A Museum Tour with John Updike
John Updike
My question for our pearliest prose stylist is: Okay, John Updike, if you’d actually plunged into a painting career, what might your work look like? Early, middle and late? For 50 years, on more than 50 dust jackets, John Updike has been listing in his credits a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford, in 1954-55. He is ever reminding us, and himself, of the road not taken. So, John, where would your instinct for what I’d call poetic realism have taken you in an art world still dominated in your professional youth by action painters and abstract expressionists?
Reading Updike’s delicious collection of informal appreciations of American artists, Still Looking, I sense his most loving identification is with Edward Hopper (1882-1967), a painter of “sunlit solitariness” and “personal silence.” Like Updike, Hopper was a brilliantly observant realist, and then some. “Hopper’s apparently noncommital art,” Updike writes, “excels in making us aware of the elsewhere, the missing, the longed-for. He is, to use a phrase generally reserved for writers, a master of suspense.” Updike also quotes the sculptor George Segal with a thought that Updike fans (like me) might also apply to the art of his prose. “What I like about Hopper,” George Segal said, “is how far poetically he went, away from the real world.” After the Hopper example (unlike so many others), Updike has stretched a distinctive personal style over a long and endlessly productive lifetime.
Updike writes — and so, of course, we’ll talk — about many others : most notably Jackson Pollock, Arthur Dove, Alfred Stieglitz, Childe Hassam, Albert Pinkham Ryder, James McNeill Whistler, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer and John Singleton Copley. The thread is (mostly) representational Americans. But with Pollock and Dove as well, Updike’s wondrously humble, methodical study always renders, first, a vivid sense of how the work was done, and then an entertaining, provocative, plausible stab at what it all means. Of Pollock’s “epic drips,” which delight and mystify Updike, he writes finally: “Who cares which number drip-painting looks better or worse than another? The artist is the thing; the works are just the shadow he casts to signify that he is in the room.”
I look forward to our conversation as a sort of walk through the American wing of the Met or MOMA in New York, or the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Lay it out for us, John, as if it were a golf course–the traps, the woods and the water hazards. Point us to the green, and show us how to feel the breeze as well as how to look at all this accomplished beauty.
free viagra
buy viagra online
generic viagra
how does viagra work
cheap viagra
buy viagra
buy viagra online inurl
viagra 6 free samples
viagra online
viagra for women
viagra side effects
female viagra
natural viagra
online viagra
cheapest viagra prices
herbal viagra
alternative to viagra
buy generic viagra
purchase viagra online
free viagra without prescription
viagra attorneys
free viagra samples before buying
buy generic viagra cheap
viagra uk
generic viagra online
try viagra for free
generic viagra from india
fda approves viagra
free viagra sample
what is better viagra or levitra
discount generic viagra online
viagra cialis levitra
viagra dosage
viagra cheap
viagra on line
best price for viagra
free sample pack of viagra
viagra generic
viagra without prescription
discount viagra
gay viagra
mail order viagra
viagra inurl
generic viagra online paypal
generic viagra overnight
generic viagra online pharmacy
generic viagra uk
buy cheap viagra online uk
suppliers of viagra
how long does viagra last
viagra sex
generic viagra soft tabs
generic viagra 100mg
buy viagra onli
generic viagra online without prescription
viagra energy drink
cheapest uk supplier viagra
viagra cialis
generic viagra safe
viagra professional
viagra sales
viagra free trial pack
viagra lawyers
over the counter viagra
best price for generic viagra
viagra jokes
buying viagra
viagra samples
viagra sample
cialis
generic cialis
cheapest cialis
buy cialis online
buying generic cialis
cialis for order
what are the side effects of cialis
buy generic cialis
what is the generic name for cialis
cheap cialis
cialis online
buy cialis
cialis side effects
how long does cialis last
cialis forum
cialis lawyer ohio
cialis attorneys
cialis attorney columbus
cialis injury lawyer ohio
cialis injury attorney ohio
cialis injury lawyer columbus
prices cialis
cialis lawyers
viagra cialis levitra
cialis lawyer columbus
online generic cialis
daily cialis
cialis injury attorney columbus
cialis attorney ohio
cialis cost
cialis professional
cialis super active
how does cialis work
what does cialis look like
cialis drug
viagra cialis
cialis to buy new zealand
cialis without prescription
free cialis
cialis soft tabs
discount cialis
cialis generic
generic cialis from india
cheap cialis sale online
cialis daily
cialis reviews
cialis generico
how can i take cialis
cheap cialis si
cialis vs viagra
levitra
generic levitra
levitra attorneys
what is better viagra or levitra
viagra cialis levitra
levitra side effects
buy levitra
levitra online
levitra dangers
how does levitra work
levitra lawyers
what is the difference between levitra and viagra
levitra versus viagra
which works better viagra or levitra
buy levitra and overnight shipping
levitra vs viagra
canidan pharmacies levitra
how long does levitra last
viagra cialis levitra
levitra acheter
comprare levitra
levitra ohne rezept
levitra 20mg
levitra senza ricetta
cheapest generic levitra
levitra compra
cheap levitra
levitra overnight
levitra generika
levitra kaufen
December 8th, 2005 at 7:48 pm
I am looking forward to this show.
