Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957-87 - Tapa dura

'Praised as a magical genius, cursed as an obscure joker, John Ashbery writes poetry like no one else.' 'The language of [John Ashbery's] books is informed by his roving enthusiasms for particular composers. His tastes are both eclectic and out-of-the-way.' (Michael Glover, 'A blue rinse for the language,' The Independent, 13 November, 1999) 'The careering, centrifugal side of Girls on the Run is one of its most effective tools in creating its special ainbience of good-humoured menace ... Ashbery has made the slush of signification, the realm where words slip, slide, perish and decay, uniquely his own.' (David Wheatley, Review of Girls On The Run, John Ashbery, Times Literary Supplement, 30 June, 2000) 'In his seventies John Ashbery offers a sprightly and energetic alternative. Instead of being sluggish he demands that the self must be even more alert, more vigilant, more attentive to the world around it, not indifferent to and weary of it. Alert, vigilant, attentive ... Wakefulness, the brilliantly evocative title of Ashbery's collection.' (Stephen Matterson, 'The Capacious Art of Poetry,' Poetry Ireland Review 62, 114)

For over three decades John Ashbery has been a leading art critic - or, as he prefers, 'a sort of art critic' - unusual in his ability to speak to general readers as well as specialists. This selection by David Bergman concentrates on work for the 'Herald Tribune', 'Art News', 'Newsweek' and 'New York', written in Paris, New York and elsewhere. It constitutes a chronicle of thirty years of new art, exhibitions, re-assessments and trends. In an age of polemic and partisanship Ashbery remains insistently 'impartial', a man with his eyes wide open. He learns a writer's lessons from the visual arts, detecting the connections between visual and environmental images and words, and how painting has become literary, poetry 'painterly'. David Bergmann has arranged the material in ten sections: Surrealism and Dada; Romantics and Realists; Americans Abroad; Portraits; America Artists; Group Shows; Recurring Figures; Architecture and Environments; Objects; and Poets and painters. He includes reassessments of Ashbery's beloved Bonnard, of Delacroix, Guys, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Redon, Dufy and Parmigianino (among many others) along with vivid evocations of Francis Bacon, Rodrigo Moyhihan, Anne Dunn, Trevor Winkfield, Kitaj, Warhol and others.