Traipsing Through The Arts -Always Looking, John Updike, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2012-A Book Review

Traipsing Through The Arts -Always Looking, John Updike, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2012-A Book Review  

Book Review

By Laura Perkins

Always Looking, John Updike, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2012

Apparently this piece, this mercifully final piece not for the substance but for the now obligatory disclaimers, will be swallowed up by various disclaimers. I am running neck and neck with the disclaimers that the drug companies throw out with their products. I  originally presented this disclaimer I guess that is what it is called but you would have to contact my “ghost” in the shadows helper in this series Sam Lowell’s old hometown corner boy leader Frankie Riley now a very successful high-powered lawyer in downtown Boston wearing the title of “of counsel” meaning plenty of dough and no heavy-lifting leaving that for some hard-pressed intern clerks to see what the legal term is in the first book Just Looking I reviewed in this three-book series by John Updike. (See Archives dated February 23, 2019.)

I presented the second review without that formal notice of transparency (check with Frankie again for the right legal term) and site manager Greg Green, after consulting the legal department kicked it back to me for inclusion. Since I am essentially a free-lancer I am complying yet again on this third volume. If parts of the statement sound very familiar then just head right down to the review section which is what you want to do anyway unless you are a budding legal eagle and read about the stuff, the sex stuff, that Updike missed as good a writer as he was if not the most careful viewer of art when he traipsed the museum world like some holy monk searching, searching for the sublime, searching in the wrong places as this irreverent series has proclaimed more than once.

*****

Since we live in the age of transparency probably honored more in the breach that the observance what with everybody telling only what they need to tell and keep the rest as secret and silent as the grave unless some moneybags publisher comes hither with filthy lucre to loosen up tongues I should mention here that my “ghost” in this Traipsing Through The Arts on-going series Sam Lowell played in several charity golf tournaments in Ipswich and other North Shore of Massachusetts venues with the author under review, John Updike. Despite both being golf nuts, and believe me that description is accurate on both counts as both have written extensively about their trials and tribulations “on the links,” whenever there was a chance to talk say at the after round of golf banquet Sam and Updike would go round and round about art which both were crazy about although I would not use the word ‘nut” on that interest.

[Although it is not strictly germane I will, at Sam’s badgering, say that while the term “golf nut” may apply to these two late bloomers to the game that compared to the 24/7/365 crowd that haunts golf courses all over the world to satisfy their addictions that John and Sam were only mildly addicted which showed in their respective scores against the ringers brought in by those basket case world-trotters. Both agreed that bringing in “ringers,” good golfers who can hit the ball long and accurate for a charity scramble event just to enable the procurer of services to add another driver or iron to their overstuffed collection of golf clubs was, is ludicrous. Beyond that John and Sam agreed that John was the better putter on the green and Sam was a better pitching wedge artist from some yards from the green. Beyond this I will not speak. If you don’t know such terms as scramble, driver, irons, putters and wedges be my guest and look on Wikipedia to sharpen up your knowledge of this frankly arcane venture.]      

***************

Back to art which is what this piece is about although I don’t know after fighting over disclaimers and bogies (look it up) I am not sure what this is about except I am trying to honor and show weaknesses in John Updike’s looks at art works. Come peaceful banquet time after that overwrought round of golf they would get in a dither especially if Sam had read one of Updike’s hot museum exhibition reviews in The New York Review Of Books which is where a good number of the reviews in the book under review got their first breath of life. The majority of the art reviews in all three volumes come from that source because Updike was something like their free-lance agent in the art world once he decided that the angst and alienation of suburban middle age crisis men and golfing were not all there was to a creative life. Done.

