Just Looking: Essays on Art

The wit and sharp observation one expects from novelist/short story writer/poet/essayist Updike are found in these 23 pieces on art, supplemented by 193 plates. He offers trenchant views on Monet ("painting Nature in her nudity"); John Singer Sargent ("too facile"); Andrew Wyeth's "heavily hyped" series of Helga nudes; Degas's "patient invention of the snapshot before the camera itself was technically able to arrest motion and record the poetry of visual accident." He hops playfully from the "tender irony" of Richard Estes's hyperrealist Telephone Booths to a Vermeer townscape, and from children's book illustration to American children as depicted by Winslow Homer. He pauses to savor the unfamiliar or forgotten: Ralph Barton's wiry New Yorker cartoons, French sculptor Jean Ipousteguy's futuristic re-visioning of human anatomy, the elaborate, studied fantasies of churchgoing Yankee painter Erastus Salisbury Field.