ALWAYS LOOKING: ESSAYS ON ART by John Updike, published by A.A. Knopf (2012)

When I read Adam Begley’s recently published, masterful literary biography Updike, it lit a fire inside me. For the next few months, I’m planning to read my way through his extensive canon. And, although I’d prefer to read chronologically, I am mostly dependent on the availability of the books through the Toronto Public Library. Yet, I did splurge on a few, including this one.

In Begley’s book I discovered that Updike originally had plans to become a visual artist, an animator, actually. And, after he graduated from Harvard, he earned a scholarship to attend Oxford’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in 1954. There, he noted about a Life Class, “nothing like a sneering nude to set a man’s pencil trembling.”

Here are a few of my favourite things from Always Looking.

On Klimt:

Updike’s description of the portrait of “Adele Bloch Bauer I” (1907), bought by Roland Lauder for $135 million to add to his collection at Neue Galerie in NYC, made me laugh out loud, because he might have been writing about himself: “Horizontal eyes and vertical half-moons in the sitter’s garments both suggest vaginas, indicating another of the painter’s interests and doing nothing to discourage persistent but unproven rumors of a romantic connection between the artist and his subject.”  See for yourself.

On Magritte:

Magritte’s bronze “Megalomania” (1967) Updike suggested, “stands as a monument to the female form, as worshipful as a Maillol or a Lachaise—a magnificent telescope of a rump giving birth to a smaller abdomen giving birth in turn to an armless, headless torso.” Updike adored women, as you can tell.

On Miro:

Although I remembered from A Moveable Feast that Hemingway knew Miro in Paris, I did not know that he borrowed 5000 Francs in 1926 to purchase “The Farm” (1921-22) to give to Hadley for her 34^th birthday, a painting that they hung above their bed. Through Updike I discovered that they were “incongruously, occasional boxing partners.”  Looking for the painting’s appeal to Hemingway, Updike wrote, “like Hemingway’s early prose, the painting is possessed by an ecstasy of simple naming, a seemingly innocent directness that is yet challenging and ominous.” Both of them were poor and hungry in Paris, “and hungry people see with a terrible clarity.”

If the Updike writing that follows is as engaging as these essays, I have plenty of days ahead that will be rife with reading joy through his obvious respect and affection for expression.

NYC Sculpture

Everywhere I travel, I keep my eyes peeled for public sculpture. NYC is a great place to gawk because there are wonderful pieces all about town. These are some of my favourites.

Double Venus, on Avenue of the Americas

Jean-Marc, apparently.

Atlas, shouldering the weight of the world, or at least Fifth Avenue.

Pomona at the Park Plaza.

The Bard in Central Park.

Angel of the Waters, Bethesda Fountain.

MOMA

One of my favourite enclaves in NYC is the sculpture garden at MOMA. When I was there at the end of November, there was a new piece by Picasso, his She-Goat. Look closely and you can see his fingerprints.

This standing piece, called RIVER, always makes me feel a little vertigo.

This slice of sky and window on New York makes me happy.

Lincoln Center, Aaron Curry’s MELT TO EARTH sculptures

 

 

 

Aren’t these fabulous?

New York City: Take Two

Each morning Ella wanted to go to Rockefeller Plaza to see the TODAY Show outdoor segments being filmed. The first morning we were there, Al Roker was still on vacation, so we received Little Al Roker bookmarks instead of seeing him alongside Matt Lauer on a walkabout.

Whenever I lay my eyes on 30 Rock, Jeff Richmond’s theme music from that eponymous show starts playing in the intracranial theatre of my imagination, and the opening credits fly behind my eyelids.

I love the Art Deco designed facade and the sculpture of the fire-stealer Prometheus that watches over below.

A short walk north on Fifth Avenue will take you by this sculpture of Atlas, shouldering the weight of the world across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where I always stop in to light a candle in memory of my brother.

New York City: Take One

Every time I visit NYC, I re-read E.B. White’s beautiful billet-doux to the city, HERE IS NEW YORK, that he penned during a heatwave of August 1948 when he was staying in town at The Algonquin. It is a perfect little love letter to his city with lines as indelible as this one: “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.”

This time I was spending the days with my 11-year-old niece, who read Konigsberg’s THE MIXED UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER before the trip, so we made a point of visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art where the novel is set.

She sought out Michelangelo’s “Little Archer” (below) as well as an Egyptian necklace and a black cat that all figure in the book.

The Egyptian exhibit always reminds me of the scene shot there and mostly improvised by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in WHEN HARRY MET SALLY.

We spent quite a bit of time in the American Wing framing photos of the figurative pieces including Diana and the Tiffany stained glass there.

Geisel Library, UC San Diego

The Mandeville Special Collections at the Geisel Library houses, among other treasures, illustrations and annotated manuscripts by its eponymous donor, better known by his pseudonym Dr. Seuss. Outside the library is a bronze sculpture of the man and his infamous feline, on his desk is scribbled the phrase, “Oh the places you’ll go.”

Inside there’s an endearing photo with a young reader.

And, here are a few samples of his manuscripts, which I expect are displayed in rotation. There’s Horton, Sam I Am, and my favourite illustration: “This book is to be read in bed.”

There’s also several display cases on the ground floor with excerpts from SIDEWAYS author Rex Pickett’s personal archives. Pickett graduated from UCSD summa cum laude. And, until September 1st, you can see photographs, newspaper clippings, annotated manuscripts and other souvenirs from his career as a filmmaker and a writer.

THE PAINTED GIRLS by Cathy Marie Buchanan (2013)

Set in late 19^th Century Paris, Cathy Marie Buchanan’s THE PAINTED GIRLS transports you to another time and place with such evocatively rich sensory detail that you’ll find yourself immersed in the clatter and clamour of those narrow streets, your head turning at the imagined scents wafting from the local boulangerie.

Impeccably researched, Buchanan’s narrative peels apart the darker criminal elements that were inevitable pieces of the lives of the impoverished class at the same time that Zola’s words played on Paris’s stages and les petits rats trained and performed in the corps at the Paris Opera Ballet.

 If you’ve ever seen a copy of Degas’s sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, you have already met the protagonist of Buchanan’s tale: Marie van Goethem, a petit rat herself who posed as the paid model over the course of several months, under Degas’s mindful gaze. The painted girls of the title are the van Goethem sisters, Antoinette, Marie and Charlotte, who, after the early death of their father and due to the alcoholism of their mother, are required to make their way in the world, earning money in order to live.

 

I remember seeing a copy  of Little Dancer Aged Fourteen here in Toronto at the AGO in 2003 and marveling not only at the appropriate posture for a dancer and the open fourth position in which her feet are placed, but also at Degas’s fingerprints that remained visible after his wax maquette was alchemized into a bronze. And, how fragile and young she seemed immortalized by one of the finest sculptors of his time.

19^th Century Paris was a rough place, if you weren’t wealthy. Girls especially had to make difficult choices if they were going to survive. In THE PAINTED GIRLS, Cathy Marie Buchanan focuses her unflinching eye on the struggles of the van Goethem sisters and makes you believe, through her craft, that every moment she unravels is true. True to the core.

This is a novel that will work its way into your heart and leave an indelible mark.