Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957-87

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.