Still Looking: Essays on American Art

Still Looking: Essays on American Art
- Used Book in Good Condition
When, in 1989, a collection of John Updikeâ€™s writings on art appeared under the title Just Looking, a reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle commented, â€œHe refreshes for us the sense of prose opportunity that makes art a sustaining subject to people who write about it.â€ In the sixteen years since Just Looking was published, he has continued to serve as an art critic, mostly for The New York Review of Books, and from fifty or so articles has selected, for this richly illustrated book, eighteen that deal with American art.

After beginning with early American portraits, landscapes, and the transatlantic career of John Singleton Copley, Still Looking then considers the curious case of Martin Johnson Heade and extols two late-nineteenth-century masters, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. Next, it discusses the eccentric pre-moderns James McNeill Whistler and Albert Pinkham Ryder, the competing American Impressionists and Realists in the early twentieth century, and such now-historic avant-garde figures as Alfred Stieglitz, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Elie Nadelman. Two appreciations of Edward Hopper and appraisals of Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol round out the volume.

America speaks through its artists. As Updike states in his introduction, â€œThe dots can be connected from Copley to Pollock: the same tense engagement with materials, the same demand for a morality of representation, can be discerned in both.â€

On Just Looking

â€œSome of these essays are marvelous examples of critical explanation, in which the psychological concerns of the novelist drive the eye from work to work in an exhibition until a deep understanding of the art emerges.â€
â€”Arthur Danto, The New York Times Book Review

â€œThese are remarkably elegant little essays, dense in thought and perception but offhandedly casual in style. Their brevity makes more acute the sense of regret one feels to see them end.â€ â€”Jeremy Strick, Newsday
Country USA
Brand Knopf
Manufacturer Knopf
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber Illustrated
Color Black
ReleaseDate 2005-11-08
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781400044184

Country	USA
Brand	Knopf
Manufacturer	Knopf
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	Illustrated
Color	Black
ReleaseDate	2005-11-08
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781400044184

Still Looking: Essays on American Art

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