STILL LOOKING: Essays on American Art
by John Updike
Hamish Hamilton £25, 222 pages

Twentieth-century America gave the world jazz, Hollywood, Walt Disney, T.S. Eliot, the Nabokov of Lolita and a dazzle of postwar novelists - Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and John Updike - who put everyone else writing in English over the previous five decades into the shade. During the same period, however, the US failed to produce an artist who approached the stature of Picasso, Matisse or any of the giants of European modernism. Its first native art movement of international importance, American expressionism, turned out to be a colourful graveyard, and its second, minimalism, an elitist bore.

For most of its history, visual art in America has suffered from a crisis of inferiority versus Europe, and this has also shaped its critics. With few exceptions, these have tended to be either extremist apologists such as Clement Greenberg, or hyper-critical immigrants such as Robert Hughes. More recently, some have taken leave of the visual altogether and descended into theory, including Benjamin Buchloh and Rosalind Krauss. Like a fresh wind on a sultry day, John Updike blows across this climate with vigour, a distinctive style, an acutely penetrating eye and always an appreciative generosity that makes looking at art with him a sharp, enlightening pleasure.

The diffident title, Still Looking, conveys the sly urbanity of this essay collection but masks its grandeur of design, for this is an intellectually cohesive, beautifully compiled history of American art from John Copley to Andy Warhol. This pair of portraitists, separated by two centuries but both fixing faces that stare out boldly from blank backgrounds, best answer the farmer and writer Hector St John de Crevecoeur’s question of 1782: “What, then, is the American, this new man?” De Crevecoeur’s answer was: “He is an American who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced.”

Flick through this book and you see that the thrill of the new and a stretching towards the absolute has always fuelled American painting. The earnest profiles of Copley’s colonial dignitaries - his John Adams, says Updike, “looks as though he might have the beginnings of a cold” - recall Dickens’s despair at the “dull and gloomy character” of the American people who “rejected the graces of life as undeserving of attention”. They had the serious business of nation-building to attend to; puritanical America, like Israel, saw itself as the promised land.

And so it is depicted in the sublime 19th-century landscapes of Thomas Cole, John Kensett and the “auspiciously named” Frederic Church. His “Twilight in the Wilderness” has a “spectacularly flaming sky tinging with red the foreground rocks and trees, as God’s glory is shed upon our earthly place”. Updike notes 20th-century successors to these wide vistas - Marsden Hartley’s Maine mountains, Georgia O’Keeffe’s mesas, Arthur Dove’s suns - but finally chooses Barnett Newman’s wash of red sliced by white and black zips, “Vir Heroicus Sublimis”, as Church’s successor.

The Sublime, Updike says, “was reborn in the mid-20th century in the oversize, utterly abstract works of Pollock and Kline, Motherwell and Still, Rothko and Newman”. He describes the painter as “performing his high-wire act with only intuition and impulse to guide him across the immensity of the canvas; the storm and precipice were purely within”.

Updike is not a natural fan of abstraction; as a novelist, he has always lovingly stroked the textures, colours and forms of the material world, and it is in this context that he interprets abstract expressionism. “The dots can be connected from Copley to Pollock: the same impassioned engagement with materials, the same demand for a morality of representation, the same aversion to what Marsden Hartley called a ‘compromising softness’.”

Brilliant at evoking the clear air, strong sunlight and high sky of the relentlessly literal Thomas Eakins, or the “uneasy, tentative muddy” haze of James Whistler, or how “a thrilling absoluteness sweeps in along with the deep shadows carved by the low sun” in Edward Hopper, he brings a novelist’s obsession with psychology to suggest the inner workings of the creative mind, which makes this book soar above conventional art history.

So Whistler “correctly saw that western painting had exhausted pictorial narrative... but by instinct... declined to walk through the door to the future, which was colour”, because he was “shy”; thus his averted faces, fogs and empty seas. Something of this reserve stood between many 19th-century American artists and greatness. In a brushstroke-by-brushstroke comparison of the impressionist Childe Hassam with his contemporary Van Gogh, Updike notes how the bold frenzied strokes in the European were “a signature of his increasingly inward vision, whereas in Hassam they remain the byproduct of an energetic hurry, a trace of vigour never formalised into a motif. His case is very American in that we feel something prevented him from doing full justice to his talent.”

Perhaps that reserve only found its perfect expression in two towering presences of 20th-century American art: Edward Hopper, whom Updike likens to the poet Wallace Stevens - two philosophical artists with a sensuous eye, drawn to solitude and ghostly presences - and “St Andy” Warhol. It is a tribute to Updike’s prose that his slow, ornate, style can speed up to illuminate the fast art of Andy yet remain elegant and laconic.

In his introduction, Updike quotes Gertrude Stein’s deliberately casual love letter to painting, and nothing better describes his own: “Everybody must like something and I like seeing painted pictures. There is no reason for it but for some reason... anything painted in oil anywhere on a flat surface holds my attention and I can always look at it and slowly yes slowly I will tell you about it.”

Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s chief art critic.