Icons Updike and Katz

I've just started rereading John Updike. I inhaled his Rabbit series back in the eighties (when I was in my thirties) along with several other of his novels; Roger's Version, The Witches of Eastwick, Couples, and The Coup, to name a few. In recent years I have not been able to get into much fiction. I've mostly read artists' biographies and books on theology. Funny how our literary tastes can change. But while at the library last week I picked up Updike's collection The Early Stories and am thoroughly enjoying again his fine artist's eye and visceral, detailed portraits of his characters. Funny also that I should find on-line today this portrait of Updike by Alex Katz (top image), an artist whose portrait work I think of as the opposite of visceral. Typically iconic, cool and slick, his faces and heads never really interested me. Not enough juice, I'd thought. But today I see in them a depth, and a ripple of emotional movement under the surface that I had not detected before. Like I said, funny how tastes can change...