Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987

by John Ashbery

The first collection of art criticism by a renowned poet ranges over modern painting and sculpture, architecture, and environmental art with a sensitive, perceptive eye and a lucid witty style

Genres: Art, Essays, Poetry, Nonfiction, 20th Century

417 pages, Hardcover

Published August 26, 1989

About the author

Formal experimentation and connection to visual art of noted American poet John Ashbery of the original writers of New York School won a Pulitzer Prize for Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975).

From Harvard and Columbia, John Ashbery earned degrees, and he traveled of James William Fulbright to France in 1955. He published more than twenty best known collections, most recently A Worldly Country (2007). Wystan Hugh Auden selected early Some Trees for the younger series of Elihu Yale, and he later obtained the major national book award and the critics circle. He served as executive editor of Art News and as the critic for magazine and Newsweek. A member of the academies of letters and sciences, he served as chancellor from 1988 to 1999. He received many awards internationally and fellowships of John Simon Guggenheim and John Donald MacArthur from 1985 to 1990. People translated his work into more than twenty languages. He lived and from 1990 served as the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. professor of languages and literature at Bard college.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected to like this book less since Ashbery's poetry does so little for me, but the era from which he is writing provides an insightful vista on the way my own looks at the past, and his writing is better in this straightforward style than in his overedified poetic voice. He doesn't appear to have much fun in front of art or to experience much pleasure outside the coffers of fulfilling his regular deadlines (the deadlines from which he credits the later success of poetic writing practice no less.) Despite these reservations I found a valuable insight or turn of phrase on nearly every other page.

It helps if you are familiar with the artists in question, though it is entertaining when some of the geniuses he chooses to anoint, like Owen Morrel, have, in the intervening decades, become shorthand for throwaway public art/ grantwriting kitsch meets science.

He's adept at quoting others; some examples:
Francis Ponge: I believe that more and more recognition will be given to those artists who, simply by their silence and by abstaining from the themes imposed by the ideology of their period, have kept in touch with the non-artists of their time, for at bottom, they lived in better agreement with the temper of their time

Joan Mitchell: I’m trying to remember what I felt about a certain cypress tree and I feel if I remember it, it will last me quite a long time

re: Saul Steinberg: Steinberg considers the New Yorker drawings as separate from his other work. He calls them "homework" and "calisthenics," since “everything has to be understood at once. I have built a muscle through homework, so that everything else is child's play. So did Seurat, who thought of himself as a scientist. What is great in him is his vision, but technique was his camouflage. I believe in Eliot's advice to poets: do something else. Left to your own devices you get fat and start slumming. In the Renaissance artists were workers – builders and constructors had their say, and the artist was part of the team. Since the Impressionists (except for Seurat), art has become no homework.
the New Yorker is my “political” world. My duty. I am formulating a subversive political message. My other drawings are political only in the sense that I am concerned with autobiography. I mind my own business, talk about myself. When I make a drawing for myself I use only my pleasure

re: Fairfield Porter: "you can buck generalities by attention to fact. So aesthetics is what connects one to matters of fact. It is anti-ideal, it is materialistic. It implies no approval, but respect for things as they are.” this last point seems hardest to digest for artists who believe that art is "raw material for a factory that produces a commodity called understanding." Thus, politically "concerned" artists continue to make pictures that illustrate the horrors of war, of man's inhumanity to man; feminist artists produce art in which woman is exalted, and imagine that they have accomplished a useful act; and no doubt there are a number of spectators who find it helpful to be reminded that there is room for improvement in the existing order of things. Yet beyond the narrow confines of the "subject" (only one of a number of equally important elements in the work of art, as Fairfield Porter points out) the secret business of art gets done according to mysterious rules of its own. In this larger context ideology simply doesn't function as it is supposed to, when indeed it isn't directly threatening the work of art by trivializing it, and trivializing as well the importance of the ideas it seeks to dramatize.

Robert Harbison: Art is troublesome and not because it is not delightful but because it is not more delightful: we accustom ourselves to the failure of gardens to make our lives as paradisal as their prospects

[ron swegman · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Ashbery is an American poet who came into prominence in the mid-1970s through a book of poems titled after a painting by the Italian Mannerist master Parmagianino -- "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" -- a book which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Critics Circle Award, one that also foreshadowed this American poet's perceptive and poetic view of the visual fine arts.

This book -- subtitled "Art Chronicles" -- collects Ashbery's numerous essays and newspaper columns which document the personal gallery and museum sightings he has made during his career. Ashbery excels in putting visual artists in historical perspective and in shining opinionated light onto those masters who have remained somewhat in the shadows. My personal favorite -- Gustave Moreau -- the nineteenth-century French Symbolist painter who instructed a young Henri Matisse. Ashbery's unique look into the Musée National Gustave Moreau in Paris is a highlight of this book and representative of the unique sightings this poet has made over a long and poetic lifetime.