Always Looking: Essays on Art

By John Updike

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 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9780307961839

John Updike

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the author of fifty-odd previous books, including twenty novels and numerous collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His fiction has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.

Reviews for Always Looking

[valerieandbooks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A collection of essays on art by John Updike, penned during the 1980s. Some of it feels dated -- little mention of women artists, for one, not to mention that several of these essays are based on exhibits shown back then. Still, Updike does discuss art in an interesting way. I especially liked his thoughts on the Helga Pictures -- titled "Heavily Hyped Helga" -- mainly because my husband and I saw that exhibit on our honeymoon in San Francisco; and now we live in what could be considered Wyeth country.

[jensenmk82 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This beautiful volume is a lavishly illustrated tribute to John Updike's primal artistic interest, drawing and painting. For a deeper understanding of Updike's work, the interesting essays on John Singer Sargent, Ralph Barton, Jean Ipousteguy, and Andrew Wyeth are particularly noteworthy, as is the final essay on the interrelations of writing and the visual arts.

[sthitha_pragjna · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Dubiously qualified. Pot-pourri of art that captures Updike's eclectic attention.

[bookcrazed_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What do great writers do when they're not writing books? Updike is among those financially successful in their own lifetimes who wrote for whatever magazine would pay well for their work, and happily, in the case of Updike, that included many essays on art. Without apology, venom, or regret, he tells it like he sees it—chastising Renoir for not being quite as great as Monet and Degas and unself-consciously, yet fondly, labeling a Diebenkorn Abstract Expressionist painting as "an expensive variety of wallpaper" (p. 80). Updike is teaching us, by example, how to view a painting. In Richard Estes's "Telephone Booths" the viewer may see a well-executed, realistic painting of people in telephone booths, a common urban sight. Updike sees "The sun is shining on a car hood. A fat woman is striding past a mannequin. Merchants are proclaiming their names and wares in visual shouts reduced to isolated letters" (p. 21). He offers us models of contemplative essays. Just Looking is richly illustrated with full-color plates of the paintings discussed. Through Updike's words, the masters become our familiars, and we care that they painted—and what they painted. Updike's knowledge indeed seems to come from a lifetime of "just looking," and he sees with an eye that the uneducated art observer can understand. He is accessible. He offers a way to view art that allows us to appreciate what we initially could not understand—and to dislike it if we must.