*********

What I had to say in the first Updike review Just Looking still stands. Since the beginning of an on-line series titled Traipsing Through The Arts series published in Growing Up Absurd In The 1950s and its sister and associated publication of, hopefully, off-beat AND irreverent personal takes on works of art that have interested me I have railed against  what I call the art cabal, what in an earlier time I might have scornfully called the academy. (The academy in various guises what the “Young Turks” of the art world rebelled against once enough of them were rejected out of hand and set up their own exhibitions, most famously the Impressionists in Paris and by extension the famous 1913 New York Armory show that brought that breathe of fresh air and other trends like Cubism and the wild boys, forgive me, the Fauvists into the rather stuffy America world of the time.

The art world like any other subset of society has historically has its favored art forms and artists, what like I said in the old days would be the academy, run by the self-selected grandees, almost exclusively male at the grandee level, and not much different today although the infrastructure is increasingly female. If your particular type of art was not accepted by the cabal then you would wind up peddling your works out of carts in the streets or today at your local flea market, or God forbid, a farmer’s market.   

That cabal for your inspection includes the usual suspects, I could name names and I will below including the Updike review where Updike has given us a complete dossier on the Clark Brothers, yes those Singer sewing machine magnates, or rather more like coupon-clippers, one of whom put a whole museum of great art together out in God-forsaken Williamstown out beyond civilization at the Massachusetts border which is a serious hassle to get to, as a classic example of the way the cabal operated in the earlier parts of the 20^th century. Guess what things have not changed all that much except this mania for mega-exhibition retrospectives (their term). Today let us just scorn the generic universe, the up-ward striving art directors staging improbable mega-exhibitions filled with loads of hype not so much in the interest of art as expanding their revenue flows via outrageous ticket price sales, souvenir sales, and 24/7/365 (or however long the exhibition goes for) drumbeats about not missing the work of the latest previously correctly neglected artist, ancient or modern.

To continue with this rogues’ gallery the press agents and flak-catchers who protect their turf by merely re-writing the releases somebody in the art director’s office threw together.* The upward striving curators hoping against hope that they will get to move up the ladder, what Sam always and maybe correctly calls the food chain, after curating some exhibition including the obligatory five-thousand-word essay about the meaning of whoever they are touting that day’s works not knowing that this profession is almost as cutthroat as the film review profession. The art patron/ donors whose only part in the drama is to pony up serious cash, look good at cocktail parties and make sure their names are etched correctly on whatever museum room, wall, cafeteria, elevator, restroom, janitorial closet they ponied up for. The poor sappy hedge fund manager art collectors whose only knowledge of art is how much their agents bid at auction driving up the prices beyond any rational number, more importantly tucking those works away from public view for who knows how long.           

*(The press agents and flak-catchers, mostly free-lance, and mostly underpaid at least earn an honest living merely repeating in their own words the morsels provided by the art directors’ offices who in turn have been given their takes from the various kept art critics. The so-called arts journalists for the glossy magazines and nationally known major newspapers are the worst not even re-writing this palaver but sending it straight in to the editor unedited maybe clipping the title off but usually not even then. Sam Lowell already mentioned in his personal take published a while back (see Archives, February 18, 2019) all you ever need to know including his own similar slimy outrages in the days before he went into a twelve- step program. Of course Sam was in the cutthroat film reviewing business and not up in the rarified airs of high-end art and would have some young intern re-write or write a review for him. When he was on a three or five-day bender he would just take the studio copy maybe rewrite the first sentence, throw his name on it and sent the damn thing in. And the editor(s) knowing he was on a bender took the stuff like it was manna from heaven especially after Sam got wise to the publishing schedules and space requirements and would send the material along in just a nick of time before the editor(s) started pulling their hair out.