I’ve not read the “Still Looking” book, so I’m asking a question with way less than complete information. But I’m curious about Mr. Updikes views the contributions of artists wives and other women artists such as:
Elaine De Kooning, Lee Krassner, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, etc.
Also, any contemporary artists grabbing his attention right now? Any non-New York artists? Thoughts or opinions about the use of digital media?
December 8th, 2005 at 8:04 pm
Does Mr. Updike think critics and collectors, such as, Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Thomas B. Hess, Peggy Guggenheim set the agenda for who became the IT artists and who didn’t? Abstraction expressionism seemed to take up a lot of mindshare.
Also, any thoughts about using Abstract Expressionists as a propaganda weapon in the cold war?
December 8th, 2005 at 8:18 pm
During a 1982 visit to Huohot, Inner Mongolia, a young man stopped our obviously foreign tourist group and asked (in English) “How is the Dean of American Literature”. After looking at each other in puzzlement, we asked the man for clarification. “John Updike”, he said. A student at the local teacher’s college, the man told us of a recent Updike read-a-thon that he participated in at the school. In China, they work with what they’ve got.
December 8th, 2005 at 8:20 pm
Chris asked, at the beginning of the show, who taught us about what is beautiful. I absorbed art at my late father’s knee, and his work, which can be seen at http://www.johnloughlin.com, taught me to especially appreciate the beauty of frost-burned November New England landscapes. November has become, over the years, my favorite month for it’s own particular aesthetic… the respite between the exuberance of autumn and the cold, pure landscapes of winter. (Of course I flinch at my temerity to try to write any kind of descriptive passage with someone like Updike on the program…!)
December 8th, 2005 at 8:36 pm
Wonderful passage Sue.
The first art that captured my attention were the Warner Brother cartoons. The animation directed by Chuck Jones still inspires me. The form, color, composition and whimsy still blow me away. Oddly enough this helped inform my transition to abstraction, minimalism, and other modern forms.
December 9th, 2005 at 1:17 am
Updike’s remarks about Pollock– that the drip paintings are really his shadows, that the artist himself is the work– explain so succinctly in a single sentence what I spent twenty minutes trying to convey to my students– with only marginal success.
I’d like to read the book.
December 11th, 2005 at 9:08 pm
I like this quote from Newsweek on Edward Hopper ( I do not know who wrote it or when):
“He paints the astonishingly complicated loneliness of the limbo hours in a coffee shop, like a glass-hulled boat trapped in the black ice of the city, lit by a slice of yellow light like stale lemon pie, and full of the sadness of a gray fedora, a red dress and a clean coffee urn.”
That of course about “Nighthawks” (1942).
December 12th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
One of the interesting, enjoyable conversations about art I have ever heard.
Keep up the wonderful work.
December 12th, 2005 at 11:13 pm
Three things going on here: the art of Painting, the art of writing, and the art of conversation. I found myself listening to the podcast twice, in the same way I re-read a chapter, or re-visit a painting. When Chris is at the top of his game and the guest is game for it, the discourse can reach high art. A good conversation does not explain or find – it searches, and Chris wields the machete as we trek through this rain forest.
In many ways this show was about the connection between literature and painting, and I have two connections FYI.
I’ve been reading “The Letters of Vincent van Gogh,� (great bathroom reading – one letter at a time!) and these letters to his brother are so intimate and brooding you feel like your looking through a peep hole at the soul of a great artist. In the letters to his brother he repeatedly discusses the influence of literature and authors.
“Now, if you can forgive someone for immersing himself in pictures, perhaps you will also grant that the love of books is sacred as that of Rembrandt, indeed, I believe that the two complement each other.�
Later:
“And I think that Kent, a character in Shakespeare’s King Lear, is as noble and distinguished a man as that figure by Th. De Keyser, though Kent and King Lear are reputed to have lived much earlier. Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.� July 1880
The other connection is Gao Xingian who won the Nobel for literature in 2000. Mr. Xingian is an accomplished painter as well and he has a new exhibit at the Singapore Art Museum. http://www.nhb.gov.sg/SAM
“In the grand tradition, both Chinese and Western painting have a close link with literature,” Gao told Reuters. “In paintings there is something very spiritual, even literary, “If I paint I can’t do anything else… but when I write I can’t paint at the same time,” he said the divergence is the medium. “In painting there are no words, just brushstrokes in ink, expressing an inner vision.â€?
In his book “Return to Painting,� Gao Xingian writes about the limits of language to describe beauty. “Beauty is intuitive and bears no relation to reason. At a far remove from reason and theories of the beautiful, beauty exists only at the moment of creation and at the moment when the work is being admired.�
January 28th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
[...] — as in the Open Source file on his Terrorist and his second volume of art criticism, Still Looking. Maybe the best fun I had in many TV and radio conversations with our prince of letters was [...]