Traipsing Through The Arts-With The Ghost of Novelist John Updike And His Three Books On His Travails Through The Art World In Mind- “Always Looking” (2012)-A Book Review Of Number Volume Three And More

Traipsing Through The Arts-With The Ghost of Novelist John Updike And His Three Books On His Travails Through The Art World In Mind- “Always Looking” (2012)-A Book Review Of Number Volume Three And More

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 for the procurer 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 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 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 Monet Plus Gallery owner one Allan Dallas, the now imprisoned ex-owner who had 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 providence 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 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 (laughable now when price has no relationship to anything but overweening desire to own say a Dali or a 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 who 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 form 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 obvious 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 more 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 art work. 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

Traipsing Through The Arts-With The Ghost of Novelist John Updike And His Three Books On His Travails Through The Art World In Mind- “Still Looking” (2005)-A Book Review Of Number Volume Two And More

Traipsing Through The Arts-With The Ghost of Novelist John Updike And His Three Books On His Travails Through The Art World In Mind- “Still Looking” (2005)-A Book Review Of Number Volume Two And More

Book Review

By Laura Perkins

Still Looking, John Updike, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2005

[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 I reviewed in this three book series by John Updike. (See Archives dated February 23, 2019.) I presented this second review without the former 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. 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 24/7/265 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 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 tiem 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 he 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 until the third book review where you will see the same disclaimer okay. Laura Perkins]

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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 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 America.

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 in my third 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 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 work 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 long 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 was then a groupie of famous art critic Clement Greenberg and being essentially 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 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 not 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 bricks and tiles thrown hither and yon and declared art.

On second thought under art gallery owners I should mentioned right now Monet Plus Gallery owner one Allan Dallas, the now imprisoned ex-owner who had 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 providence 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 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 Clark 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 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.

This volume is exclusively Updike’s take on American art since colonial times, maybe before so some of the paintings from the early days can be dismissed out of hand since it is well known that the Puritan ethic frowned upon sex, sexual expression and naked bodies except for the ministers who preached the so-called good word who kept what passed for sexually provocative paintings in their private chambers. (one of the male Mather clan, Pericaval, the preacher crowd, had quite a cache when they opened his private closet about thirty years ago blowing the ethic, if not Max Weber, out of the water). Naturally if you deal with the long history of American art then the first serious name, a name well-known in Boston art circles, is the Tory traitor and rat John Singleton Copley who fled America for the sweet bosom of Mother England and some well-paid assignments painting risqué portraits of upper- class women showing plenty of shoulder and for the times that sweet bosom everybody thought was reserved for Mother England. Fortunately I, we don’t have to spent much time on this since we only claim our theory for the 20^th century. Praise be.

We can easily pass over the Hudson River School boys like Cole and Church and their wide-eyed visions of the American pastoral and their Garden of Eden predilections. As with botanist and proto-flower child Martin Johnson Heade he of hummingbirds and lush flower fame since I will be damned if I can link him with Georgia O’Keeffe’s sensual, fleshy florals. The long and varied career of Winslow Homer is another story if you look beyond the famous farm and field material with two-wayward boys trying to figure out the meaning of life, his serious illustrations during and after the American Civil War and some seaside scenes. A strong argument can be made for the homo-erotic nature of his famous Undertow. Nobody has claimed, and I have asked Sam who uses the English poet W.H. Auden who kept close tabs on the matter of who belonged in what Auden called the “Homintern,” that Homer’s proclivities headed in that direction but in the closed world, read closet, that gays and lesbians were confined in the matter is hardly closed. Especially when you factor in Homer’s close relationship with the acknowledged gay poet Walt Whitman and his rough trade crowd. In any case this is the time for another provisional disclaimer that art, some art, some serious art was driven by sex and sensuality before the 20^th century it just generally in the case of painters like Homer very subtle, and very driven by coded symbols like flowers and stormy seas in lieu of pressed together bodies.

