After the death of the artist and poet Joe Brainard in 1994, his friend, the poet John Ashbery, recovered an envelope of paper cuttings Brainard had collected for use in collages. The envelope was a posthumous message for Ashbery and reminded him of the collages he had made while spending time with Brainard and the poet James Schuyler in the 1970s. For Ashbery, who died in September 2017, the envelope was a fond reminder of his friend and signaled a return to his work as a collagist.

”Why Famous American Poet John Ashbery Made Hundreds of Collages

In his 1975 masterwork Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the late American poet John Ashbery (1927–2017) meditates on Francesco Parmigianino’s painting of the same name. The emotional intimacy of the Renaissance artist’s sensitive, tender-hearted portrait captured Ashbery’s imagination: “The soul establishes itself. / But how far can it swim out through the eyes / And still return safely to its nest?”

The Childhood Innocence of John Ashbery’s Art

Ashbery’s primary subject matter concerns an alternate world where nothing goes permanently wrong, and where disasters are nothing more than pranks

On December 31, 2017, the New York Times Magazine released its annual “The Lives They Lived” issue dedicated to the “artists, innovators, and thinkers” who had died that year. It featured a photo of John Ashbery’s collage-making desk, complete with paste can, scissors, and piles of ephemera. It might have seemed like an odd homage to the late poet. While there have been numerous critical studies of his poetry, there has been no sustained critical work on Ashbery’s collages. But two concurrent New York exhibitions—“Oh, What Fun! Collages 2015–2017” at Tibor de Nagy Gallery through October 14 and “The Construction of Fiction” at Pratt Manhattan Gallery through November 14—make it clear that Ashbery’s collages were in fact an integral part of his writing practice, shedding light on the nature of his idiosyncratic poetic technique.

John Ashbery, a Poet With Paper and Glue

A new book pairs some of Ashbery’s poems with the sophisticated and playful visual collages he also made over the course of his career.

By  Gregory Cowles    April 6, 2018

Decades ago, Harold Bloom declared that after the death of Wallace Stevens, in 1955, we entered the "age of 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.