Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #10 John Updike's "Bridges to the Invisible"

Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait with Horn (1938)

I love reviews that take me to a museum or gallery and put me squarely there with the critic as he or she describes and analyzes the art on view. In the next few weeks, I’ll list ten of my favorites and attempt to express why I like them so much. 

Today, I’ll start with #10: John Updike’s “Bridges to the Invisible” (The New York Review of Books, November 28, 1996; included in his 2012 collection Always Looking), a review of Max Beckmann in Exile, at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York, October 9, 1996 – January 5, 1997.

I relish the way this great piece begins:

Descend with me to lower Broadway and the Guggenheim Museum there (suggestive, in its converted old warehouse, of a discount outlet for the goods on display in the chic spiralling main emporium on upper Fifth Avenue) and discover, upon arising from the subway and perambulating half-gentrified streets thronged with jubilantly hairy youths and tall thin girls clad entirely in this season’s remorseless black, and then upon threading through the bustling museum shop, with its plastic spread of modernist kitsch, past the vast flashing bank of computer-manipulated, laserdisc-fed television monitors designed by Nam June Paik and entitled Megatron—discover, I say (its doors as discreetly marked as its financial sponsorship by Lufthansa and Deutsche Bank), an exhibit of twenty-one late paintings, including seven of his famous triptychs, by Max Beckmann (1884-1950).

The second paragraph is even more seductive:

What have we here, so incongruously nestled under a second-floor show of electronic manipulations and virtually empty rooms called Mediascape? We have painting, pure and simple—painting that in its clarion colors, packed human groupings, and unmistakable metaphysical intent recalls the grand European tradition. We are challenged, in this age of acute aesthetic impatience, wherein visual stimulations have the duration and subtlety of electric shock treatments, by works so nakedly, simply representations in pigment and yet so stubbornly withholding of easy pleasures and a clear message. Some sort of colorful struggle is going on, but in terms almost entirely selfish, with no appeal to a public, by a sensibility to whom the Self is a self-evidently potent entity.

Some sort of colorful struggle is going on. By the end of the review, Updike has thrillingly described that struggle, as reflected in Beckmann’s “symbol-fraught canvases” (especially the triptychs), and suggested a compelling idea as to what it might be about (“transmuted autobiographical discourse”). In so doing, he fulfils one of criticism’s primary aims: offering a perspective, a thread through the tangle.