Washington Post Reviews John Ashbery's They Knew What They Wanted: Collages and Poems

The Washington Post's Troy Jollimore reminds us not to overlook John Ashbery's playful collage-work, in a review of John Ashbery: They Knew What They Wanted: Collages and Poems (Rizzoli Electa, 2018). Set alongside a selection of poems, the collages in the book, which "collects work that spans a period of more than half a century," allow us "to see how much they have in common, to understand how each medium came to occupy a natural space in this prolific and influential artist’s creative landscape." More:

To make his collages, Ashbery cut up and combined postcards, comic books, board games, all manner of pictorial ephemera. In large part, his materials consisted of the paper bric-a-brac of childhood: illustrations from early 20th-century children’s books and catalogues of children’s goods, superheroes and sinister villains from comics, diagrams that appear to be drawn from outdated health manuals aimed at youth. These are presented in combination with more adult matters: reproductions of classical paintings, postcards of hilariously unappealing vacation spots, nudes and sexualized images drawn from art, pornography or the contested hinterland that lies between.

In “Diffusion of Knowledge” two agitated cartoon superheroes strike an action pose in front of the Smithsonian Institution. “Late for School” — an early collage dating from 1948 and one of my favorites — consists of two panels suggesting a cartoon narrative. In the first, a young boy about to dash out of the visual frame is being pursued by a large dark bird while two girls, possibly his sisters, look on. In the second frame, the boy has returned, but a metamorphosis has taken place: The boy’s head has been replaced by the head of the bird. The sly, subversive and disturbing wit on display here will feel familiar to readers of Ashbery’s poems.

Read on at the Washington Post.