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. 

Michael Hofmann's "Where Have You Been?"

This is just a quick note to say how much I’m enjoying Michael Hofmann’s new essay collection, Where Have You Been?. Hofmann isn’t a New Yorker writer. But his dazzling, delicious book connects with the magazine in several interesting ways. For example, it contains two excellent essays on Elizabeth Bishop, who contributed more than fifty poems and five short stories to The New Yorker. In “Bishop/Lowell Correspondence,” a review of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Hofmann catalogues the differences between the two poets:

Bishop is acute, Lowell obtuse; Bishop sensitive, solicitous, moody, Lowell dull, sometimes careless, rather relentlessly productive; she is anxious, he when not shockingly and I think genuinely self-critical, insouciant; she is open to the world, whereas with him—and this is an understatement—"sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing"; her poems in her account of them are fickle, small-scale, barely worth pursuing—and how many of them seem to get lost in the making—whereas his are industrial-scale drudgery and then quite suddenly completed.

At one point, Hofmann says, “Bishop likes strong Brazilian coffee, Lowell drinks American dishwater coffee (or tea, sometimes he's not sure).” In comparing Bishop’s and Lowell’s letters, Hofmann pulls no punches; he likes Bishop’s better: “Bishop is so prodigal with sympathy, attention, interest; Lowell, by contrast, seems to endow even people quite close to him (even Elizabeth Bishop, as we will see) with very little reality. It comes down to something like focal length—his is about a foot.”

For a kinder view of Lowell’s letter writing, see Dan Chiasson’s "Works On Paper" (The New Yorker, November 3, 2008),  in which he calls Lowell’s recovery letters “among the most brilliant letters ever written, for the simple reason that the writing of them operates against such tragic stakes.”

Another piece in Hofmann’s collection that links with The New Yorker is “James Schuyler.” Schuyler contributed at least a dozen poems to The New Yorker and was the subject of a wonderful essay, called “Whatever Is Moving,” by longtime New Yorker poetry editor, Howard Moss. Hofmann mentions Moss’s piece in his essay. Regarding Schuyler, Hofmann says he is “at once a painterly poet, descriptive and objective, and at the same time he uses all the subliminal, microbial quirks of language.”

A third New Yorker connection came to mind when I read Hofmann’s piece on Zbigniew Herbert. The New Yorker published a number of Herbert’s poems, including the John and Bogdana Carpenter translation of "Mr. Cogito on a Set Theme: 'Friends Depart,' " (June 28, 2004), which Hofmann quotes, using the Alissa Valles translation. Hofmann rips Valles’s translation of Herbert, calling it, among other things, “slack, chattersome, hysterical, full of exaggeration, complacency, and reaching for effect.”

And fourthly, reading Hofmann’s absorbing piece on Max Beckmann, I recalled Peter Schjeldahl’s New Yorker review of Saint Louis Art Museum’s “Max Beckmann and Paris” ("The French Disconnection," March 8, 1999; included in Schjeldahl’s 2008 collection, Let’s See), which contains this memorable description of Beckmann’s great Quappi in Blue: “In Quappi’s bone-white face, her red lips assume a sweetly wry expression while visually exploding like a grenade.” Hofmann, in his “Max Beckmann," also notes the detonative character of Beckmann’s work. He says, “In its drama and clutter and burstingness, it regularly challenges the very idea of what can be done in a painting.”

All of these connections are worth exploring further. Where Have You Been? is a rich, spirited collection. I’m enjoying it immensely.