"Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," the Watergate Affair, and Johns's Crosshatch Paintings: Surveillance and Reality-Testing in the Mid-Seventies

Abstract

This essay focuses on a poem, a political event, and a series of paintings of the mid-seventies: John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1974),' which Henry M. Sayre, in The Columbia Literary History of the United States, calls perhaps the most famous poem of the 1970s;2 the Watergate affair-unquestionably the most famous American political episode of the 1970s; and Jasper Johns's crosshatch paintings (see Scent [1973-1974], Figure 1), which use the first abstract motif to dominate paintings by Johns,3 the living American artist who, for the longest period of time, has consistently produced unexpected and critically renowned art.