Once Sam dried out, recovered from both drug and alcohol abuse, he moved up the publishing ladder and wound up as film editor at various publishing houses, most notably the American Film Gazette which published other types of reviews on the arts and culture as well as films despite its name. While there, now having gotten religion about what was right and wrong with sending in bogus copy, he had a run in, had to fire one Clarence Dewar. Dewar now the chief art critic for Art Today who was then a groupie of famous art critic Clement Greenberg and being essentially a flak-catcher then, maybe now too, he would just send Greenberg’s columns in with his name on the piece. (It is still unclear whether this was with Greenberg’s blessing or just the clumsiness and immaturity of a young free-lancer.) Busy Sam did not notice anything until one of his writers pointed out that they had seen the same piece in Art News under Greenberg’s by-line. Adios Dewar, although the attentive reader will note that he has resurfaced as the main opponent of our sex and sensuality theory about 20^th century art.)       

Worst, worst of all warranting their own separate paragraph the vaunted art gallery owners, I won’t name names here since this is a book review of sorts, who without the infrastructure mentioned above to cater to the average collector off the street since most of the other stuff is at auction or private, very private sale, would be stuck with plenty of unsaleable merchandise. I made Sam laugh one time when I mentioned that these gallery owners without that backup from all the nefarious sources would have stiff competition with your off-hand priceless Velvet Elvis hangings at the local flea markets and God forbid farmers’ markets which they would be reduced to for hawking their wares, their various now trendy bricks, tiles, pipes, rosary beads, typewritten messages, color-coded indexes, steel girders thrown hither and yon and declared art.

On second thought under art gallery owners I should mentioned right now former Monet Plus Gallery owner one Allan Dallas, the now imprisoned ex-owner. Until he was caught red-handed after many years of working the scam of having his still at large master forger, Claude Le Blanc, do a reproduction of say a Renoir or whoever the greedy little hustler art collectors were directed to outbid each other on and “sell” that at a public auction using his acknowledged say so as provenance for the work and then the real one to some superrich and discreet private collector or keep it for his own stash. (Dallas held about seventy such paintings from Holbein the Younger to Robert Ray and Jack Devine in a private room in the basement of his Hudson River mansion which after the police raid were estimated to be worth about two hundred million dollars on today’s open market.) Who knows Dallas may have had a hand in the infamous mass art thefts at the Isabella Gardner Stewart Museum in Boston. Certainly, Dallas could not be discounted any more than anybody else since the merchandise has not reappeared for many years. None of the paintings found in his basement room were from that heist but he could have been the so-called fence with his extensive networks of private collectors and hustlers.

Now that I have my blood up in the future when my backlog of art works to review settles a little I will scorch earth this art cabal with plenty of names and their evil deeds beyond the seemingly benign idle-rich  Clark Brother churning over the art works operation and the discredited Dallas (now serving a nickel to a dime, Sam’s expression not mine, in some federal country club from which he has been recently changed so I am not sure where he is today). The Clarks were to say the least eclectic although seemingly on top the market trends probably having somebody like Benny Bach shilling for them to keep prices down. That idea laughable now when price has no relationship to anything but overweening desire to own say a Dali, Jimmy Solo or a Grady Lamont.

The only ones connected with the cabal, if marginally, that have my sympathies are the poor, totally bored security guards who these days have all matter of device sticking out of their ears whether to keep eternal vigilance or to hear whatever music they have tapped into I don’t know. Oh, and the average museum-goer cum non-art critic writer like the author under review novelist John Updike and his travelling museum exhibition road show put in book form, non-coffee table book form Still Looking. Updike (see above in the brackets for his “relationship” with Sam Lowell) has loved art and going to art museums since he was a kid in Pennsylvania and his dusty backwater local art museum drew him in to create his forever attitude toward art. He had something in common with me, and more generally Sam, in that he was an art aficionado, a self-described artist, without having the wherewithal to pursue that as a profession. Writing about art turned out to be his later in life métier. Join the amateur junior league club brother and welcome.

