Cy Twombly is an artist wreathed in paradoxes. His work seems at once
spontaneous and controlled. The dense textures of his painting can appear
either sensuous or impenetrable, and his sculptures, while they strike one
as bleak and sepulchral, contain elements of playfulness. Even his name
causes confusion; the son of a former Chicago White Sox pitcher, Edwin
Parker Twombly Jr inherited the monicker Cy from his father, who had been
given it as a tribute to another pitcher, Cyclone Young. The artist’s nom de
guerre makes him sound a little like a cartoon creation – a spiral storm of
creativity – but also inaccessible. Now eighty, Twombly is increasingly
spoken of as one of the greatest living painters, but his reputation has
long been moot: based in Italy, he has seemed to American critics a remote
figure, while Europeans have found him hard to categorize, and his
champions, such as Heiner Bastian, have written about him in an obfuscatory
way.
Obfuscation is, in fact, one of Twombly’s defining skills. He relishes arcane
ideas and obscure inscriptions, and layers his paint in dollops of colour.
He is notorious, too, for blurring the distinction between drawing and
painting. Tate Modern’s retrospective, the largest-ever showing of his works
in Britain, highlights what we might think of as his viscous lyricism – a
vision that is poetic but also deliberately clotted. The eighty or so
examples of Twombly’s work gathered here have been carefully selected to
illustrate his different strata of obscurity while also illuminating them.
Arranged chronologically, the exhibition charts Twombly’s development from the
time he spent during the early 1950s at Black Mountain College in North
Carolina, where he studied under Ben Shahn, to the series of paintings known
as Bacchus, which were first exhibited in 2005. Its title, Cycles and
Seasons, suggests the distinct phases of Twombly’s evolution, and points as
well to his penchant for creating groups of works and for repeatedly
exploring images of mortality, violence, sexual arousal, memory and
antiquity.
Twombly’s creativity has tended to be unleashed in bursts. “I work in waves,
because I’m impatient”, he has told this exhibition’s curator, Nicholas
Serota. He rolls from one excitement to the next. The trio of early pieces
with which the exhibition begins is bold: the paintings’ encrusted
black-and-white archaeological forms suggested to the poet Charles Olson,
who was Dean of Black Mountain College, “thrown down glyphs, . . . old
sorrels in sheep dirt in caves, . . . [and] flaking iron”. These are
brooding works – malevolent, awkward, powerful. By contrast, the exhibits
that immediately follow look unfinished and insubstantial. Canvases coated
with oil-based house paint are strewn with semi-literate graffiti, most of
it clumsily incised with a lead pencil. The result is a group of palimpsests
that, for all their energy, feel hesitant. In “Academy”, painted in New York
in the summer of 1955, the word “Fuck” appears three times; the gesture is
obviously rebellious, but the word is half-obscured, its
anti-authoritarianism delivered with a stammer. Most of Twombly’s scratchy
words are barely legible, and more often it is his crossings-out that look
decisive. The impression is of an artist fiddling with ideas. In one of the
essays that appear in the catalogue, Tacita Dean argues that “it is wrong to
relate Twombly’s marks to doodling; they come from mindfulness rather than
mindlessness”. Perhaps a more appropriate term would be “scribbling”, which
suggests the intensity of the act of creation while also capturing its
quickness and seeming haphazardness.
Twombly left America for Italy in 1957, and at this point his idiom changes
sharply. His work becomes more thickly imbricated; first he makes greater
use of wax crayons, and then he introduces curds and burls of oil paint.
With the Ferragosto sequence, produced in 1961, his style grows more
explosive. These Dionysian paintings, claustrophobically sexual, take their
name from the Italians’ traditional late-summer holiday, and they evoke a
sweltering ripeness. The paint seems almost to have been ejaculated on to
the canvas. The palette suggests the butcher’s shop – the marbled reds of
aged steaks, with smears of pink and brown impasto.
The Bolsena pictures of eight years later reflect Twombly’s concern with world
events – in this case the Apollo 11 space mission, which culminated with
Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. The canvases are a tumble of geometric
forms and incorrect calculations. Taken together, the fourteen works – five
of which appear here – look like designs for a surrealist DIY project. The
technical aesthetic continues in “Treatise on the Veil”, the second version
of which is ten metres wide and, in part because it resembles a minimalist
musical score, has attracted comparisons with the work of John Cage. Not
unreasonably, Donald Judd observed of Twombly’s experiment with quiet
massiveness that “there isn’t anything to look at”.
