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 on advice of counsel unless some moneybags
publisher comes hither with filthy lucre I should mention here that my “ghost,”
maybe better put my muse, 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. (People laughed and roared with serious snickers when
Queen Bee art patron, and literary too she helped John Reed get a leg up in
that world, Mabel Dodge brought the
cream of the new young artists and not so young from Monet to Picasso and
Braque to the armory and took the backwoods cousins stink away art in America.
Mabel got the last laugh though.]
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, Myles
Connors, not exactly an unbiased source since he is locked up in state prison
and looking to sell out, fink on anybody he has to get out of jail has floated
the idea but enough of that speculation. 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
about the cute tricks available when one wants to go on a three- day drunk and
get paid at the same time). 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, look good at cocktail parties and make sure their names are etched
correctly on whatever museum room, cafeteria wall, elevator, restroom,
janitorial closet they ponied up for. Include the poor sappy hedge fund manager
art collectors, the only ones who can afford the gaff which once belonged to
doctors and lawyers 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
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. 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 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 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 not Remembrances Of Things Past ) 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 20th
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 in that hippie girl tryst 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. You can
image what some lonesome haughty prince, lust-saturated housebound priest or dirty
old man 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 than 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 to “sit” for the
edgy Sargent. 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- tier 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 though 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 been 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 19th 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 Japanese kimono
regalia. I tried my hardest after viewing that sly, sexy come hither smile and
the symbolism of the samurai and the snakes to see if could find a whiff or scandal around Carmille’s
name, see if she had any off-hand affairs but came up empty.
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 19th
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 if extremely profitable 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 she 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 with a
bunch of bored children grinding their teeth 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 dehumanizing them including his
dear mother 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 racehorses 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 which one
had painted which one (except after making an incorrect guess 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 20th 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
high up in the 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 20th 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 21st 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.)
