Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Late for School

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John Ashbery
1927-2017

Late for School

1948
12 1/2 x 8 inches (31.8 x 20.3 cm)
Paper collage.
2019.150

Gift of David K. Kermani, from the Collection of John Ashbery.

Notes
Throughout his life, the poet John Ashbery showed a deep engagement with the visual arts. Less well known than his poems are the collages he created, beginning in the 1940s, under the influence of Max Ernst and other Surrealist antecedents. Late for School is one of the earliest, made while Ashbery was a student at Harvard. Combining illustrations from nineteenth-century German children's books, he imagined the unsettling story of a boy who leaves for school one morning and returns home with his head changed into that of a bird, to the dismay of his little sisters. The collage aesthetic, with its surprising juxtapositions, offered an important model of composition for Ashbery's poetry.
Artist
Classification
Century Drawings