But starting in the 1970s Twombly’s work becomes more personal and melancholy,
as in his calligraphic tribute to Nini Pirandello, the wife of his Roman
gallerist, or Hero and Leandro (1981–4), in which cascades of brushstrokes
suggest the trauma of drowning. Nicholas Cullinan, who has written detailed
explanatory notes for the catalogue, diagnoses a close interest in “water
imagery, mist and . . . liquidity” and points out that “death and aquatic
imagery often seem to go together for Twombly”. This proves the case in the
“Green Paintings” first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1988, which allude
to both Monet and Turner, while Twombly’s Quattro Stagioni, dating from the
early 1990s, conveys an earthbound yet still quite fluid idea of transience.
“Ah, it goes, is lost”, he writes on the panel representing summer; the line
could stand as a summary of his oeuvre.
The exhibition concludes with some of the huge paintings from Bacchus. Their
sanguine loops are ambiguous. Are they exclamations of release or symbols of
introversion? Their energy is impressive, but Twombly does not seem to have
developed a late style – certainly there is none of the fiery eccentricity
and tragic self-knowledge that, thanks to Adorno and Edward Said, have been
canonized as the hallmarks of “lateness”. The Bacchus paintings lack the
depth of the best of Twombly’s earlier work; his description of their
creation (“It was just very physical, it’s a process”) perhaps betrays a
rather cold-blooded approach.
Twombly’s painting has always had a monumental quality. By contrast, his
sculptures, here given a generous amount of space, are modest. (Twombly’s
assessment of them is less so: “There’s a certain perfection in most of
them”.) Found objects are grappled or bandaged together, painted white. One
resembles a primitive skateboard, another a voodoo fetish, a third
(subtitled “Funerary Box for a Lime Green Python”) a prop from a
fortune-teller’s boudoir. The effects call to mind Giacometti, and at other
times Marcel Duchamp: as with the former, we may sense we are in the
presence of something ancient, fragile and potent that has just been dug up,
but there is also a hint of Dadaist mischief.
In offering a context for reading both the sculptures and the paintings,
critics make much of Twombly’s scholarship. But his allusions to Rilke,
Virgil and Mallarmé feel more like namedropping than a substantive
intellectual framework. Archilochus is his “favourite poet” – a telling
choice, since no complete work by Archilochus survives. Actually, Twombly’s
art is intuitive and eclectic rather than rigorously erudite, and the
references to figures such as Homer and T. S. Eliot, though treated with
reverent seriousness by art critics, are no more than felicitous snippets.
The present exhibition’s catalogue provides for Twombly’s work an incredible
assortment of cultural points d’appui. For instance, it suggests, somewhat
impressionistically, that the Quattro Stagioni paintings are informed by
Poussin, Keats, Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of
Melancholy and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar. Credibility is being
stretched – one might just as soon claim the influence of Vivaldi, Brueghel,
Thoreau, James Thomson, Jasper Johns, Tintoretto or the Four Seasons pizza.
Another note claims that Twombly’s use of the phrase “Et in Arcadia Ego” (in
a work not shown here) calls to mind “Theocritus, Virgil, Guercino, Poussin
and Goethe”. In truth, the phrase – which we could also choose to associate
with others Auden, Walter Pater, Aubrey Beardsley or Philip Johnson– has
become a sort of cliché of faux-classicism and pseudo-history, and its
awakening of deep intellectual resonances seems doubtful. A more convincing
declaration of artistic kinship can be found in the painting “Hérodiade”,
where Twombly theatrically proclaims, “I have known the NAKEDNESS of my
scattered dreams”, sounding more than a little like William S. Burroughs or
Allen Ginsberg, although the line is from a translation of Mallarmé.
Roland Barthes, who wrote at some length about Twombly, pronounced that his
art “ne veut rien saisir”. This reluctance to cling on to anything – to a
particular movement or manner – goes some way towards explaining why Twombly
has not achieved the iconic status of Jackson Pollock or his friend Robert
Rauschenberg. When he was in the army in the 1950s, he worked in
cryptography, something for which he was by his own account “a little too
vague”, and this combination of the vague and the cryptic seems useful when
thinking about Twombly and his affection for incoherence, fragments and
squiggles, incomplete recollections and ambivalent spillages. Tate Modern’s
exhibition is a determined attempt to beef up his reputation, and it has
already attracted some handsome compliments. But Twombly remains enigmatic.
Henry Hitchings's The Secret Life of Words: How English became English
was published earlier this year.
Saw this exhibition today. Excellent article, and Hitchings gives the very silly catalogue an entirely justified drubbing in all but one respect. The phrase "et in arcadia ego" is in fact easily discernible in the autumn painting of the first Four Seasons set. Otherwise, spot on, and thanks.
Tim, London, UK