joe phelan

John Updike seems to me to be the ideal art writer (as opposed to art historian or art critic) ; he loves art especially painting and actually studied to be a painter before he became a writer, which means he's got a trained eye and the vocabulary to write about what he sees. And of course he's a splendid writer who has been publishing a book a year for the past four decades mostly fiction but also plays, poems, belles lettres and just plain old book reviews.

He started reviewing museum exhibits in the eighties and in 1989 Knopf published his first collection of art essays entitled "Just Looking" which is one of my favorite art books.

Since then he has quietly been reviewing exhibits mostly in the pages of the New York Review of Books. His latest essay there is a review of the Vincent Van Gogh show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18512

This month his latest collection of essays was published as "Still Looking". Its even better than the first book because it has a story about what American artists from John Singleton Copley to Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol have in common. As he writes in the introduction:

"The dots can be connected from Copley to Pollock; the same impassioned engagement with materials, the same demand for a morality of representation, the same aversion to what Marsden Hartley called 'compromising softness,' can be discerned in both."

Even if like me you are such an Updike fan that you have already read every one of these essays as they appeared over the past decade, you will want to buy and own this book for its superb full color illustrations of the paintings he discusses. And of course its great to be able to throw out all those old yellowing pages ripped out of the NYRB which are tucked away in various places in my library.

For those who don't know much about Updike and want an introduction to him there are a few great places to go just now. Updike did a three hour interview on C-Span a few weeks ago to promote the book and he talks about his long career as a writer. This isn't available on the CSpan website yet but is should be there shortly so keep checking. Its a delight to watch.

The New York Times has a special feature about Updike complete with reviews of all his major books and articles he has written including his recent review of Jed Perl's book "New Art City: Manhattan At MidCentury"
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2005/...ors/index.html

Finally there a website devoted to Updike http://userpages.prexar.com/joyerkes/