Updike is not just dabbling in these subjects. His reflections on the tension between beauty and the sublime in a review of American Sublime, an exhibition which came to Tate Britain in 2002, reprise ideas that were explored in his 2002 novel, Seek My Face. That flawed but absorbing novel was in turn prompted by his reviews of the Jackson Pollock retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998-99 and several Arthur Dove shows in New York in 1998. Updike’s natural sympathy is more with description and earthbound beauty than with abstraction and the sublime, as any reader of his fiction will know, but his exploration of the entire subject, in these reviews as well as in Seek My Face, is engrossing.
The whole book is generously illustrated, and of course arresting verbal images rise from every page. In Copley’s ‘The Death of Major Peirson, January 6, 1782’ (1782-84), ‘the central group clusters an excessive number of men in a campy clot of solicitude around the inverted figure of the major’. (One looks to the reproduction and it is exactly so.)
In Hopper’s ‘Early Sunday Morning, 1930’, ‘the dawn comes rakingly from the right. It arrives stealthily, while the windows still sleep, and we think of the inhabitants behind those curtains, dreaming or groggily stirring as the day, like an ambitious merchant, is already setting up shop.’
In the paintings of Thomas Eakins ‘our sense of an intelligence exerted is not always balanced by the sense of a moment captured’. Whistler, meanwhile, is arrestingly described as ‘a piquant loner, a crepuscular dead end’: ‘To think of [his] nudes in relation to Degas’, or his faces in relation to Sargent’s, is to confront an almost frightening lack of interest, of that excitement that generates specificity.’
Something similar — a preference for the general over the specific — limits the achievement of Pollock, according to perhaps the most provocative review in the book. To Updike, the public reverence for Pollock is not baseless but it is certainly suspect. Andy Warhol, on the other hand, is described as ‘an ill-educated dyslexic who became the wittiest image-maker since Duchamp and the wittiest voice in American art since Whistler’. ‘His fifteen minutes are still stretching; there is an uncanny, unearthly beauty and rightness to his work.’
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