Bibliograph

Still looking, essays on American art, John Updike

Type

Label

Still looking, essays on American art, John Updike

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Still looking

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

56834496

Responsibility statement

John Updike

Sub title

essays on American art

Summary

When, in 1989, a collection of John Updike's writings on art appeared under the title Just Looking, a reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle commented, "He refreshes for us the sense of prose opportunity that makes art a sustaining subject to people who write about it." In the sixteen years since Just Looking was published, he has continued to serve as an art critic, mostly for The New York Review of Books, and from fifty or so articles has selected, for this richly illustrated book, eighteen that deal with American art. After beginning with early American portraits, landscapes, and the transatlantic career of John Singleton Copley, Still Looking then considers the curious case of Martin Johnson Heade and extols two late-nineteenth-century masters, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. Next, it discusses the eccentric pre-moderns James McNeill Whistler and Albert Pinkham Ryder, the competing American Impressionists and Realists in the early twentieth century, and such now-historic avant-garde figures as Alfred Stieglitz, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Elie Nadelman. Two appreciations of Edward Hopper and appraisals of Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol round out the volume. America speaks through its artists. As Updike states in his introduction, "The dots can be connected from Copley to Pollock: the same tense engagement with materials, the same demand for a morality of representation, can be discerned in both."

Table Of Contents

The American face -- Nature his only instructor -- "O beautiful for spacious skies" -- Heade storms -- Epic Homer -- The ache in Eakins -- Whistler in the dark -- "Better than nature" -- Walls that talk too much -- Street Arab -- Evangel of the lens -- "A lone left thing" -- O pioneer! -- Logic is beautiful -- Hopper's polluted silence -- Early Sunday morning -- Jackson whole -- Iconic Andy

Creator