John Updike: Just Looking: Essays on Art [Paperback]

John Updike (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2, 2000

Artwork by John Updike.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The wit and sharp observation one expects from novelist/short story writer/poet/essayist Updike are found in these 23 pieces on art, supplemented by 193 plates. He offers trenchant views on Monet ("painting Nature in her nudity"); John Singer Sargent ("too facile"); Andrew Wyeth's "heavily hyped" series of Helga nudes; Degas's "patient invention of the snapshot before the camera itself was technically able to arrest motion and record the poetry of visual accident." He hops playfully from the "tender irony" of Richard Estes's hyperrealist Telephone Booths to a Vermeer townscape, and from children's book illustration to American children as depicted by Winslow Homer. He pauses to savor the unfamiliar or forgotten: Ralph Barton's wiry New Yorker cartoons, French sculptor Jean Ipousteguy's futuristic re-visioning of human anatomy, the elaborate, studied fantasies of churchgoing Yankee painter Erastus Salisbury Field.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: MFA Publications; 2nd edition (December 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0878465774
• ISBN-13: 978-0878465774
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #726,191 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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 lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. John Updike died on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Fine Art Critic Too!, August 5, 2000

By 

Tom Adair - See all my reviews

This review is from: John Updike: Just Looking: Essays on Art (Paperback)

Painting is to Updike what music was to Anthony Burgess: not so much a second love as a parallel infatuation. One always knew it from his prose: from the references to painters and painterly styles, and from the conspicuously visual quality of his description. It is good, then, to have this collection of the writer's thoughts on selected artists and art-works. He is neither too academic nor too personal in his opinions, and speaks with authority but without jargon. Of the longer essays, 'Something Missing' struck me as particularly good - a tentative, penetrating, careful pondering about what it is in John Singer Sargent's work that misses the mark of great art. The shorter pieces offer bite-sized reflections on single paintings or objects: 'Some Rectangles of Blue' discusses an abstract work by Richard Diebenkorn in such a way that one not only feels enlightened about the particular work but about abstract painting generally. As a critic, Updike has a refreshing freedom from academic orthodoxy - 'We are on the verge here of poster art', he reflects on some of Renoir - and as a (verbal) artist himself has licence to entertain as well as instruct with his prose. The book is lavishly illustrated with uncompromising colour reproductions and, of all his books, the most pleasant simply to hold in the hands.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Delightful and Beautiful Book, July 21, 2007

By 

Ethan Cooper (Big Apple) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: John Updike: Just Looking: Essays on Art (Paperback)

In the 23 essays in JUST LOOKING: ESSAYS ON ART, John Updike is a delightful guide and insightful companion as he reviews art across the centuries. Throughout, Updike's voice is totally engaging, informed but never pedantic, respectful but not reverential. Here is a sample:

o "From his art, we might imagine him [Renoir] a plump, rosy, placid man, but in fact, he was bony-faced, nervous, reactionary, and restless."

o "This painting of Wertheimer tells us what we have been missing in even the more admirable of Sargent's portraits: an at-ease emotional possession of the subject that enables him to concentrate on making a painting. Where no warming familiarity exists, a certain distancing finesse takes over."

o "In 1944, Robert Motherwell wrote of his friend Jackson Pollock, `His principal problem is to discover what his true subject is. And since painting is his thought's medium, the resolution must grow out of the process of his painting itself.' Three years later, in sudden full stride, Pollock could state, `When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing.' Pollock painting is the subject of Pollock's paintings."

o "[Modigliani] ...drank while he painted and liked to complete a canvas in one sitting."

o "As his eyes increasingly dimmed, Degas perforce experimented with roughness of execution, never losing his underlying integrity of drawing."

o "Faces gave [Fairfield] Porter a lot of trouble and his paint thickens as he worries over them."

JUST LOOKING: ESSAYS ON ART is also beautiful book with great reproductions. These tie seamlessly to Updike's commentary and enable the reader to fully appreciate his wonderful insights.

If you can't get to your local museum to visit the Vermeers (thank you, New York), this book is a superb alternative.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 12 Extra Pages, February 6, 2009

By 

stonecutter "Passionfilm" (Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Just Looking: Essays on Art (Hardcover)

I have a copy of this book but there is a binding error.
Pages 109 to 132 are repeated. Are there any other books like this or is this possibly the only one?
How does this affect the value?