I have (along with my “ghost” Sam) as I have alluded to above staked out a certain way to look at art, especially the art of the 20^th century which is the period of art that “speaks” to me these days around the search, although that is not exactly the right word and I hate it as well, for sexual awakening and eroticism in the post-Freudian world. (I will provide a provisional disclaimer that Updike has never been associated with that theory of art despite his sex-driven angst novels) Not the only theme but the central one for which I, we, have decided to take on all comers to defend. And we have had to so far in the birthing process beat off self-serving Brahmin reputation protectors, and here I will mention the name of one dowdy Arthur Gilmore Doyle who seems to have been left adrift in social consciousness around 1898, irate evangelicals who could care less about art, hate it, would not let their kids go to an art museum for love nor money but are worried that their kids might read that art and sex are not mutually exclusive, and a hoary professional art critic who is fixated on the search for the sublime, for pure abstraction, art for art’s sake and maybe art to cure headaches and gout for all I know. He has a name already mentioned in connection seedy doings among the denizens of the art cabal Clarence Dewar from Art Today who as noted Sam long ago exposed as a toady and sycophant. Updike’s beauty beyond the casual way he leads the reader to his insights is exactly that. Unlike the finicky Doyle, or the rabid Dewar he has no axe to grind, he has no monstrous and ever-hungry cabal to protect and although he would by no stretch of the imagination subscribe to the sex theory of modern art, along with a couple of other flaky but true observations not directly related to defending the thesis, he has some interesting things to say. I can understand why Sam and he went round and round after a round of golf. 

As noted in the first review Just Looking and continues to be true here Updike is as eclectic in his wanderings, observations and “takes” on his assignments as I am, (as Sam would be as well if he ever had taken the on-going series when he was offered it on a plate). A quick run-through of this the second of three books (the third one published posthumously in 2012) going through Updike’s keen-eyed writerly paces. Maybe not so strangely I have been able to “steal” a few ideas he has presented to go off on my own quirky tangent which I will mention as I detail his experiences at the world’s major art museums, and a couple of minor ones as well.

In his essays Updike might well have had in mind the idea of rounding up the usual suspects. After grabbing some nostalgia from his own childhood artistic endeavors and reading choices which is what has animated Updike in all of his musings on the arts including this last post-humous selection Always Looking many from his occasional stints as roving art critic for The New York Review Of Books he takes a somewhat unusual detour to deal with one example of collectors of how strong art interest and cash combine, the Clarks of Clark Museum out in God forsaken Williamstown at the edge of the wilderness in Massachusetts. The two brothers, heirs to the Singer sewing machine fortune which made many a by-gone mother happy to not have to sew those button and things by hand although maybe angry that she had one more tool to keep her housebound, were serious art collectors although they were a little eclectic in that they swapped many of the paintings with each other or auctioned them off. The most interesting thing Updike mentioned about them, individually and together, is how strong their dislikes were on certain more modern artists like Jackson Pollack and his drip paintings. Enough said about that essay since it does not directly relate to my general theory about 20^th century art.

By the way we can dismiss out of hand Updike’s late in life basic summary essay of the drift of American art from early on to the near present as well as the holy goof Gilbert Stuart and his ten million portraits, some not finished, of General Washington and the whole Revolutionary era crowd. Since he already dealt with the Hudson River school and their visions of pristine innocent Westward Ho Garden of Eden America of the Manifest Destiny long gone except in national parks and such we can pass on his essay about Frederic Edwin Church. (We will pass but I will note a certain exotic and suggestive possibility in some of his mountain stream productions but notice is all it is worth at this time until we can explore more closely his works and career when we have time.)             

Yes, I know we have roasted Claude Monet over an open fire for putting up with his wife’s flirtations after he outfitted her in a Japanese kimono and a blonde wig (what Japanese person do you know who has naturally blonde hair that hard fact telling me something was wrong with this guy, some kinkiness). What did he expect when even one hundred plus years later guys are lingering over the painting in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston wondering some pretty salacious thoughts. We have also roiled Monet for his own kinky and worse romps with some chorus girls and other women whom he had what we would in today’s #MeToo era call unfair power over them. I know it is too late to bring charges even if the young girls and women would talk, would say the words that needed to be said in court to put this bum of the month behind bars. Instead he got a free ride to do whatever he pleased, and nobody said squat (Sam Lowell’s roughhewn expression not mine but right for the moment).

