Always Looking
John Updike
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
<p><span>In this posthumous collection of John Updike’s art writings, a companion volume to the acclaimed </span><span>Just Looking </span><span>(1989) and </span><span>Still Looking</span><span> (2005), readers are again treated to “remarkably elegant essays” (</span><span>Newsday</span><span>)  in which “the psychological concerns of the novelist drive the eye from  work to work until a deep understanding of the art emerges” (</span><span>The New York Times Book Review</span><span>). <br><br> </span><span> Always Looking </span><span>opens  with “The Clarity of Things,” the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities  for 2008. Here, in looking closely at individual works by Copley, Homer,  Eakins, Norman Rockwell, and others, the author teases out what is  characteristically “American” in American art. This talk is followed by  fourteen essays, most of them written for </span><span>The New York Review of Books</span><span>,  on certain highlights in Western art of the last two hundred years: the  iconic portraits of Gilbert Stuart and the sublime landscapes of  Frederic Edwin Church, the series paintings of Monet and the monotypes  of Degas, the richly patterned canvases of Vuillard and the golden  extravagances of Klimt, the cryptic triptychs of Beckmann, the personal  graffiti of Miró, the verbal-visual puzzles of Magritte, and the  monumental Pop of Oldenburg and Lichtenstein. The book ends with a  consideration of recent works by a living American master, the steely  sculptural environments of Richard Serra. <br><br> John Updike was a gallery-goer of genius. </span><span>Always Looking</span><span> is, like everything else he wrote, an invitation to look, to </span><span>see,</span><span> to apprehend the visual world through the eyes of a connoisseur.</span></p>