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Indlæser... John Updike: Just Looking: Essays on Artaf John Updike
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Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog. Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. What do great writers do when they're not writing books? Updike is among those financially successful in their own lifetimes who wrote for whatever magazine would pay well for their work, and happily, in the case of Updike, that included many essays on art. Without apology, venom, or regret, he tells it like he sees it—chastising Renoir for not being quite as great as Monet and Degas and unself-consciously, yet fondly, labeling a Diebenkorn Abstract Expressionist painting as "an expensive variety of wallpaper" (p. 80). Updike is teaching us, by example, how to view a painting. In Richard Estes's "Telephone Booths" the viewer may see a well-executed, realistic painting of people in telephone booths, a common urban sight. Updike sees "The sun is shining on a car hood. A fat woman is striding past a mannequin. Merchants are proclaiming their names and wares in visual shouts reduced to isolated letters" (p. 21). He offers us models of contemplative essays. Just Looking is richly illustrated with full-color plates of the paintings discussed. Through Updike's words, the masters become our familiars, and we care that they painted—and what they painted. Updike's knowledge indeed seems to come from a lifetime of "just looking," and he sees with an eye that the uneducated art observer can understand. He is accessible. He offers a way to view art that allows us to appreciate what we initially could not understand—and to dislike it if we must. This beautiful volume is a lavishly illustrated tribute to John Updike's primal artistic interest, drawing and painting. For a deeper understanding of Updike's work, the interesting essays on John Singer Sargent, Ralph Barton, Jean Ipousteguy, and Andrew Wyeth are particularly noteworthy, as is the final essay on the interrelations of writing and the visual arts. ingen anmeldelser | tilføj en anmeldelse
Examines the delights of paintings and sculptures through a gallery of twentythree illustrated essays.
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. Ingen biblioteksbeskrivelser fundet. |
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I especially liked his thoughts on the Helga Pictures -- titled "Heavily Hyped Helga" -- mainly because my husband and I saw that exhibit on our honeymoon in San Francisco; and now we live in what could be considered Wyeth country. ( )