John Ashbery

He places this figure where it will reinforce rather than disrupt the original composition, so that even as he is shading, psychologizing or interpreting the painting he’s chosen, he’s also letting it shine as it is.

Much has been made of the notion that Ashbery creates his collages by accretion, as he does with his allusive poems. No doubt. Yet he also works as a curator here, selecting images and staging them to tug the viewer in unexpected ways.  All the more unexpected since the artist whose sly boyishness comes through in this new work is almost 90.

John Ashbery is eighty-nine. In the last two months, he’s published a new collection of poems, Commotion of the Birds, and launched an exhibition of his latest collage work, which appears through January 28 at Tibor de Nagy. 

What have you done in the last two months?

The journey or the dream, the unavoidable movement from one domain to another, is one of the themes running through a number of the recent collages. In others, which use a game board as the ground upon which Ashbery has affixed various images, a terrain is re-imagined. We seem to encounter the most unlikely and ordinary things, all of which are mysterious portents of what lies ahead. The other thing that struck me about these works is how gay some of them are. For a poet who is notorious for writing opaque poems in which autobiography and transparency are dispensed with, a number of collages celebrate the youthful male body with an innocence that is touching, tender, and, frankly, poignant and sweet.