We can put Thomas Eakins in the same boat, or should in his case, scull, as Homer as a guy who was disturbed by his times but not quite sure of what he wanted to paint except graphic scenes in what passed for medical schools in those days. James Abbott McNeil Whistler though is another matter and it seems to me to not be merely coincidental that Updike has taken up Whistler cudgels, as much of a rogue as he was. Whistler can clearly, in fact must be clearly tagged along with a few others before the 20^th century by sex. In his case not only on the canvas. I have already, thanks in part to Sam and his arcane knowledge of ancient history, written Whistler off as a pimp when reviewing his The White Girl with its deeply symbolic wolf’s head and fur which has been an “advertisement” for availability since the days of the Whole of Babylon. This time out Updike wants to garner in some observations about Whistler’s long series of paintings dubbed with color names and centered, appropriately, on the night as an early devotee of “the night time is the right time” which was shorthand for art for art’s sake in his book. Of course we, Sam and I, and couple of the interns had a big laugh over that one since every lame artist and art critic has used that as a back-up to the search for the sublime as their working theory of what drove a painter to paint what he or she painted. Updike’s main contention though is that Whistler couldn’t make it to the modern since his palette was limited (limited by his pressing dough question when he didn’t have enough for paints even on credit and had to send some mistress of the time out onto the streets or castles to hustle up some business. The night time is the right time is right. 

          

On to the 20^th century. We can dismiss Albert Pinkham Ryder out of hand since who knows what he was trying to do now that most of his works have self-destructed just because he was clueless about what paints and other products would survive on the canvass. He night have been a serious artist and maybe a contrary example to my theory but who knows. Childe Hassam is another matter although it is tight and requires a certain amount of knowledge that say his famous painting of the Boston Common in the old horse and buggy days was a coded piece of work since one of the townhouses on the left was infamous as a high-end brothel. Moreover if you look closely at the actual Common part you will see in the distance what looks like a young women soliciting a gentleman in a top hat. Beyond that I am not willing to comment on Hassam’s work except there is definitely something erotic in all those flag-waving paintings he did to great effect.

We can pass the piece on Stieglitz since he is famous for bringing modern art to the American shores and pushing wife-to -be Georgia O’Keeffe into the limelight but is known personally for his photography, his attempts which only in the past couple of decades have beeb bearing fruit of having high-end photography accepted as a fine arts form. In that regard it is interesting that the National Gallery of Art in Washington has only in the recent past been displaying it huge treasure trove of photographs from the 1800s to present with retrospectives down on the ground floor of the West wing which seems to have been set aside to accommodate those works. I might add that the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has been doing the same in a couple of it galleries dedicated to photography. Finally it is not clear to me and therefore not worth speculating on in regard my general theory how much Stieglitz contributed, if anything to Ms. O’Keeffe’s sexually symbolic works from flowers to skyscrapers to those sensual mountains in New Mexico.    

       

Homoerotic art has a long and honored history going back to the Greeks and their full display jugs and vases if not before (some of the earlier cave art has some such displays). Although I have not commented on explicitly homoerotic art work before what will be so comments on the work of Marsden Hartley, a gay man early in the 20^th century I have worked on the idea that such art is fully in accord with my general theory about sex and eroticism in serious 20^th century art. On occasion, and since this is a fairly new on-going series, not many I have alluded to the homosexual proclivities of artists like closeted John Singer Sargent and openly gay Grady Lamont but that sexual preference was not openly professed in their works. Marsden Hartley thus is the first to have painted openly homoerotic works like Sustained Comedy and Christ Held By Half-Naked Men which might have been somewhat scandalous (and brave) at the time but now are rightly seen as classics of the genre. Having brought this art into the discussion we have come full circle about the various forms of sexual expression presented in this series

While Marsden Hartley in his later career was able to “come out” in his art the legendary Arthur Dove started out practically from day one dealing with the sexual nature of his art, his heterosexual art as far as I can tell in paintings like Silver Sun and That Red One where instead of Georgia O’Keeffe vaginal flowers, penis skyscrapers and bosom mountains he using moons and sun to make his erotic substitute statements. I will be doing a separate piece on his work so I will leave the bulk of what I say for that (and Hartley’s also since Sam Lowell has something he wants to have me present about his role as a vanguard gay artist). Updike has declared him on the cutting edge of modern and that seems about right although as usual Updike shies away from drawing sexual implications from works that scream of such expression.     

