John Updike on American Art

But if this is a major obsession of American artists, Updike explained, it is not one with which they have all lived easily. Particularly in the late colonial and early republican periods, many American artists felt limited by it. Some saw their own paintings as too workmanly, craftlike, and even primitive, notably by comparison with what European artists—with their academies, museums, and aristocratic patronage—were producing.

Updike finds in John Singleton Copley an ideal exemplar of this vexed relationship with the American-ness of American art. Born in Boston in 1738, the son of Irish immigrants, Copley became by his late 20s the leading portraitist of British colonial America. But despite his success and wealth, this artist who was trained by his stepfather, a painter and engraver, could not help scorning his fellow colonials for seeing painting as "no more than any other usefull trade." Copley would decamp to England with his Tory wife and in-laws at the outbreak of the Revolution, but even before leaving the Colonies, he worked hard to overcome flaws that had been pointed out by fellow colonial painter Benjamin West, who himself had earlier moved to England. Updike quotes West's judgment that he had found Copley's work too "liney"—a defect resulting "from there being so much neetness in the lines." The great English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, while praising West's work, noted similar flaws, including, it was reported by a go-between, "a little Hardness in the drawing, Coldness in the Shades, An over minuteness."

Focusing on Copley's 1768 portrait of Paul Revere, Updike takes note of some of its "merely craftsmanly qualities," even while exploring the fascinating prefigurations of modernist touches in those defects: "The shirt is splendid, but the hand on the chin appears too big for the face, and the reflection of the fingers of the other in the silver of the teapot seems surreally artful.'" In England, emulating Reynolds, Copley would strive to become more artful, more theatrical, more romantic. But Updike's judgment of this effort was harsh: "In Copley's painting of English gentry, the stiffness is burnished to a metallic luster and rings hollow."

American artists, at least until the advent of abstract expressionism in the mid-20th century, were forever wrestling with this sense of cultural inferiority in relation to Europe. Yet Updike's lecture repeatedly implies that those artists who borrowed European solutions to visual challenges finally ended up producing accomplished but somehow inconsequential art. Among such artists were Sargent and Childe Hassam, casually dismissed by Updike as European painters with American citizenship.

Among the painters who in his view eluded that pitfall, Updike lavishes considerable attention upon Winslow Homer, who began as an illustrator and retained much of that "liney" clarity of illustration in his mature work. Yet though he went to Europe, Homer returned, Updike claims, "with no sign of French influence" but with "a braver style." That bravery exemplified his almost literal plunge into water, all forms of that natural element: "swampy and shadowed in the Adirondacks, sparkling aquamarine in the Caribbean, thunderous, surfy, and titanic off the coast of Maine." On his own terms, Homer moved beyond "liney" work to achieve powerful painterly effects, ending up, in Updike's words, "the wettest of artists, not only a supreme watercolorist but an inventor, on this continent, of Impressionism and action painting in oils."

Other great Americans who came to more or less successful terms with their "liney" inclinations include Thomas Eakins, the great Philadelphia artist. Though he usually painted with scientific precision, Updike sees Eakins transcending his lininess in his affectionate portraits of friends and family. And largely through chiaroscuro lighting effects, Updike says, Eakins often tempered a stiff precision to produce heroic drama, as in his depiction of surgery in progress in his Portrait of Dr. Gross.