Friends Who Came to See Me: Drawings from John Ashbery's Collection

Around 1965 Jean Hélion drew John Ashbery's face eight times on one sheet of brown paper, and in every view the poet looks away. It was a study for an oil portrait Hélion never finished. Apollo's Langdon Hammer noticed how often Ashbery's friends drew him that way.

The show is about 25 works on paper that Ashbery's husband, David Kermani, gave the Morgan in 2019, most of them gifts from the artists. Eight are portraits of Ashbery, by Hélion, R. B. Kitaj, Larry Rivers, Philip Pearlstein and others, so you study the poet from eight angles and rarely catch his eye. Around them hang still lifes and abstractions, his own Harvard collage, and a 1920s Jan Matulka watercolor that came out of a Lower East Side hardware store window.

The Wall Street Journal called it "a quietly stunning, intimate show." The catch is scale: these are modest drawings, so come for Ashbery's circle rather than big statements. It closes 25 October.