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Still Looking: Essays on American Art Hardcover – November 8, 2005

by John Updike (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 20 ratings
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From a master of American letters and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series comes a richly illustrated book of eighteen insightful essays about American art, written while he was the art critic at The New York Review of Books.

“Remarkably elegant little essays, dense in thought and perception but offhandedly casual in style. Their brevity makes more acute the sense of regret one feels to see them end.” —Newsday

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 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 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.”
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  1. Print length
    240 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Knopf
  4. Publication date
    November 8, 2005
  5. Dimensions
    8.29 x 0.89 x 10.3 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1400044189
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1400044184
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Bookmarks Magazine

Published primarily in the New York Review of Books, the collected essays in Still Looking are less art criticism than finely honed art appreciations. Reviewers note Updike’s inquisitive tone and earnest interest in his subject matter. The often honored (an American Book Award, an O. Henry Prize, a National Medal for the Humanities) and prolific author once aspired for a career in cartooning and studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England. The major complaint, if it can be registered as such, is that Updike is so effective at bringing these works to life that the book, though amply illustrated, provokes frustration that the exhibitions are no longer running.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Updike's art criticism is free of abstraction and jargon and radiant in its curiosity and discernment. He can't help but bring a novelist's gift for psychological insight to his discussions of art, even as he expertly considers technique and aesthetics. American art is his passion, and within that realm, it is painting that he loves best, although he has included a judicious discussion of Alfred Stieglitz, the most painterly of photographers. Updike begins with a witty discussion of American portraiture and John Singleton Copley, then celebrates American landscape painting in his most rousing pieces, discussing with deep feeling the idea of the sublime during the oh-so-brief era in the New World when "nature reigned untamed" and offering agile responses to the paintings of Frederic Edwin Church, Martin Johnson Heade, and Winslow Homer. Forthright in his castigation of museum exhibitions burdened with dunning commentary, incisive in his interpretation of John Sloan and Arthur Dove, and brilliant in his response to Edward Hopper, Updike is receptivity personified, writing about art with ardent attention, knowledge, and profound appreciation. Updike's immersion in art assures us that there are oases, still, from the crassness of commercial images. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; F First Edition (November 8, 2005)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400044189
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400044184
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.41 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.29 x 0.89 x 10.3 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 20 ratings

About the author

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John Updike

John Updike

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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.

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4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
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Top reviews from the United States

Great Faulkner's Ghost
5.0 out of 5 stars Udike On American Art
Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2012
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Arguably America's last great man of letters, the late John Updike's interests ranged from art, to literature, children's books, and occasionally to golf. With the exception of literature, from which he wrote from the perspective of a foremost practitioner, Updike was, as he admits himself, more of a well-informed dabbler. Therein lies the charm of this book. Updikes' observations on painting and sculpture are not those of an "art critic" per se, but of a professed non-expert, who was at the same time, one of the most profoundly literate, and intelligent men of his era. He approached art in the way most of us do, as an amateur, yet with far greater artistic gifts and sensibilities than most. Perhaps that is why I found his observation to be so helpful -- like, "yes, that is exactly the same question I had, and, of course, that is exactly what I was sorta' thinking, but couldn't quite get too." I enjoyed lingering on every page of this book, with its lovely reproductions of the art Updike is describing (I only wish that more of the painting/art were actually pictured), and of course, the mind of John Updike himself, who loved art, and who took time from his too short, but marvelously productive literary life to explain art to those of us who shared his passion for it, using the full range of his immense intellectual and humanistic gifts.

Note: Still Looking is the second of three art books Updike would pen over the course of his career.The others are:  Just Looking and  Always Looking: Essays on Art  This volume focuses exclusively on American Art, while the other two range across the broader international landscape. I recommend all three, if possible, as they form a continuum of fertile insights into art and sculpture of all schools and venues.
4 people found this helpful
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J. H. Brown
5.0 out of 5 stars Great
Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2022
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Arrived at time and in condition advertised.
One person found this helpful
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pulling cheek swirl better shake up
4.0 out of 5 stars People who paint can be joyously violent precursers of modern art
Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2017
As nature becomes dynamic, the painter Albert Pinkham Ryder had stages in preparing some of his paintings that made thr freshly finished painting quickly become a thing of the quirky past. Trying to find cultural Chernobyls in which no control rods at the bottom of the reactor core pulverized a power station by spasmodic disintegration of fuel microcosms causing liquid water to change to steam with explosive force, raising the upper shield over the reactor core, "his tacky paintings were piled in a dusty jumble" P. 97) had an exhibit in 1918, the year after he died in 1917, which photographs show now better than "the originals have all but dissolved." (p. 98). A painting called The Curfew Hour (early 1880s) is shown beside a 1909 photograph on page 99. The recent photograph before 1990 has many cracks visible in the sky, but it is difficult to tell what is wrong in lower portions of the picture. Even a hack forger could paint like Ryder. "We like it that his paintings are self-destructing (p. 101).
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fran w.
5.0 out of 5 stars Still Looking
Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2014
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I bought this for my husband. He liked it very much. I also bought him Always Looking which he doesn't think is quite as good.
One person found this helpful
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william McGee
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2017
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It was very good!
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R
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on August 24, 2016
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Great book, thanks.
One person found this helpful
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David B Richman
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Sampler of American Art History
Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2006
John Updike is a prize-winning novelist, but he was also trained in fine art and has written a number of gallery show reviews, especially for the New York Review of Books. His reviews are always interesting and point out many aspects of the artist's work being shown. "Still Looking: Essays on American Art" is a collection of his reviews and that collection is quite eclectic, covering such artists as Whistler, Copley, Ryder, Eakins, Homer, Hopper, Nadelman, Dove, Hassam, Pollack and Hartley, as well as the photographer Stieglitz and two theme reviews on storms and landscapes in his eighteen chapters. While all of his highlighted artists are male, he has good things to say about Mary Cassatt (p. 118) and he does reproduce two of O'Keeffe's watercolors (p. 142) and one of her oils (p. 143). I think his relative lack of female artists in this volume may have more to do with the shows he reviewed for the various publications than any especially strong male bias.

That said, this book is magnificent! The articles are well done and the art work is reproduced in vibrant color. I found a number of works I had never seen as well as "discovering" several artists that were essentially new to me, and was fascinated by the depth of the art produced by them. If you want to begin to learn about American artists, this collection of reviews is a very good place to start.
16 people found this helpful
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Richard Coeur de Lion
4.0 out of 5 stars The Language of American Art
Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2006
I love John Updike's essays. His perspicacious critical writing is, more often than not, a joy to explore. However, I have to agree with a previous review, which wonders at the lack of female representation. In a country with giants like Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, and Helen Frankenthaler pushing the bounderies of art; it's impossible to think of this book as anything other than a reflection of Updike's personal preferences. Therefore, don't expect a comprehensive collection of essays about "the best" (whatever that means) American art.
5 people found this helpful
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Janet
5.0 out of 5 stars American art essays
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 24, 2021
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A really great book and super fast delivery
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