Always Looking, by John Updike
Eloquent, knowledgeable, urbane; who wouldn’t have wanted to stroll through an art exhibition with the late John Updike? Always Looking, a collection of review/meditations on various big ticket shows, primarily retrospectives, were mostly written for The New York Review of Books. It joins and complements the earlier Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005). Updike, whose astonishing output numbered over 60 volumes, never ceased to delight in the music and magic of the written word. In his review of “Degas Landscapes,” which was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1994, he says: “On the Cliff arrests us with its steep upward mass of grassy hill abruptly thrust into a concave piece of clear blue sky, sky that looks stuck and unreal until we step back and see it resolve, with the blotches of fuscous green that wander up the hillside, into a rectangle of perfect high summer in its elemental duotone.” John Updike. Photo courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf/Random House In short, there is a clarity of description throughout. He took his assignments seriously and wrote them in formal, although conversational prose that doesn’t digress or escort us away from the subject…
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