John Ashbery 1927 - 2017

John Ashbery, in his poem “The Skaters,” asks, “How much survives? How much of any one of us survives?” In Ashbery’s case, there’s no question his poetry will survive. Dan Chiasson calls him the “greatest American poet of the last fifty years” (“Postscript: John Ashbery,” newyorker.com, September 4, 2017). But Ashbery was also an inspired art critic. His Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957 – 1987 deserves to survive, too. Here, for example, from his essay “Jane Freilicher,” is his description of her great The Painting Table:

“The Painting Table” is a congeries of conflicting pictorial grammars. There is a gold paint can rendered with a mellow realism that suggests Dutch still-life painting, but in the background there is a reddish coffee can (Savarin?) that is crudely scumbled in, whose rim is an arbitrarily squeezed ellipse – one understands that this wasn’t the shape of the can, but that the painter decided on a whim that it would be this way for the purpose of the picture. Other objects on the table are painted with varying degrees of realism, some of them – the flattened tubes of paint and the blobs of pigment – hardly realistic at all. There is even a kind of humor in the way the pigment is painted. What better way than to just squeeze it out of the tube onto the flat surface of the canvas, the way it is in fact lying on the surface of the table, reality “standing in” for itself? But she doesn’t leave it entirely at that; there are places where she paints the image of the pigment too, so that one can’t be exactly sure where reality leaves off and illusion begins. The tabletop slants up, the way tabletops are known to do in art since Cézanne – but this seems not the result of any Expressionist urge to set things on edge but rather an acknowledgment that things sometimes look this way in the twentieth century, just as the gold tin can is allowed to have its way and be classical, since that is apparently what it wants. The tall, narrow blue can of turpentine accommodates itself politely to this exaggerated perspective, but the other objects aren’t sure they want to go along, and take all kinds of positions in connivance with and against each other. The surrounding room is barely indicated except for the white wall and a partly open window giving on flat darkness. (Is it that these objects have come to life at night, like toys in some boutique fantasque?) The result is a little anthology of ways of seeing, feeling and painting, with no suggestion that any one way is better than another. What is better than anything is the renewed realization that all kinds of things can and must exist side by side at any given moment, and that this is what life and creating are all about.

That comment on the “crudely scumbled” coffee can, “whose rim is an arbitrarily squeezed ellipse,” is brilliant! Reported Sightings brims with such observations. Ashbery was not only the “greatest American poet of the last fifty years”; he was a terrific art critic, too.