Volume 53, Number 11 · June 22, 2006
The Novelist in the Gallery
By Willibald Sauerländer
Still Looking: Essays on American Art
by John Updike
Knopf, 222 pp., $40.00
In the history of criticism, novelists and poets who write about exhibitions of painting and sculpture have a distinctive place. Their comments on the visual arts may (or may not) be less well informed than the writings of professional art critics and scholars, but some have been capable of subtle, independent observation that makes us see things freshly. The long tradition of literary art criticism began around the middle of the eighteenth century with Diderot's reviews of the 'Salons' and it splendidly continued with critical essays by Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, Zola and Huysmans, to cite only a few of the most famous names.
Review, 4134 words
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