The Invisible Avant-Garde

Abstract

This chapter examines John Ashbery’s early work in the context of the French neo-avant-garde of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It argues that Ashbery’s reading of the cubist poet Pierre Reverdy and close proximity to the “New Realism” movement in France (Ashbery’s home for nearly a decade from the mid-1950s to 1965) inform the collage technique of his notorious second collection, The Tennis Court Oath, and the suave lyricism of his third collection, Rivers and Mountains. Ashbery responds to the aestheticized concept of “nature”—the idea that art creates a “second nature”—that underpins neo-avant-garde practices of the “New Realist,” as codified by their chief theorist Pierre Restany. In idealizing poetry that would be “like a natural landscape in a world of painted ones,” Ashbery subscribes to the long-standing avant-garde fantasy of turning art into nature—a fantasy that reaches a new level of sophistication and transparency in his early masterpiece, “The Skaters.”