I have already commented on dirty old man Edward Hopper, the king of mopes, and his leering at nubile young women who are unaware that he is painting them (and who knows what else with the young women who consented to be painted by the famous allegedly modest painter and got much more than they bargained for. In the #MeToo age it is not clear whether his modest reputation would save him from scandal, and maybe the law but nothing has surfaced yet. Jackson Pollack also has been the subject of a recent piece and needs no further comment other than somebody tried to defend him by claiming that when he was working his wore loose-fitting pants and so he had zipper problems. (Sir, check the famous videos of him working and you will see some very tight dungarees or jeans if you want to call them that so much for your vaunted defense.) In finish off Pop Arts’ Andy Warhol, king of the hill back when they counted before everything turned minimalist galore will also get a future gloss and it only needs to be said here that he was artist first and performer and showman second. I remember somebody saying that they could “do” soup cans. Sure but who though of the idea and who actually thought to paint common everyday items and make them works of art. Enough for now.    

  

Traipsing Through The Arts-With The Ghost of Writer John Updike And His Three Books On His Travails Through The Art World In Mind- “Just Looking” (1989)-A Book Review And More

Traipsing Through The Arts-With The Ghost of Writer John Updike And His Three Books On His Travails Through The Art World In Mind- “Just Looking” (1989)-A Book Review And More

Book Review

By Laura Perkins

Just Looking, John Updike, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1989 

[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 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. 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 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. They would get in 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. Laura Perkins]

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 personal takes on works of art that have interested me I have railed 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 and set up their own exhibitions, most famously the Impressionists in Paris and by extension the famous 1913 New York Amory show that brought that breathe of fresh air to America.

That cabal for your inspection includes the usual suspects, I could name names but 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. On second thought under art directors I should mentioned one Allan Dallas, the now imprisoned ex-director who had until he was caught red-handed after many years of working the scam of having his still at large master forger 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 and then the real one to some superrich and discreet private collector. Who knows he 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. 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. 

To continue with the rogues’ gallery the press agents and flak-catchers who protect their turf by merely re-writing the releases somebody in the director’s office threw together (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 will give you all you ever need to know including his own similar slimy outrages in the days before he went into a twelve- step program). 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 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, 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.           

Worst, worst of all warranting their own separate paragraph the vaunted art gallery owners 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 which they would be reduced to for hawking their wares, their various bricks and tiles thrown hither and yon and declared art.

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 Just 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 local art museum drew his attitude. 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) 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. 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 and 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 Clarence Dewar from Art Today who 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 Doyle, the rabid, or 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 (and a couple of other flaky but true observations not directly related to defending the thesis.)

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 first of three books (one published posthumously) 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 (and a couple of minor) art museums.

After taking us on a two-edged trip through the changes, not all of them to his liking, at MoMA from his first times going through in the 1950s to a retrospective look in the 1980s he run through a potpourri of artists starting with Richard Estes (who had been interviewed about the question of sex in his work by Art Today saying that his telephone booth work (quaint these days when you could not find one except maybe in a museum exhibition (the real ones at the National Gallery have been long out of use) is filled with sexual meaning from trysts to exhibitionism although Updike passed on that one. Following Proust apparently in one of his volumes from his In Search Of Lost Time (my preferred translation) Updike went on and on about Vermeer’s painting of his native city of Delft which frankly made me yawn a bit since there are a million such scenes of cities by a million artists, especially seemingly nostalgic Dutch artists and Grand Tour devotees of Venice. What would have not made me yawn would have been if Updike had tackled Vermeer’s erotic The Girl With One Pearl Earring. This obviously an indication that we have different takes on some painter which is okay.     

        

I have staked out the 20^th century, post-Freudian, post-Jungian, post-Kleinian if there is such a word art work as the epitome of the search for sex and eroticism but that is hardly the only century or only art movements concerned with the subject and Updike draws closer to the nub in dealing with the famous nudes by Cranach. The famous take on Adam and Eve in the Garden as they grab the apple. No question that the Christian period has produced some very erotic art and these nudes are exemplars of that notion despite the previous say one thousand years of trying to make the memory of Greek and Roman naked and kinky art disappear. I showed the paintings that accompany Updike’s essay to Josh Breslin who almost flipped out when he saw Eve commenting that he had had a girlfriend in his hippie youth in the 1960s who looked just like her, including those long forever braids that took her forever to unwrap and unsnarl which he claims led him to become a serious dope fiend waiting for her to get ready. He was so awestruck he kept coming back to my desk to view the photograph. So you can image what some prince, priest or merchant must have thought when viewing the mother of us all in his private bedroom, monastic cell or counting room.       

