BOOKS
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earned him a living while writing poetry, Ashbery's defense of the minor
artist is bound up with a sense of his own modest claims of authority. At
bottom, he realizes he is a poet writing on art, not an art critic proper.
Reported Sightings
is a selection of Ashbery's writings on art pub–
lished during the last thirty years, starting with a weekly column for the
Paris
Herald- Tribune
and leading to assignments as "a sort of art critic,"
for
ArtNews, Newsweek
and
New York.
From the first, Ashbery chose what
suited his taste and wrote in whatever relaxed manner pleased him. With
fewer constraints placed on him than on most journalists, Ashbery,
moreover, was at liberty to follow his own literary impulse, and given
the roots of his own poetry in Symbolism and Surrealism, it is no
wonder he consistently favored painting totally at odds with - and even
oblivious to - the formalist modernity derived from Cubism as espoused
by the art critic Clement Greenberg.
Consequently, if Ashbery's oflhand impressionistic art appreciation
is a pleasurable read that informs us about his esthetic. That is to say, he
prefers language simple in its constituent parts, that is yet intricate and
fantastic in its assembly. It is telling, for instance, that in a column
written for
New York
magazine Ashbery once followed a lead review on
the visionary architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi with one on the
Surrealist poet and painter Henri Michaux, for he considered Piranesi
father of the
malaise
to which Michaux succumbed. Complication is
Ashbery's special delight: he was disappointed that sheets of dungeons
were rare among the architect's many benign landscapes, while he took
pleasure in the ink drawings by Michaux, whose mescaline-induced
pictographic fields breed the kind of space that refuted rationality.
Ashbery's own poetic space often seems as though Michaux were
describing it: "I want my tracings to be the very phrasing of life, but
flexible, but deformable, sinuous."
Structures rife with irrational internal relationships are as character–
istic of Ashbery's poetry as what follows is not: in painting Ashbery
much prefers representational to abstract art. Of his group, not all artists
are, strictly speaking, illustrative in line or syntax, although conservative
draftsmanship is plentiful in Chirico - perhaps his favorite painter:
Fairfield Porter is a Yankee Nabi, while Jennifer Bartlett and Joe
Shannon are illustrators without apology. But he is fully aware that this
antimodernist taste is a weakness that casts doubt on his own claims as a
modernist. In a review of "Fantastic British Book Illustration and
Design" he says, "Illustration is one of the most discredited genres of art.
The trouble is, we all like it." He thus concedes a failing as a writer
about art that could not tempt him as an avant-garde poet.
If
Just Looking
by John Updike is minor, it is not for lack of a ma–
jor talent. This book touches on the art and reputations of the illustrious