It still bugs the hell out of me that Monet was able to get a name for himself as a “max daddy” of the moderns (another Sam expression from the old neighborhood he said), a leading Impressionist and was able to do his breakthrough water lilies work without getting a hand laid on him. Apparently that is not Brother Updike’s take since of all the artists in the world he could have featured in Monet’s place he has given him two serious essays in this three-book series. Since this is a book review and not my take on this mad monk holy goof I will hold my nose and give what Updike refused to mention when discussing his famous variation haystack and church series. Everybody now knows the reason why Monet painted those haystacks at odd hours, or if you don’t I will fill you in. Not only was Monet kind of kinky (think about a grown man painting water lilies, the code for sexual connections in late 19^th century high society, of all the subjects he could have tackled even out in the country where absolutely nothing was going on) but he was a voyeur. Take another look at those stacks of hay and see if you don’t see a couple of humans, could be man and woman, or two men or two women rolling in the hay as they say (my expression)              

What people don’t know is why a barely religious man, if religious at all except that way all lapsed Catholics are still Catholics as long as they don’t go under the ground cursing the church’s name, was hanging around a church, again at odd hours. Well-known art critic Bret Barre in a recent expose has gotten some evidence, enough for thoughtful speculation anyway, that across the street from the church and from his temporary studio he was keeping a mistress and trying to keep it from the flirty Camille of the kimono so she would not go off on her own lust-filled excursions. Poor sap Updike apparently hadn’t heard thing number one about the rumors back in his day and just kept going on and on about the idea of seeing innocent fixed figures at various hours. Okay, John.

I can barely utter the name, the Degas name, it so disgusts me to even mention it. On the last go round with Degas (funny how two of the most depraved artists of their times got two reviews each from the sullen writer and although I won’t delve into his motives it is strange very strange when he had many, many other choices). Despite Updike’s naivete I was able to summon up (via #MeToo uprisings) my accusations of extreme sexual depravity on Degas’ part. At least Monet had the spine to leave the younger ones alone, Degas went right after the trapped ballerinas who due to their dedications to their art were vulnerable to an old man who admired them, gave them little treats and a few francs for their attentions. Jesus, what a monster?  I have been given some information that Degas didn’t just bother ballerinas although that was his main hang-out but also among the young horsey set. Updike oblivious to all the swirl around the Degas scandals decided that everybody had to know the guy could paint outdoor scenes just like the other mad monks who put brush to canvass. I never thought I would say this, but Updike was what we today would call an enabler. I can’t and won’t say any more about this monster except to renew my plea for reparations for any descendants of those poor young ballerinas who can prove some relationship to those places where Degas hung out. Some museum should sell their ill-gotten Degas paintings and put a fund together. More likely though the bastards will throw Degas another mega-retrospective and laugh all the way to the bank.

Gustav Klimt-sex, Gustav Klimt-erotica. Finally, as we head into the 20^th century proper Updike all of a sudden can use the “s” words to describe what this major artist was about. Klimt ran amok in Vienna in the fin de siècle days when the wine was plentiful and the women like precious ripe fruit. That was before World War I tore the facade off of bourgeois society and it quests for progress and culture. Not figuring in that optimistic age that there are regressions in society and in art too. Not to worry though I almost don’t have to work up a sweat (and neither did Sam although I did see him perspire over some of the nude drawings) with that kinky gold dust stuff he threw his “patroness” Adele of the one thousand dreams (and rich and accommodating husband who was having his own flings much like dear Madame X and her hubby) and silky sheets. One would have a hard time not working up the sexual stuff in Klimt although I am sure professional art critic Clarence Dewar will say Klimt was merely looking for the sublime. We have already had a good laugh at the water cooler over that one when he claimed Monet in his haystack painting was looking for that lame excuse of an excuse. For once Updike and I are on the same page so forward.             