We can safely pass over a few essays about children in art for one is, me, heartily tired of seeing Winslow Homer’s winsome sun-burned farm boys lolling away in a field and Singer Sargent’s overblown portrait of the impatience Boit sisters. I thought I was going to be thrown out of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on day when a matronly volunteer guide was going through her paces about the Boit painting on the second floor of the American Art wing and said within hearing distance that I was sure the Boit sisters were more that happy to unload that albatross from their fretted away childhoods on the museum since none of them wanted to keep the foolish thing once they got to the age of reason or from under their screwy parents thumbs. (I have since learned that at least one of the sisters, Cecelia her name I believe, the pubescent girl in the shadows was so pissed off at the long hour sittings that Sargent who seemed to have plenty of time on his hands in between dinner parties with the rich and connected put them through that she almost burned the damn thing one night. Reason: some boy she was interested in lost interest when she kept breaking their dates. Go, girl, go I could relate to that for sure.)  

While we are on the subject of Sargent, John Singer Sargent in case you forgot the days when everybody from stiff brush artists to Boston high-end merchants and bankers wore three names I swear as proof against illegitimacy, something less worrisome these days when plenty of unwed single mothers are raising their two name off-spring in quiet desperation, drew Updike’s soft pedal ire. (Having four children two each from two marriages and two divorces I know from whence I speak on the desperate mother issue.) It seems the guy whose reputation the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston beyond that silly Boit vase business is firmly wedded to enhance, has drawn more succor than you could shake a stick from exhibitions, displays, programs and the like is an overblown, overrated artist in his book. Sargent, having been born with a silver brush in his mouth and more skill and ease of painting than seems natural he never reached his full potential, always left something on the palette.

Maybe it was the fatal decision to spend his prime painting the rich and famous for big dollar commissions and a chance to sit at the bachelor seat at those elegant dinner parties where he fought dear friend Henry James (allegedly they called each other the improbable Hank and Jack) for invitations. Maybe it was not being washed clean by the Impressionists some of whom he actually painted alongside like Monet. Or maybe later getting hung up on murals which were in those days (and later except for guys from Mexico like Diego Rivera) seen as cheapjack, second-rate art by third-rate artists which led nowhere but saved the rotunda at the MFA from looking pretty drab. Whatever the reason Updike after viewing what was probably the umpteenth Sargent painting since it appears no museum in America is without at least one pulled the thumbs down on his overrated reputation. Thank, John.        

Of course, Updike, looking from a different perspective, didn’t come close to checking out some other obvious factors for why Sargent when all is said and done is only a second their member in good standing of the pantheon. The scandal over his Madame X portrait leading the way which sent the timid and oversensitive Sargent out of Paris on the fastest ship over to sweet home London exile. The scandal on its surface is bad enough having shown just too much bosom and a suggestive dropping dress strap of the famed professional beauty but having exposed her myriad extramarital sexual affairs to public scrutiny (egged on by her almost bankrupt husband) was too much for prissy French high society.

It was later revealed by one of his dear friends that Sargent actually hated women and that he either painted them as whores, or what you might as well call whores even if not working the streets or as puffy dowagers and brainless twits. Updike was on to that idea but never pursued the idea going on and on about his work lacking psychological depth. The elephant in the room and corollary to the hatred of women which Updike actually almost alluded to and which my “ghost” Sam Lowell, citing the great English poet W.H. Auden was deep into homosexual relations, “the love that dare not speak its name” and justifiably since the laws were harsh on that subject then. That explains a lot and a tip of the hat to Updike for at least letting a breath of fresh air in on the subject. 

As we move along we can blow off a couple of short nowhere and not worthy of his time essays on folk artist Erastus Field since even the liberal MFA throws his works and the few pieces of folk art they exhibit down in the dungeon, the netherworld ground floor of the American art wing where they generally do not even bother to post a security guard. The National Gallery specifically in its high horse days refused to let the stuff in the building and relegated it to the “garage” over on the first floor of the National Portrait Gallery where I did notice, once, they had a security guard although he was busy texting away. I will skip the essay on the incredible female nude that the drunken sod Modigliani painted as a throwback to medieval art since it would only unfairly buttress my argument about sex and the century. Certainly would give Cranach’s Eve a run for her money in the “hot” contest.

