American beauty. John Updike, whose second love was painting, sees his nation's art as a spiritual struggle on a grand scale. George Walden argues that we must keep its achievements in perspective
Published 06 March 2006
Still Looking: essays on American art
John Updike Hamish Hamilton, 222pp, £25
ISBN 0241143357
The first thing to say about Updike on art is that, now art history has become the dustbin of ideologies and criticism of contemporary art has plummeted from the heights of Clement Greenberg to the bottomless vacuities of today, it is a relief to read a real writer on the subject. But Updike, trained as a painter himself, has his peculiarities. One is that, as in his literary reviews, he is a gentle critic, whose infatuation with the appearance of things makes him sympathetically attentive to everything he sees. He is also a patriot, whose writings on American art are character-ised not so much by defensiveness - there is often no need for it - as by a genially stubborn resolve to ensure that his country's artists are given their due.
All this is a way of saying that Updike is predisposed to think the best of American art. He writes with a kind of benign prejudice, his honesty and intelligence reining in his enthusiasms. The result can be perceptive judgements. On Jackson Pollock, while a little breathy about the drips - "lovely in their scrawled and spattered radiance" - he admits that the earlier work could be ugly, and concludes: "There is an American tendency to see art as a spiritual feat, a moment of amazing grace. Pollock's emblematic career tells us, with perverse reassurance, how brief and hazardous the visitations of grace can be." For Pollock, it might be argued without too much exaggeration, read American art as a whole.
Updike repeatedly singles out the Puritan influence. Writing on the exhibition "The American Face", he speaks of the faces painted by Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent as appearing "not merely to offer a depiction of their subjects but to render a judgement upon them". Sometimes he does this himself, speaking of there being, in American portraits, "little of the pampered cheek and arrogant downward glance of English aristocrats . . . by Van Dyck and Gainsborough". Arrogant or not, theirs can be the better pictures, with a tonal nuance and delicacy of observation that American portrait painting was never to attain. The problem with many an American artist, from John Singleton Copley to the 20th-century, socialist-inspired Thomas Hart Benton, was that the judgement visited on the sitters was so often upliftingly positive: their features squared off into noble segments, their virtue conveyed by those pragmatic/idealistic, all-American gazes.
Updike is at his best when discussing the Americanness of American art, notably in his essay on the wonderful exhibition "The American Sublime", first shown at Tate Britain in 2002. To his eyes, the topographical awesomeness of Frederic Edwin Church's Icebergs or Jasper Francis Cropsey's Dawn of Morning, Lake George and the purity of Barnett Newman's swathes of colour share a spiritual aspect. "Greatness of dimension", wrote Edmund Burke, "is a powerful cause of the sublime" - and sure enough, these are large pictures for a big country. Speak- ing with the assurance of an artist who originally studied to be a philosopher, Newman pronounced that the divine aspect of nature had been lost - the supernatural could be apprehended through the abstract medium of paint alone. This was to become doctrine. Troubled about how realistic he should be when depicting weather, the painstaking (and plodding) abstractionist Arthur Dove once wrote to a friend: "Weather shouldn't be so important to a modern painter - maybe we're still 'too human'."
Would Updike agree with the proposition that the more American the painting, the more impressive it tends to be? I suspect so, though that would suggest he is more critical than he seems prepared to be of the blandly Europeanised Copley (who spent 40 years in England) or of American impressionists such as Maurice Prendergast or William Merritt Chase, in whose over-pretty confections a certain literal-mindedness comes thumping through. Updike's overgenerous urges can be revealed by his anxiety to valorise American work by reference to the French. He claims, for example, that Childe Hassam's Rainy Day, Columbus Avenue, Boston of 1885 compares favourably with Gustave Caillebotte's famous Paris Street; Rainy Day of a decade earlier. It doesn't. Hassam's picture, closer to Victorian realism, has neither the subtlety nor strength of image of the Frenchman's. More discerning is his distinction between a Van Gogh and a Hassam still life when he writes that in the Dutchman "parallel brush strokes become a mannerism, a signature of his increasingly inward vision, whereas in Hassam they remain the by-product of an energetic hurry".
His lack of enthusiasm for Whistler (the piece on him is prejudicially entitled "Whistler in the Dark") may have something to do with the artist being a blender of French, Japanese and neoclassical influences who, having left his homeland in his youth, never returned. Updike is right that "as a theorist Whistler posed the right questions but gave weak answers", but passes too swiftly over his successes, such as the Nocturnes or the "Mother", whose significance as a futuristically American work he fails to spot. Like Rothko's atmospheric paintings, it was done with inky paint on unprimed canvas in imitation of American primitives, a revolutionary procedure in 1871. And like Rothko's work, it has sunk, as though edging into the shadows. Albert Pinkham Ryder was another intrepid experimenter, who played around with oils mixed with bitumen and poured varnish on to still tacky paint, with the cracked, lustreless and ghostly result we see today.
Puritanism has an inbuilt tendency to excess, and in modern America there is always something "ultra" going on, even if it borrows as heavily as Andy Warhol did from Marcel Duchamp. The Frenchman had the wit to foresee the mass, commercialised future of art in the 20th century and the discrimination to tell the joke once, and leave it there. Fifty years later Warhol lived that future, and mass-produced the joke. (He was followed after another 50 years by the Brits, who have only just got it.) Updike the indefatigable chronicler of ads and adspeak in his own work takes to the early, soup-tin era ("A certain deadpan rapture lurked in such productivity") more easily than to the films or books, and sees straight through the subversive pretensions: "Warhol's was a protest-free Dada." The problem with nullity as an art form is that you can nullify only once. Nullity repeated becomes both null and void, and Updike's busy Protestant mind was not made to luxuriate in an endlessly echoing void of irony.
It is easy to think of Edward Hopper's visions of the everyday as being closest in spirit to Updike novels, but whereas these are cheerfully garrulous, Hopper's work is balefully pregnant with - what? "Hopper's polluted silence" is Updike's phrase for it.
Though Hopper is an exception, overall one is struck by Updike's inability to look at American art without thinking about what was happening (or not happening) in Europe. In his art novel Seek My Face he describes with exuberant patriotism the irruption on to Europe's stagnant art scene of the great exhibition of abstract expressionism "The New American Painting", when it toured the Continent in 1958-59:
They didn't know what had hit them, but they knew a bomb had gone off in their faces: freedom in action, baby. Only in America . . . Hey, you want revolution? Here it is . . . Surrealism without the smirk, abstraction without geometry, every painting a wrestle with God.
His triumphalism may be justified, but Updike also wrote of the transient nature of the visitations of grace in his country's art, and its achievements must be kept in perspective. In 1872-73 Degas visited New Orleans. In a letter home he described how his mind raced with projects and possibilities, but in the event he produced only one notable painting: the superb Cotton Office. Art's loss, perhaps, but in patriotic terms America's gain.
George Walden's Why God Won't Save America: the crisis of the Puritan tradition will be published by Gibson Square Books this spring
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