Max Beckmann-sex, Max Beckmann-erotica (and old-fashioned B&D and S&M which would make de Sade proud). Mercifully we are deep into the 20^th century now and can fling all the art for art’s sake jive out the nearest window. The Nazis when they came to power declared his paintings “degenerate art” and in philistine and merciless way they were right by their standards if not the rest of the world who appreciated his bringing stuff not even found in the Kama Sutra to wider audiences. Of course the Nazis ideas of virtue and good art were pagan and Greek who we all know had no problem dealing with sexual subjects in their artwork. What the Nazis deemed degenerate is what makes Beckmann’s work so stimulating trying to figure out what strange sexual taboo he was trying to highlight (and break) once he got into stride. His Brother and Sister is a prime but hardly the only example of him “going outside the box” in depicting sexual themes, especially in those enigmatic triptychs. Like with holy goof and mad monk run amok in the post-Freudian world Klimt not much needs to be said although I expect that somebody like Clarence Dewar, a thorn in my side art critic of the professional variety, will say I am “cherry-picking” my artists known for coded sexual expression in their works or have expressed that sentiment in words. That only a few artists delved in to explicit sexual or sensual themes. For now just let me say on Beckmann like Klimt even John Updike has to admit the guy was crazy to put sex to brush to canvass.

If you look at Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, a founding document of that movement in art and literature you will notice that it is peppered with references to the subconscious, to unspoken dreams and thoughts. Maybe in the 18^th or 19^th century that would have been covered in art under some theory of the search for the sublime or beauty. In the post-Freudian era, now, although not all of Freud’s insights have withstood the test of time and his anecdotal evidence not extensive enough the relationship between the subconscious of the Surrealist dream state and sex is still pretty clear, and raw. I will just mention two key Surrealist painters who fit that mold Joan Miro who although I know he had his sexual dreams tied into his very strange collages I still am puzzled by most of it and Rene Magritte who is straight forward. Updike seems to follow that scheme as well. Like I say in terms of this book review when you get to the 20^th century my theory pops out of every crevice. These past several artists mentioned are easy but I will show that even Mark Rothko, Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Diebenkorn, Harry Samuel, Grady Lamont and others are deep into the same ideas when I get this burden down.    

Roy Lichtenstein rounds out what retrograde art critic Stuart Appleton has called the rogues’ gallery of 20^th century artists Updike has taken under his wing. Of course, Appleton will not touch comment except snide remarks about 20^th century art and is stuck somewhere around the Impressionist and maybe Arthur Dove on his good days. Anybody like the small group of founders of Pop Art including Lichtenstein are beyond his understanding never mind whether they exhibit any sexual content. What Appleton apparently forgot or maybe never knew as a child was that comic books, a staple of Pop Art one way or another is where we first learned visually about sex even if understated and not central to whatever story-line was being followed. I know I wanted to look just like Veronica in the Archie high school hijinks comic books with her womanly shape almost before I knew what womanly shape meant. Lichtenstein is just playing an old song in his various creations.

Make no mistake John Updike except almost by indirection and inference has not added any fuel to my claims for the overriding sexual nature of serious modern art. Fair enough. But then in the very last essay in Still Looking on writers and artists he forsakes all the many acute observations he had about art, about the times of the art, and about where art stood in the cultural pantheon. Then, subdued, no that is not the right word, suppressed artist turned writer Updike bleeds all over himself about the sympathetic relationship between the narrative of the painting and the narrative of some piece of writing. He brings in a cast of characters like Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Larry Roman, Sid Smith and a fistful of others all to pay homage to his amateurish artwork. In this good green earth is possible to do more than one profession, one hobby, one avocation well but sometimes one should check the ballast at the door. A great job overall though with a nice selection of paintings and photographs to ponder while reading his museum musings (and the same is true as I have already noted for the other two legs of the trifecta.)           

Enough said