Updike then does a trifecta, or maybe the publisher who arranged the chronology since not everything is in order by period or by the time he went to an exhibit or had just hanging out at a museum to channel something, on the French Impressionists, Renoir, Monet, forever Monet, and the known pervert Degas. Renoir can be handled in a few sentences because everybody knows that beyond painting party-goers, working-class party-goers to boot and nude women, women whose baby doll faces betray their definitely womanly bodies and raise the question about why somebody didn’t have the guts to report him to the gendarmes as a child pornographer he was pretty shaky as an artist. Had terrible eyesight that only got worse with age unfortunately (although it did not seem to disturb his ability to what I finally figured left him out of the court system and out of prison to very accurately paint those cherubic girls in women’s form which was his “alibi” that he was doing the whole grift from memory). Okay, it is too late to grab him by the neck now in an age which is better able to defend the “best interests of the child” but he should be taken down a peg in his standing and maybe his paintings should be discounted to $9.95 in protest.

Monet, forever Monet the father of us all, the father of the modern and hence the max daddy of the sexual revolution that accompanied the shift from worrying about representation and more about painting for effect (erotic effect the great unspoken truth among that horde of professionally paid art critics like my antagonist Clarence Dewar from Art Today). Everybody remembers him for those morning/noon and night haystacks out in the wilderness in rural France and those morning/noon and night views of some medical church in Rouen of all places. Updike on one of his seemingly endless trip to the MFA in Boston to breathe the pungent air of culture sidestepped that stuff (having already clued us in that Monet to him, to me and Sam as well, really didn’t get modern until those big sexy vaginal waterlilies which some said aroused all kinds of prurient interests back around the turn of the 19^th but today are seen as just gestures) and decided to take a run a the portrait of his wife Carmille, a former street vendor flower girl in full kimono regalia.

Today we are more sensitive to “acts of appropriation” of other cultures, here ancient Japanese tea house hostesses and severe samurai warrior cults but in the late 19^th every European with enough cash grabbed whatever they could from the ships bringing a ton of loot in, including that beautiful opium bong pipe business which was scandalous at the time but today is strictly yawn stuff. In any case Monet was no exception to the European imperial rush and somehow got hold of a valuable kimono, probably from Whistler who when not pimping his muses for walking around dough was selling at exorbitant prices whatever he could find on the London waterfront (meaning he had had to deal with the notorious Anchor & Sail Tavern gang who controlled the waterfront black market for one “boss,” Larry Lawrence). This kimono, the real interesting part beyond asking why he had his dear wife, his beautiful flirty dear wife throw on a blonde wig since when was the last time anybody saw a blonde Japanese geisha was not just any kimono but had been the possession of one of Kazu’s concubines, Kazu the leader of the Seventh Samurai Brigade which defended the Lord High Emperor.

Moreover it had all kinds of references beyond the Brigade history of the various “conquests” of Kazu in the bedroom such as they were in Japan then. When Madame Monet found out she was wearing some tart’s dress he threw a fit and almost put a knife to the damn painting. ( I am not sure unlike with that sullen Boit girl whether I would say “go girl” on this one because unlike the dour Boit vase scene this one is a great work of art.) Of course the civilized art patron John Updike would rather die than spill the beans that Monet had made his wife another holy goof in his drive for the modern.

I accuse. Maybe Sargent hated women (and “liked” men). Maybe Alexander had a serious drug problem he hid by painting strange cult figures like the opium-entranced Isabella. Maybe the seemingly totally corrupt Whistler hustled his muses to keep himself in dough and then showing serious disrespect by calling them studies in every color under the sun. Maybe Hopper was a dirty old man covering his lusts in his “art” in the Bronx or Brooklyn where the young nubile women could not see where he lurked. Maybe Jackson Pollack had trouble with his zipper. Maybe Lamont was really painting to sell high-grade pornography. Maybe Renoir’s lame defense that his eyesight was failing was for real. Maybe Monet was really culturally insensitive. All that is kids’ stuff when we come to deal with one Edgar Degas, an artist of some distinction and a pervert. Criminally so although it is way too late to prosecute now.

If Degas had stuck to the horsey set and their race horses and odd social set manner we would think of him fondly. That work however was just a cover to make his money in order to hang around every available ballet studio and dance hall in France bothering underaged girls whose only “crime” was to love ballet. Sure there were rumors that Edgar paid off the ballet masters for the “privilege” (allegedly he paid the overdue rent at many studios as well) of watching the girls but nobody ever complained. Some stories from the girls, told much later when Degas had passed have the same feel as those being told today in the #MeToo movement. But there was no such movement then and who would believe some high-strung young girl against the French treasure Degas. My advice is that the next time some billionaire buys an overpriced Degas he or she put the same amount paid for the damn painting in a reparations fund for the remaining descendants of the poor young girls he molested, robbed of their girlhoods.

