CY TWOMBLY AT HIS BEST

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An important experimental painter of hypnotic scribbles and abstract allusions ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

"Cy Twombly excites art critics in ways that perhaps no other American abstract artist does," observed The Economist in 2004. In part this was because he was one of the few Abstract Expressionists left who was not only alive but also still grappling with canvas. But his work (dubbed "post-Abstract Expressionist") can also be difficult, full of scratches and phalluses, filth and the occasional lofty classical allusion. His mix of subversive vulgarity and grand ideas earned him zealous followers and not a few detractors. Indeed it is this divisiveness—this singular ability to excite—that has helped to secure his place as one of America's most important postwar painters.

But little of this attention seemed to affect the man, who was always something of a loner. He had long traded America for Rome, where he could paint in peace and read his Rilke, far away from the noise of the art world. This was where he died on Tuesday, aged 83.

On the eve of the painter's 80th birthday and just before his 2008 retrospective at the Tate, Philip Hensher, a British novelist and art critic, traced the arc of Twombly's career for Intelligent Life magazine. We have republished the tribute in full below. Twombly's work can also be seen at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in a show that juxtaposes his paintings with those of Nicolas Poussin.

1961: "The Italians" (above)
Cy Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928, the son of a baseball pitcher. From this out-of-the-way spot, events took him to the sources of modernism. In 1951-52 he studied at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina with some of the central modernist refugees from Nazism, and met big figures such as Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. Twombly moved to Italy in 1959, and ever since he threw his first sculptures into the Tiber as a propitiatory act, he has had an almost magical connection to it, while working at an angle to both the European and American traditions. “The Italians” is a noisy and chaotic evocation of city life. Italians have been drawing penises on walls since as far back as Pompeii, and Twombly’s painting calls up both contemporary scribbles and the nameless ancient artists whose rude commentary survives along with the walls of ancient Rome.

1962: "Leda and the Swan" (above)
By the early 1960s Twombly had an international reputation, sealed by a show at the 1964 Venice Biennale. His deep involvement with the grandeur of classical myth could take a surprising turn. “Leda and the Swan” has a hint of the Looney Tunes about it, plunging us into the uproar of the impossible copulation with a thicket of scribbles and flying feathers.

 
1968: "Synopsis of a Battle" (above)
The image of chalk on a blackboard drew Twombly, as it drew a very different artist, Joseph Beuys. For Beuys, the blackboard was the image of authority and power. For Twombly, it is the moment where knowledge and fantasy meet. His white-on-black paintings have the air of pedagogy let off the leash. They don’t convey anything; their meaning and even their mood is not easily readable. What is there is a characteristic pleasure in the recorded gestures of the body, and a love of academic imagery running riot. Twombly’s work is the recovered dreams of a history professor, and he starts from the loose, hypnotic blackboard scribbles which are made before thinking is embarked upon, or perhaps after.

1984: "Hero and Leander 1" (above)
Twombly had worked as an army cryptographer, and some of his paintings are puzzles to be solved. “Hero and Leander 1” is a welter of dark greens, reds and blacks. This great Hokusai wave is a tsunami of passion, not just a natural phenomenon. What the rest of the triptych records might be the period after some great cataclysm. The violence passes, leaving only a dark mutter of paint sinking like treacle, and finally a huge rippling surface. These are not recordings of violence, but meditations on its aftermath and its creative power. 

1985: "Wilder Shores of Love" (above)
Writing on paintings is like voice-over in films: violently frowned upon by the purists. It’s an important part of Twombly’s manner. Here, the pictorial aspect is an abstract allusion to one of the classical forms of landscape painting. The huge scrawled title, though, leads us right up  to something cryptic and private, a message sent to a very few people. The more the painter writes, the less we know how to read.
 
1993-94: "The Four Seasons 1-4" (below)

The four seasons are one of the key subjects of Western art. They form a satisfying whole, and in the past would have supplied a rich patron with a  beautiful and showy cabinet of treasures. A four-part work can surround the owner and transform the year into a  four-sided room. Twombly’s “Four Seasons” reduce the conventions to their basics. In “Winter” the treatment is nothing more than a sooty black scrub, tinged with a very dirty-looking yellow. Yellow runs through these seasons like a principle, but each painting handles it in a different way. By “Summer” it has taken charge, and the blaze is that of a Roman summer.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Twombly took an increasing interest in flower painting. The lovely bouquet-like structures which frame “Spring” have grace as well as force; the explosions of red and yellow falling down the canvas are expressions of pure spirit, and not representations of reality. There is an unexpected realism to the cycle, most evident in the dankness of “Winter” and the light-obscured fury of “Summer”. The triumph of Twombly’s career is his ability to take historical subjects from their cabinets and reinvigorate them with new, outdoor life and energy. The cycle of the seasons in nature has no beginning and no end, but Twombly’s sequence does something perverse in beginning with autumn. His “Autumn” is a burst of final energy, and not what we usually mean by “autumnal”. It reinforces the sense, apparent throughout his career, that he is a painter towards the end of painting’s history.

Picture credit: AP; © Cy Twombly

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