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.

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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.