The skimpy essays on Diebenkorn and funny named Fairfield Porter can conveniently be overlooked since in the former case if you say Diebenkorn you say Matisse and nothing more. In fact a few years ago the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art had a combined Diebenkorn-Matisse exhibition with two works by their respectively artists side by side and almost everybody was hard-pressed to tell who was whose (except Matisse’s colors without exception were more dramatic than those of the staid Diebenkorn). What the hell could one say about wannabe three name Porter except he was an exceptional draftsman and painted nice views of his study. Neither skills allowing the guy to enter the pantheon of 20^th century serious art and therefore according to our standard must reek of sexuality (which his work does not) and does not put a dent in our general theory. Thanks.        

Every writer, for that matter every creative artist knows that except in exceptional cases you cannot sustain a whole book, painting, play with beginning to end, 24/7 delights. The last paragraph is a good example of exactly that. I needed to throw in an off-hand paragraph to fulfill my contact to provide X number of words or face either outright rejection of the transcripts or deduction in payment. Not wanting to face either of these legal guillotines I tossed in some not-essential noise about the infamous West Coast artist Richard Diebenkorn and his master-servant, or maybe master-mere copyist relationship with Henri Matisse. Longtime writer Updike who surely knows every such trick in the book had interspersed his splendid tour with some throwaway reviews. Stuff we can finish off in a few sentences like his little piece on Ray Deforest and movement in modern art, some screed upon a hand in some sculpture in some medieval church, the baffling article on early New Yorker illustrator par excellence Ralph Barton and his off-beat life (although his non-magazine work provides some very in your face sexual material), the brief fling through Japanese art portraying nostalgia for the boyhood quest for fireflies and the ho-hum life of a medieval scholar in the days when they were mainly priests and dog eat dog hierarchy who did not have the social graces to go down in the mud with mere parishioners. Done.           

After the filler and here is the beauty of the writer Updike when he was not writing middle-class male angst novels could fly with the eagles in a piece that he did on the sculptor Jean Ipousteguy. Updike captures the sense of the earthy if not necessarily massive sculptures that he created. Thinking about Ipousteguy and his works reminded me of a secondary battle I had with the professional art critic Clarence Dewar already well-advertised above. When he challenged my characterization of Edward Hopper’s more sexually explicit paintings, almost exclusively of young and nubile women and wanted to defend his position about some holy goof meaningless verbiage on the progressive search for the sublime made an erroneous assumption that I meant only painting, stuff you could throw on the walls. In response I noted that I had not mentioned that medium as part of my sex and sensuality theory of 20^th art for the simple reason that nobody that I have seen or read about has contested that theory for sculpture. Of course sculpture is part of the mix look at David Smith, Giacometti or Brancusi. Mr. Dewar surprised me by acknowledging the obvious as pointed out by Updike that even he believed all sculpture was driven by sometimes very weird ideas about sex. Thanks, Mr. Art Critic. By the way add Ipousteguy to the sex and erotic mix he simply reeked of metals hammered from that glorious search.                  

Nobody, especially in the 21^st century where what is considered art is captured in a very big tent, has to like certain works of art, and maybe thinks some artists touted for some social, political or financial reason by the art cartel have not withstood the test of time despite the best efforts of the cabal to hustle the reputation and the works. Updike had made his personal preferences and general ideas about what in art and whose reputation does or does not stand up clear in this volume (and the latter two as well). That is the case with one Andrew Wyeth whose most famous painting was of a young physically-challenged (then crippled and hopefully in the ever- changing quick draw shifts my characterization passes the current PC litmus test) Christina out in some woe begotten field but who had a lesser known body of work doing various portraits of a female neighbor/lover? Helga, including some nudes, actually many nudes. While Updike appreciated some of the work of his fellow Pennsylvanian he mainly put a thumb’s down on this painter. It is hard to blame him for his comment that basically once you’ve seen a couple of Helgas you have had enough. Oh my god, I have said that about a national treasury. Thanks, John.

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 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 art work. 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 for the other two legs of the trifecta.)