Always Looking by John Updike

Always Looking by John Updike

In this posthumous collection of John Updike's art writings, a companion volume to the acclaimed Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005), readers are again treated to remarkably elegant essays (Newsday) in which the psychological concerns of the novelist drive the eye from work to work until a deep understanding of the art emerges (The New York Times Book Review).

Always Looking opens with The Clarity of Things, the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities for 2008. Here, in looking closely at individual works by Copley, Homer, Eakins, Norman Rockwell, and others, the author teases out what is characteristically American in American art. This talk is followed by fourteen essays, most of them written for The New York Review of Books, on certain highlights in Western art of the last two hundred years: the iconic portraits of Gilbert Stuart and the sublime landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, the series paintings of Monet and the monotypes of Degas, the richly patterned canvases of Vuillard and the golden extravagances of Klimt, the cryptic triptychs of Beckmann, the personal graffiti of Mir , the verbal-visual puzzles of Magritte, and the monumental Pop of Oldenburg and Lichtenstein. The book ends with a consideration of recent works by a living American master, the steely sculptural environments of Richard Serra.

John Updike was a gallery-goer of genius. Always Looking is, like everything else he wrote, an invitation to look, to see, to apprehend the visual world through the eyes of a connoisseur.

JOHN UPDIKE was the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels, including The Centaur, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009.

CHRISTOPHER CARDUFF is a member of the staff of The Library of America and the editor of John Updike's posthumous volumes Higher Gossip, Always Looking, and The Collected Stories. He lives in Melrose, Massachusetts.

BRAD LEITHAUSER is the author of sixteen books, the most recent of which is The Oldest Word for Dawn: New and Selected Poems. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and Iceland's Order of the Falcon, he is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and divides his time between Baltimore, Maryland, and Amherst, Massachusetts.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780307957306
ISBN 10	0307957306
Title	Always Looking
Author	John Updike
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Knopf
Year published	2012-11-27
Number of pages	224
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable