Art: A novelist proves a genial and generous critic of American art, writes Colm Tóibín
Writers of fiction should beware of making oracular statements about art. In 1876, for example, Henry James attended an early showing of Impressionist work in Paris with paintings by Renoir, Monet, Pisarro, Sisley and Morisot. In his article for The New York Tribune, he made his position clear. "None of its members show signs of possessing first-rate talent, and indeed the 'Impressionist' doctrines strike me as incompatible, in an artist's mind, with the existence of first rate talent." James compared these new French painters unfavourably with the English Pre-Raphaelites. The Impressionists, he wrote, "declare that a subject which has been crudely chosen shall be loosely treated".
Sometimes, praise makes less sense than abuse. Thomas Mann's essay on Dürer, for example, is one of the worst things he ever wrote in his life. His last paragraph begins: "To think of Dürer means to love, to smile, to remember." Joyce, in his wish for Brancusi's portrait of him - made up of a few swirling lines - to be more "explicit" is another good example, but he made up for it by quoting his father's remark when he saw what Joyce called Brancusi's "whirligig": "Jim has changed more than I thought".
John Updike, as an art critic, is more genial and restrained and respectful than his three predecessors. His comments in these essays on the complex fate of being an American artist are of great interest. He is intrigued by the connection in painting between realism and Puritanism "those dominant American modes". He traces the origins of American painters' belief in the Sublime - their loving sunsets and storms and precipices - to "our assumption, since the Puritans, of favoured-nation status 'under God'".
He also knows that Americans have easy expectations that artists will be mad or self-destructive. "Americans," he writes, "with their basically millennial expectations, admire holy fools."
And he is alert to the idea that there are few first fully realised acts in American art. The case of the painter Childe Hassam, he writes, "is very American in that we feel something . . . prevented him from doing full justice to his talent". Or: "In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young, and Andy Warhol managed this in the nick of time."
Updike knows in his heart that the American painters before Abstract Expressionism were provincial and worked in a cultural backwater, but he is all the kinder to them and more fascinated by them for that. He wishes to have a mild argument with Henry James who, he writes, "could never quell his sensation that there was something intrinsically unworthy in American subject matter". He has decided to see what he calls "the American open-mindedness" and its "fabulous national innocence" not as a sort of vacancy but as a gift.
As in his fiction, Updike writes with grace; as a stylist, he is always ready to make his own sweet contribution to the history of the sublime. In describing certain aspects of American landscape painting, for example, he writes: "The moment when rain approaches or recedes, like those of sunrise and sunset, is dramatically freighted with implications of a past and future, of a life in time that the landscape leads." In analysing the weakness of Thomas Eakins, comparing him with Walt Whitman, he writes: "Yet Whitman had a great subject: New York City, melting pot of an immigrant democracy. Eakins had, instead, the troubled faces of the Philadelphia gentry." And then there was poor old Whistler: "Though Whistler's busy love life testifies to a healthy interest in women, his concept of beauty did not alight on their flesh".
UPDIKE PREFERS THE paintings he describes, even the most harmless and half-hearted of them, to their critics. Since his pieces were written as reviews of exhibitions, Updike feels free to cast his eye, suddenly sharp, on the catalogues. He writes witheringly and sometimes hilariously about the efforts of art scholars to wish that the painters under consideration did more for the poor. He seeks to defend painting against them: "The medium's silence and its lack of an olfactory or tactile dimension make it inadequate to render the noisome reality of a slum or squalid dwelling." This comes after a critic's attack on a painting from 1897 by J Alden Weir of a tree with a factory in the background. "The large tree," the critic writes, "spreads its protective canopy over the smoke stack of the Willimantic Linen Company's factory . . . There is no hint of the immigrant labour problem that the company had experienced in the 1880s or the financial problems faced in the late 1890s."
Although he deplores this sort of rubbish, Updike does not read paintings as objects out of time, aspects of what he calls "the mindless roar at the heart of all". Describing painting before 1820, he is aware that a change in ideas led to a change in what appeared on canvases. "Until Romantic developments in theology cleared the ground for Divine occupation of the wilderness, Nature was in a sense invisible."
Perhaps what fascinates Updike most, since he has spent his life under the same skies, is the element of newness and struggle in American painting from its founding fathers to the work of Pollock and Warhol. They were working in an unmuddied stream. Thus Thomas Eakins could return from France and Spain in 1870 and start painting what his biographer would call "the light and atmosphere . . . of America: clear air, strong sunlight, high remote sky, brown trees and grass . . . An original mind was dealing with actualities". Updike sees Edward Hopper as another such talent. As an upholder in prose of a similar kind of radiant realism, he writes with wonder and insight about Hopper as a great American original.
Updike's book is beautifully made, awash with colour illustration, often used on the very page where the author is describing the original painting. He is, however, too kind at times, especially to Georgia O'Keefe and Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove. He should not mention Edward Hopper in the same sentence as Vermeer, nor Arthur Dove in the same sentence as Miro and Klee. But he is in a generous mood, most of the time, in these essays written between 1990 and 2004. They are another aspect of his loving attention, which has taken many forms, to the secret and sensuous history of his own country.
Colm Tóibín's collection of stories, Mothers and Sons, will be published in September
Still Looking: Essays on American Art. By John Updike, Hamish Hamilton, 240pp. £25