Always Looking - John Updike

I love to read John Updike’s essays, especially those on artists, which were collected in two volumes, Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005). The posthumous companion, Always Looking: Essays on Art (Knopf, $45), leads off with Updike’s Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, delivered in 2008 in Washington. I was lucky to be in the audience at the Warner Theater for this slide-talk entitled “The Clarity of Things” which connected the “American-ness” in paintings by John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins, among others. The lecture, like Updike’s essays, was full of close observation and an obvious love of his subjects. Always Looking continues with fourteen other pieces on such topics as the monotypes of Degas, the landscapes of Frederick Edwin Church, the patterned interiors of Vuillard, Miró’s graffiti, and the pop worlds of Lichtenstein and Oldenburg. It’s great art and great Updike.