John Ashbery, 28 Jul 1927 - 3 Sep 2017 Search this
Medium:
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions:
Image: 37.3 x 37.5cm (14 11/16 x 14 3/4")
Sheet: 50.5 x 40.4cm (19 7/8 x 15 7/8")
Mat: 71.1 x 55.9cm (28 x 22")
Type:
Photograph
Date:
1975
Exhibition Label:
Born Rochester, New York
John Ashbery posed for this portrait in 1975, the year he published Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a volume of poetry that went on to claim a trio of prestigious literary awards: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. In the title poem for Self-Portrait, Ashbery offers a long meditation on the act of taking a likeness and on the fragile relationship between the individual and the work of art: “What is beautiful seems so only in relation to a specific / Life, experienced or not, channeled into some form / Steeped in the nostalgia of a collective past.” Over the course of his career, this was his artistic credo, as he sought to vocalize experience through his own ecstatic, long lines of verse. Ashbery, one of America’s most important poets and an heir to Walt Whitman (1819–1892), published more than twenty books of poetry between 1956 and 2015.
