New (sur)realisms: the recombinant arts of Jane Hammond and John Ashbery

Abstract

This article traces the relationships between Jane Hammond’s painting and John Ashbery’s poetry, focusing particularly on Hammond’s sixty-two painting series, The John Ashbery Collaboration, and the poet’s concurrent volume, And the Stars Were Shining. Both artists have significant debts to, and at the same time doubts about, Surrealism, and these conflicts and congruencies lead to a Neo-surrealist aesthetic that revises various Surrealist techniques of collage, collection, and recombinatory practice.