You will seek my face is the twentieth Romance of the prolific writer American John Updike, born in 1932: the novel is appeared in 2002 in New York under the title " Seek my face" and translated into French by Claude Démanuelli was .

This novel is consisted the interview which gives, at the end of its life, Hope, woman of several painters who marked the American modern art in the years quarante-soixante and painter itself. While answering the questions of a young journalist the old woman recluse in her house of Vermont will remind the course of its life.

Presentation

Initially young painter promising at the end of the Thirties, Hope marries Zac Mccoy (transposition of Jackson Pollock) which it accompanies in his artistic research marked by the Dripping and the Action painting. It evokes their difficult life and close friend in a lost farm of Vermont where the couple settled and draws the portrait of the artist who revolutionizes in quasi an anonymity modern painting. It shows at the same time the rough aspect of the painter, his creative force and its destroying alcoholism.

It evokes also the painters with whom the couple remains in contact and after the death of Zack in an car accident, its marriage with Guy Holloway in which one recognizes Andy Warhol. There accompanying still creation by the Master of the Pop-art and illuminant their common life with their three children, it testifies to the New Yorkean artistic life and its overflows. She divorces finally and finishes her life with Jerry, an critic art of which she shares complicity.

After the departure of the journalist, Hope, returned to the loneliness of old age and meditating on the passage of time, takes refuge in memories of its early childhood.

Analyzes and Comments

• It is about a novel with keys which in an explicit way clarifies one period of the American art of the XXe century, initially with the generation of Jackson Pollock and the Action Painting then with Andy Warhol and the Pop-Art. Concurrently to these great figures one recognizes other artists like Rauschenberg or De Kooning as well as galerists and critics art like Peggy Guggenheim.

• The romantic bond between these artists is consisted a character of woman who takes again of enough close, for the first part, the figure of Lee Krasner, the woman of Jackson Pollock. The marriage with Andy Warhol concerns as for him the novel and takes again other real characters.

• Through this woman itself artist, the author enters the step of artistic creation with authenticity and opens a reflection on the Art and the search of the Beauty which exceeds a definite space-time framework.

• The novel is without typographical cut nor breathing like a long evocation of the facts and years which are connected to constitute the assessment of a life, and beyond the one period artistic assessment that John Updike seems to know of very near.

• The report/ratio of Hope with the young journalist is also interesting: the irritation of the old artist in front of the modern young woman with the long teeth makes little by little place with a female proximity which alleviates the end of the discussion and accentuates the final loneliness of that which has just reparcourir its life, evoking as well its emotional and sexual intimacy that its participation in the world art. Thus the revealing announced by the title of the novel it could take place.

Prolongations

One can bring closer this novel to John Updike of film put in scene and interpreted by the actor ED Harris, " Pollock" , left into 2000 in the United States and 2003 to France. Besides the actress Marcia Gay Harden will obtain a Oscar for her interpretation of the role of Lee Krasner, the woman of painter of which the novelist by You were partly inspired will seek my face .

Quotations

  • But strangest with the drippings of Zack (= Jackson Pollock), it is that, in spite of the violence of the details, the splashes, the pasty mixtures, the unit releases an impression of calm. (...) Yes, there was a true peace, a balance, a quietude in its fabrics, in which I can see only the reflection of his mood when it was over there, in the cold of the barn, far from me, the experts of criticism, these pinks of full women to the aces and these being wary abroad who directed the galleries, delivered even his need to drink: it was in peace, superimposing its reasons the ones on the others, until it must stop and wait until painting dries. And then there is such an innocence in this man dancing and to kneel around the fabric by ground, such a capacity childish to absorb itself in the pure action, which I have desire for tightening it in my arms and for asking for forgiveness to him to have brought it on a ground where there could embank the beauty and to be remained unable to show him how to withdraw a durable happiness of such an experiment.

John Updike - You will seek my face (ED. threshold, 2006) (page 111)

External bonds

  • http://www.passiondulivre.com/livre-25222-tu-chercheras-mon-visage.htm

  • http://www.filmdeculte.com/film/film.php?id=609

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