Always Looking by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-96183-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

KLIMT The Dancer, 1916–18 Oil on canvas, 711/16 × 35⅜″ Private collection (Illustration Credit 8.1)

The Dancer (1916–18), a much later, unsigned, and unfinished canvas that prior to the spectacular new acquisition was the museum’s featured Klimt, also holds a clash of textures, but, more roughly painted, in stabbing brushstrokes that testify to the painter’s struggles with portraits in his later years, seems to consist not of two distinct planes but of only one and a half. My gaze rested most comfortably, I found, on the near-monochrome The Park of Schloss Kammer (c. 1910), its pointillist mix of greens and blues flooding the large square canvas to the corners; the little, early, vertical Pale Face (1903), a study in black, cream, and mauve, the black insouciantly descending from bulky hat to flowing hair to dark coat without a break in its sinuous contour; and, earlier still, The Tall Poplar Tree I (1900), another dark shape reaching past the painting’s upper edge, against a radiant sky where bits of surreally sharp azure stare through the clouds. All three paintings show the painter’s wish to banish perspectival depth—to confess, as it were, the flatness of the canvas—yet also respond to the stimuli of natural appearance: green dabs of motion in the foreground pond of the park; the sharp nose and long chin and meditative smile of the female contemplative, a café-haunter à la Toulouse-Lautrec; and the fuzzy saplings and dotted flowers in the orchard beneath the white sky, seen with Impressionism’s soft focus. These paintings have a settled peace, whereas the brazen, theatrical patterning of Klimt’s Golden Style, not to mention the hectically crowded symbols of his once-scandalous murals, have about them the nerved‑up anxiety of fashion, which is always being pushed from behind by the next spectacular thing.

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