'Always Looking,' by John Updike
Updated 4:55 pm, Friday, January 25, 2013
John Updike chose the title "Hugging the Shore" for one of his collections of nonfiction, to acknowledge its difference from the landless navigation that the writing of novels and short stories demands.
Readers of his copious criticism never sense Updike (1932-2009) hugging the shore more closely than when visual art was his subject. "Always Looking: Essays on Art," like the two related collections that preceded it, show him most at ease when describing pictures, particularly likenesses of people, and bunting them with anecdote or biography, with illuminating admiration or insolence.
Of a grandiloquent Gilbert Stuart late 18th century portrait of Lord Chancellor John FitzGibbon, Updike writes that "amid all this regalia Stuart includes FitzGibbon's sharp, small, scornful face, almost angry with haughtiness, pinched as it were by his piled-on prerogatives."
Updike clearly delighted in the narrative canter permitted him by his essay on Stephen and Sterling Clark, the contentious collectors behind the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. Their acquisitive and philanthropic life stories track important artworks, like luxury cargo, to their destinations in public collections.
But visual artists, collectors of and commentators on their work present such narratively fluent possibilities only so often. Even though he excelled as a describer - a prime qualification for an art critic - a reader can feel the effort it took Updike to overcome the fixity of static objects without an anecdotal jump start. Sometimes the design of an exhibition helped; so did literary connections.
Pondering Ernest Hemingway's attachment to an early painting by Joan Miró, Updike writes, "One tries to look at The Farm with Hemingway's eyes, seeking what made him fall in love. Under a cold blue sky and a small gray moon, a tan landscape and two white buildings hold a meticulous inventory of tools, furniture, and farm animals; 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. He and Miró, their reminiscences reveal, were both often hungry in Paris, and hungry people see with a terrible clarity."
For all of Updike's diligence and enthusiasm, errors and misunderstandings crept in that the book's editor, Christopher Carduff, might have caught, or noted. Jasper Johns' famous early bronze is of ale, not beer, cans. Updike seems to have misread as "drawing" the carving out of lines by means of color applied over black grounds in Max Beckmann's painting. Most significantly, he seems to have been unaware of paraphrasing in his essay "The Clarity of Things" an argument about American art made a generation earlier by Barbara Novak.
Such blemishes aside, Updike's inviting tone and nimble voice make him as an art writer something like the ideal museum docent. And docents may prove to be the ideal readers of "Always Looking."