John Updike on American Art

Grant Wood's work, including his 1931 painting The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, also exhibits that very American lininess. But he, too, found a homegrown solution, using neatness, Updike explains, "with a flavor of parody; the village is toylike, a Christmas-yard village with its lit windows throwing out golden druggets onto the road" and Revere's horse "stretched out in the position of a hobbyhorse, and the playfully patriotic mood of Longfellow's overfamiliar poem ... knowingly evoked."

Similarly, Updike points out how the wiry, restless lines of Thomas Hart Benton's 1975 Origins of Country Music call, somewhat cartoonishly, "for a suspension of disbelief while it presents not so much an American scene as a rendering of America's self-image." Even the abundance of details that Reynolds had deplored in Copley here, in Benton's painting, verifies what Updike calls "a collective vision."

Updike must leap beyond the set images to show how Homer's accomplishment of creating pictures that "are at once representations of natural phenomena and examples of painterly artifice" found its way into the abstracting reductions of painters like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock (whose Number 30, Updike observes, "is all line, dribbled and splattered in a mystic dance between concept and thing") as well as into the pop art of Andy Warhol and the photorealism of Richard Estes.

Will American artists ever outgrow their lines? In a country now more attuned to its cultural and ethnic diversity, it would seem so, even by Updike's lights. But his last words on this occasion betrayed his belief that a deep-rooted tendency will not vanish entirely, at least not so long as some American artists remain intent on mapping the visible "in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness." And as Updike's own ever growing body of work shows, if the outer wilderness is largely gone, the inner one remains.