Life, that Mixed-Media Affair
John Ashbery: Collagiste

 

 

 

Icarus, 2010, collage, 3.5 x 5.5 ins, Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, copyright John Ashbery

  

Artist Statement

I started making collages when I was an undergraduate at Harvard in the late 1940s. I forget exactly when or why I began, but it was no doubt a response to the collage novels of Max Ernst and the partly collaged Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque (and later to the collages of Schwitters and Joseph Cornell.) In the early 1950s I also began using collage elements in my poems; some are entirely collage.

 

 

Motorcourt, collage, 5.5 x 4.5 ins, Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, copyright John Ashbery 

  

Why did I do this? More important, why did great artistic minds like Picasso, Gris and Braque suddenly feel the urge to incorporate bits of everyday ephemera like newspaper clippings into their highminded classical work? Well, perhaps to bring it down to earth a little and make it more realist, in a certain sense. But no doubt also to introduce life, which is a mixed-media affair, into their paintings.

 

  

Hotel Negresco, 2010, collage, 6.25 x 5.5 ins, Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, copyright John Ashbery 

  

As one studies them, one's attention keeps shifting from the ebb and  flow of angular or rounded forms to the printed texts in the newspapers, announcing perhaps a furniture sale or a crime that was the talk of Paris for a week. We're all suckers for these appurtenances of daily life.

 

 

      Samos, 2010 collage, digitized print 11 x 8.5 ins, Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, copyright John Ashbery 

  

Most of the collages I did at Harvard are lost. Years later, in the early 1970s, I would visit Kenward Elmslie and Joe Brainard in the summer at Kenward's lovely house in Vermont. After dinner and a certain amount of wine we would sit around the table, cutting up old magazines and splicing them back together for our own amusement.

  

 

September 1939, collage, digitized print, 10.5 x 8 ins, Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, copyright John Ashbery 

  

I got into the habit of using postcards, whose sense of the picturesque can be skewed, even while the often blithely disconnected messages on the back contribute to the narrative of how life was really lived back then. (At one point I was going to use collaged postcards for the outline of a novel, but that project never got off the ground.) 

 

 

  

I did a few more collages in the later 1970s. Then a couple of years ago, when the possibility of a show of them arose, I went through shoeboxes of old postcards and found an envelope filled with materials cut out and collected by Joe, which he sent me for one of my birthdays in the early 1990s; each year, in fact, he used to send me either postcards or other paper souvenirs, often with an injunction to use them in collages. I was delighted to make use of some of them, especially in a collage called "Chutes and Ladders," which I've dedicated to Joe.

 

 

  

Looking at these colorful disjecta membra, I can almost feel the warmth of his amused, affectionate gaze, and hear his apologetic stammer as he tactfully pointed out the obvious places where they belonged. So these fragments are really about him, and record the atmosphere of a wonderful friendship that lasted far too short a time.

 

 

  

 

 The Mail in Russia, 2011, collage, digitized print, game board,

 13 x 15.5 ins, Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, copyright John Ashbery 

 

 

 

 

Palette, 2011, collage, digitized print,  12.5 x 17 ins, Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, copyright John Ashbery