Always Looking

A master class in art appreciation with a great American man of letters. In this lavishly illustrated collection of John Updike's recent art writings, a posthumous companion 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). The first essay, "The Clarity of Things," was the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities for 2008 and perhaps Updike's major statement as art critic; here, by looking closely at Copley, Homer, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop, he explores what is "American" in American art. This is followed by fourteen essays, most of them written for The New York Review of Books, on masterpieces of American and European art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-from the sublime landscapes of Frederic Church and the series paintings of Monet and Degas, to the verbal-visual puzzles of Magritte and the steely sculptural environments of Richard Serra. With more than 200 full-color reproductions, Always Looking is, like everything else that Updike wrote, an invitation to see the world afresh through the eyes of a matchless connoisseur.

John Updike was the author of more than sixty books, including twenty-three novels and dozens of collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His work has been honored with the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Gold Medal for Fiction of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009.
 

Christopher Carduff is a member of the staff of The Library of America and the editor of John Updike’s Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism.

PREFACE: PICTURES AND WORDS

“THE CLARITY OF THINGS”
[Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities for 2008]

MAKING FACES
[Gilbert Stuart, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 21, 2004–January 16, 2005]

THE LOVE OF FACTS
[Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church, at the National Academy Museum, New York, February 9–April 30, 2006]

THE ARTFUL CLARKS
[The Clark Brothers Collect: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings, at the Sterlin and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, June 4–September 4, 2006]

MANY MONETS
[Monet in the ‘90s: The Series Paintings, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, February 7–April 29, 1990]

DEGAS OUT-OF-DOORS
[Degas Landscapes, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 21–April 3, 1994]

AN INTIMATE WHIRLWIND
[The Intimate Interiors of Édouard Vuillard, at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, May 18–July 30, 1990]

GOLD AND GELD
[Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections, at Neue Galerie in New York, October 18, 2007–June 30, 2008]

BRIDGES TO THE INVISIBLE
[Max Beckmann in Exile, at the Guggenheim Museum Soho, New York, October 9, 1996–January 5, 1997]

MIRÓ AT MOMA
[Joan Miró, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 17, 1993–January 11, 1994]

THE ART OF OUR DISORDER
[Surrealism USA, at the National Academy Museum, New York, February 17–May 8, 2005]

MAGRITTE THE GREAT
[Magritte, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 12–November 12, 1992]

A CASE OF MONUMENTALITY
[Claes Oldenburg’s Closepin]

BIG, BRIGHT, AND BENDAYED
[Roy Lichtenstein, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 8, 1993–January 16, 1994]

SERRA’S TRIUMPH
[Richard Serra: Forty Years, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, June 3–September 10, 2007]