156..Magritte's mother drowning suicide...face found to be covered by her nightdress....the many veiled or absent or exploded or impassive or averted heads of his paintings have a psychic source...
166..Oldenburg..monumentality of clothespin mocks the concept of monumentality..
169..Lichtensteins 3-decade variations on the ingenious, hardworking artist's SINGLE IDEA, transporting into high art of reproduced commercial arts mechanical look
185..Serra...thoughts on the process, cost, complications,....
notes:
preface: childhood photo on porch, "a majestic amount of steam in the kitchen"
"photo looks posed...poignant & tender"
17..Eakins..man in single scull...stippled waves
95..Vuillard..suffered from comparison w/Bonnard..
102..an aura of sanctity, of respect for the toll that ordinary living took on him, tinges his friends' reminiscences
110..Klimt..the drawings contributed to the iconography of the forbidden...depicted women in onanistic raptures, voluptuous theme of lesbianism
123..Beckmann...painting pure and simple..packed human groupings
127..shallow space crammed to the point of claustrophobia w/bleakly staring, unrelated figures
156..Magritte's mother drowning suicide...face found to be covered by her nightdress....the many veiled or absent or exploded or impassive or averted heads of his paintings have a psychic source...
166..Oldenburg..monumentality of clothespin mocks the concept of monumentality..
169..Lichtensteins 3-decade variations on the ingenious, hardworking artist's SINGLE IDEA, transporting into high art of reproduced commercial arts mechanical look
185..Serra...thoughts on the process, cost, complications,....
January 21, 2013
I put down the book a few weeks ago, which is not out of the ordinary for me when reading (approaching) Updike.
Since then I have joined this book club and will probably go back and read it again to the end. Updike, sometimes he,..
if only he could help himself and not be so uh, I am trying to meld the kinetic image of 'slick' with the remote feel of footsteps as the recede down the hall, oddly louder, and more distant, the deeper in his book you read.
At any rate, I will report back, if the hallway holds out...
Since then I have joined this book club and will probably go back and read it again to the end. Updike, sometimes he,..
if only he could help himself and not be so uh, I am trying to meld the kinetic image of 'slick' with the remote feel of footsteps as the recede down the hall, oddly louder, and more distant, the deeper in his book you read.
At any rate, I will report back, if the hallway holds out...
August 13, 2015
L'intellettuale a 360 gradi, non lo scrittore di romanzi e racconti. Il curioso erudito a prescindere, non l'autore pluripremiato con il Pulitzer. Questo è il John Updike che parla d'arte: osservatore minuzioso, mai pedante. Le mostre da cui prendono spunto i pezzi qui raccolti sono la chiesa dove si officia l'adorazione per l'estetica e la poesia che stanno dietro (davanti) a un quadro. Benefico.
April 28, 2014
Fourteen essays on art by the late John Updike, his third such collection since 1989. They cover major Eastern American exhibits from the 1990's on, from the colonial to the camp. As in his fiction, Updike is a master describer of the material and the methodological, while middling on meaning. His eager appreciation, though, and his fluid, informed prose make him a great fellow gallery-goer.
Currently reading
October 12, 2014With all the time I've been spending with art these last couple of years, it's time I begin reading more from those that know, about art today. This one looks superb.
Updike on Art
http://nyti.ms/Y6R0Lo
Updike on Art
http://nyti.ms/Y6R0Lo
Want to read
March 3, 2016I've only had time to read one chapter --on Gilbert Stuart-- before returning this to the library, and I've enjoyed it so far.
It's a lovely glimpse (with great writing and interesting details) of exhibitions I've been unable to see in person.
It's a lovely glimpse (with great writing and interesting details) of exhibitions I've been unable to see in person.
December 10, 2012
Wonderful.
Meraviglioso.
Meraviglioso.
January 5, 2013
Only 3 essays in so far and am frustrated by the fact that many of the paintings he talks about not included in the book.
January 16, 2013
Beautiful artwork and intelligent commentary
Read
April 3, 2013other than the annoyance i feel at rich white men stating opinions (some wrong) as fact, an ok read.
June 25, 2013
I found this collection of essays about artists, art history, and exhibition to be both entertaining and informative. The book is filled with luscious photographs, too.
August 30, 2014
I only wish all art reviews and art criticism were like this book. Thoughtful and full of insight and beautifully written
September 1, 2014
Excellent book, beautifully written
Very lush and descriptive. Highly recommend for art lovers and others.
Very lush and descriptive. Highly recommend for art lovers and others.
Read
February 5, 2015didn't finish it b/c had to return to library
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews