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Home , Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly (b. 1928, Lexington, Virginia; d. 2011, ) by Sarah Roberts

In December 1948, Cy Twombly, then an art student at the Boston Museum School (now the School of the Museum of Fine Arts), clipped a page from Life magazine depicting the Lili noir de fumée (Smoky Black Lili) (1946) by Jean Dubuffet. The accompanying article, titled “Dead End Art: A Frenchman’s Mud-and-Rubble Reduce to a Joke,” upbraids Dubuffet for enacting a fake primitivism built on the “highly sophisticated intellect of the civilized man.”1 In other words, the Life critic argues, Dubuffet had made the unforgivable choice to adopt a rough, juvenile style as a cynical insult to cultured society. Dubuffet’s intentional transgression of intellect through ribald subjects and gritty surfaces led that writer and others to question his work’s legitimacy as art. Twombly, who would keep the image of the Dubuffet painting for the rest of his life,2 went on to create a body of work that explores precisely this territory where bodily and base elements of human existence intrude on the “higher grounds” of intellect and culture.

Twombly’s earliest mature paintings date from 1951 to 1953 and combine the defaced, scarred aesthetic of Dubuffet’s surfaces with an energetic edge-to-edge abstraction that was influenced by Abstract Expressionists such as , whose work Twombly particularly admired.3 Rendered in combinations of black, white, and brown, the paintings have thick, crudely worked surfaces marked with scratches and shapes in pencil and crayon that recall a child’s scribbling. Some titles, such as Tiznit (1953), refer to historical figures and ancient cities, including places Twombly had visited while traveling in Europe and North Africa in 1952–53. from the same period combine found wood, twine, nails, and scraps of cloth in forms that evoke rituals, fetishism, and ancient funerary objects. In Untitled (1953), much of the work is covered with a layer of white paint that unifies the disparate materials and gives the a ghostly aura. Though Twombly did not produce three-dimensional work continuously throughout his career, when he did he nearly always whitewashed his sculptures, regardless of when or from what they were made. He later remarked, “white paint is my marble,”4 suggesting that he valued the color for its visual reference to the traditional material of classical and Renaissance sculpture.

In 1959 Twombly moved to Rome and focused his artistic energies entirely on painting. By the end of the decade the dark palette and thick, gritty surfaces of his early 1950s canvases gave way to compositions featuring wriggly letters and strings of numbers mingled with phallic shapes, finger smudges, gloppy splotches, and the occasional disassociated word—kill, detail, floods. He first gained recognition for works such as The Geeks and Academy (both 1955), which conflated , writing, and painting with a mixture of techniques that would come to largely define his body of work. By 1962 he had delved into color and begun using a greater range of textures, creating dramatic paintings such as Second Voyage to Italy (Second Version).5 Smears of fleshy peach and tornadoes of blue paint and crayon cascade from the upper left corner of the canvas to its base, from which red, blue, and gray scribbles kick up at an angle like a splash created when the markings hit the work’s bottom edge. The painting’s title evokes the journey of a classical hero, and in fact, before settling in Rome, Twombly had traveled throughout Italy. He spent much of his life dividing his time between homes there and in his birthplace, Lexington, Virginia. He also traveled extensively in Europe, the Caribbean, North Africa, and the Middle East, but he always identified closely with and drew his most direct inspiration from the landscape and history of the Mediterranean.

In the early 1960s Twombly began creating painting cycles based on episodes in Roman and Greek history and mythology, such as his series dedicated to the Italian summer festival Ferragosto (1961) and the nine-part work Discourse on (1963). Although his paintings had begun to sell reasonably well by this time, the clumsy looking lines, splatters, and glyphs continued to be difficult for many critics to reconcile with the august tradition of history painting implied in the works’ titles. The Commodus paintings were called a “fiasco” when shown at the Gallery in New York City, and Twombly’s work was consistently judged to be pretentious, baroque, and too suggestive of defilement, eroticism, and scatology.6 One writer even decried his paintings as “hesitant but emphatic latrinograms.”7 Many reviews, much like the Dubuffet article Twombly had encountered in Life as a student, characterized Twombly’s work as lacking in skill; the rudimentary, grating qualities of the paintings so dominated critics’ responses that they often failed to even mention the artist’s historical and mythological references.8 Twombly would suffer such slings and arrows for his entire career.9

Perhaps in response to the glut of negative criticism, after 1966 Twombly significantly pared down his visual language. He began using simple webs of inscribed lines in a series of restrained, gray paintings often noted for their superficial resemblance to smudged chalk writing on school blackboards. Twombly’s work is strongly identified with this style of illegible, letter-like marking, which he referred to as “pseudo-writing.”10 In a subset of the gray paintings the chalkboard color scheme is reversed and creamy off-white fields are marked with dark gray lines in various shades, as in the Fisher Collection’s Untitled (1968). The newly streamlined aesthetic of the gray paintings chimed well with the reductive style of Minimal art, which dominated the New York art world in the mid-1960s. When this body of work was shown in fall 1967 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, it met with far greater critical approval than the Commodus paintings had when they debuted there just three years earlier.11

Although the gray paintings lack the direct historical references that had been so dominant in Twombly’s previous work, they retain a sense of history. The bundles of spirals in Untitled (1968) stack up like waves rolling toward the beach, one inexorably following the next. The repetitive, unreadable scrawls suggest monotony and purposelessness, yet there is also a calming inevitability and beauty in the painting’s cyclical energy. In some areas the tangled lines lie half- buried in paint, while elsewhere their crisp contours rise from the work’s surface. The use of erasure, overpainting, and scraping implies the haphazard accumulations of history. Like both the earlier and later paintings that Twombly embedded with direct references to past places and moments, these untitled, fully abstract compositions embody a sense of time that feels at once grand and troubled.

Mythological, literary, and historical narratives surged back into Twombly’s paintings in the mid-1970s and would govern his work for the remainder of his life. In 1976 he also returned to creating sculpture, ending a seventeen-year hiatus from the medium. While the sculptures remained restrained, even when making reference to specific places and figures, the paintings increasingly became passionate, even epic, responses to mythological characters and celebrated works of literature. The cycle Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair (1985) consists of five paintings, each topped with a rectangular pediment inscribed with an ardent quotation drawn from a love poem by Giacomo Leopardi, Jalal al-Din Rumi, or . Lines by Rumi top the second painting in the series: “In drawing and drawing you his pains are delectable; his flames are like water.”12 The inscription repeats below the pediment, nearly subsumed by the lush showers of white paint that descend over the composition. As with the artist’s earliest works, this exalted rumination on desire is grounded by the painting’s lushly savage brushwork and the fact that the text is rendered in an inelegant, nearly illegible hand.

The series Twombly produced late in his life range from the visceral Bacchus works to the more transcendent suites, such as Notes from Salalah, Blooming, and Camino Real. Brushwork and handwriting take on even greater significance in these paintings, in which Twombly revisited compositional elements from his earlier works with refocused attention. Created in 2005, the Bacchus paintings, including Untitled, make tangible the frenetic energy bordering on madness associated with the Roman god of wine, agriculture, and pleasure.13 The series comprises eight vivid canvases of fleshy peach with ferocious red looping swirls that take up the artist’s signature blurring of the boundaries between painting and handwriting, and magnify it on an enormous scale. In contrast to the jittery handwritten lines in earlier works, the carnal cascade of paint in Untitled projects grandeur and athleticism,14 as if segments of a blackboard painting have been cropped and exponentially enlarged. Here, as in the many powerful paintings and sculptures he created throughout his career, Twombly’s vast knowledge of mythology and literature from around the globe, along with his deep engagement with landscape, classical history, and poetry, have given rise to a messy and majestic composition that emphasizes and elevates the fraught dualities of human life and culture.

[Notes] 1. “Dead End Art: A Frenchman’s Mud-and-Rubble Paintings Reduce Modernism to a Joke,” Life, December 20, 1948, 22–23.

2. , Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: The , 1994): 15, 55n41. For a thorough and nuanced consideration of the reception of Dubuffet’s work in the United States, see Aruna D’Souza, “‘I Think Your Work Looks a Lot Like Dubuffet’: Dubuffet and America, 1946–1962,” Oxford Art Journal 20, no. 2 (1997): 61–73.

3. Twombly referred to Pollock’s work as “the height of American painting” in a June 2000 interview with David Sylvester. See David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 179.

4. Twombly quoted in David Sylvester, “The White Originals,” Art in America 88, no. 7 (July 2000): 74.

5. This painting is a smaller cousin to Second Voyage to Italy, which is nearly ten feet in length and is currently in the collection of the Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna, Rome.

6. , “Cy Twombly,” Arts Magazine 38, no. 9 (May–June 1964): 38. See also Lawrence Campbell’s review of the Castelli exhibition: Lawrence Campbell, “Cy Twombly,” Art News 63, no. 3 (May 1964): 13. Even Robert Pincus-Witten’s positive essay about the blackboard paintings, published in 1968, reflects the view that the mid-1960s works are grandiose. See Robert Pincus-Witten, “Learning to Write,” in Cy Twombly: Paintings and , exh. cat. (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Center, 1968), 4–6. Reprinted in Nicola Del Roscio, ed., Writings on Cy Twombly (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2002), 56–60.

7. World War II military slang for rumors spread among soldiers waiting to use camp latrines, the word “latrinogram,” was applied to Twombly’s work by art critic Eduoard Roditi, who undoubtedly selected it more for its scatological connotations than for its suggestion of gossip. See Edouard Roditi, “The Widening Gap,” Arts Magazine 36, no. 4 (January 1962): 55.

8. See, for example, Martica Sawin,“Cy Twombly,” Arts Magazine 31, no. 5 (February 1957): 57. The 1964 Judd and Campbell reviews of the Castelli exhibition (in note 6 above) both neglect to mention the content or even the title of the Discourse on Commodus series.

9. As late as 1994, art historian Kirk Varnedoe felt compelled to defend the artistic merit of Twombly’s work. See Kirk Varnedoe, “Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly,” MoMA Magazine 18 (Autumn–Winter 1994): 18–23. More than ten years later the controversy continued: A 2005 exhibition at the occasioned a heated debate of the matter in the local press. See Patricia C. Johnson, “Is Cy Twombly What’s Wrong with Modern Art?” Chronicle, May 29, 2005, http://www.chron.com/entertainment/article/Is-Cy-Twombly-what-s-wrong-with-modern-art- 1920782.php.

10. Cy Twombly in Nicholas Serota, “History Behind the Thought” (interview, September and December 2007), in Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, exh. cat., ed. Nicholas Serota (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 53.

11. See, for example, Cindy Nemser, “Cy Twombly,” Arts Magazine 42, no. 3 (December 1967– January 1968): 55; and Max Kozloff, “New York,” Artforum 6, no. 4 (December 1967): 52–54.

12. This passage is taken from poem 222 by Jalal al-Din Rumi. See Jalal al-Din Rumi, Mystical Poems of Rumi, ed. Ehsan Yarshater, trans. A.J. Arberry, rev. ed. (1969; combined and corrected with a new foreword by Franklin D. Lewis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009): 229.

13. The inscription “Mainomenos” is a secondary name associated with Bacchus. It refers to the god’s potential for inducing mania or outright violence.

14. James Rondeau has noted the extreme physicality of the related Salalah paintings, suggesting that the traces of Twombly’s body are more present in this series than in any of his earlier work. See James Rondeau, Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works, 2000–2007, exh. cat. (Chicago: , 2009): 34.