John Updike on American Art

What is distinctively American about American art? That is the question John Updike, beak-nosed patriarch of American letters, set for himself in this year’s Jefferson Lecture, the 37th in a series of annual talks sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Addressing a capacity crowd at Washington's Warner Theater, Updike, 76, framed his answers largely around 40 works of art that the NEH and the American Library Association are supplying in reproduction, and with commentary, to schools and public libraries across the country. If it was a somewhat restrictive decision—though a generous gesture toward the host of the occasion—the selection of artists and works gave him sufficient berth to explore his theme.

"The Clarity of Things," the lecture's title, comes from Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century Calvinist theologian and divine whose graphic and sometimes terrifying sermons helped spark America's first Great Awakening. The phrase sums up what Updike believes is an enduring feature of the American mentality: an inclination, derived both from Puritanism and the empiricism of early modern science, to find in things, clearly and exactly perceived, the "principal manifestations" of God's perfections and even another text of divine revelation.

More simply, as Updike elaborated, this mentality exhibits a deep-rooted preference for things over abstract concepts, an aesthetic memorably summed up in the words of 20th-century poet William Carlos Williams: "For the poet there are no ideas but in things." Or as Updike would also insist, for the American artist in general.

If Updike's lecture ultimately revealed as much about him as his subject, it is probably little surprise: It distilled much of what he has been up to in a prodigious body of creative and critical works that now includes more than 50 books of fiction, short stories, poetry, and assorted nonfiction.

Updike's heavily laureled career began in small-town Pennsylvania, where artistic ambitions were instilled in the only son by a doting mother who harbored similar ambitions herself. Graduating from Harvard College, Updike spent a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England, before settling on writing as his profession. Apart from an early two-year stint at the New Yorker, Updike has lived and worked in Massachusetts, bringing forth, among other fictional creations, the memorable Rabbit Angstrom. During these years, his critical intellect found outlets in hundreds of reviews and appreciations, many of which were assembled into books. The most recent of these collections, Still Looking, focused on American painters and might be read as the deeper background to his Jefferson Lecture—and as more ample support of his major claims about the spiritual underpinning of the American aesthetic.

"We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort," Updike told NEH Chairman Bruce Cole in an interview for the most recent issue of the endowment's magazine, Humanities. "We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills. [John Singer] Sargent misses getting top marks because he made it look too easy."

Since "we" and "us" require qualification in these correctly minded times, Updike began his lecture almost apologetically by saying that he was exploring a line of American art that originates with that "least hip of demographic groups, white Protestant males of northern European descent"—particularly those thin-lipped Puritan founders who settled the wooded wilderness of New England.

Updike can talk about painters in this tradition with a familiar, almost offhand intimacy because he shares not only much of their spiritual orientation but many of their explicitly visual ambitions as well. Like them, and also like the great 17th-century Dutch masters of whom he has often and admiringly written, he has made the precise rendering of the physical world a kind of spiritual exercise: an attempt to recover in everyday objects a sacramental dimension that Puritans effectively banished from their institutional religious life.

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.

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.