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]
*********
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 20th
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 20th 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 20th 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 20th 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 20th 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 20th 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 20th
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 20th
century I have worked on the idea that such art is fully in accord with my
general theory about sex and eroticism in serious 20th 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.