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.)