Date: 29-06-2008
Owning Institution: Tate Modern
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2012  
Subject: 20th Century    

It is the early 1950s and the young Cy Twombly has just got back to New York from a trip to North Africa with his friend Robert Rauschenberg. Abstract Expressionism is the new American style of the moment – the vivid drips and spills of Jackson Pollock, the glimmering fields of Mark Rothko. But at twenty-three years old, Twombly is just as fascinated by the delicate biomorphic figures painted by the Armenian emigre Arshile Gorky, and by the new European art that he goes to see every day in the art galleries on Manhattan’s West 57^th Street: the pinched, attenuated figures of Giacommetti; the ad hoc sculptures of Picasso, formed from such things as the handlebars of a bicycle; the dream-like scrawls of Paul Klee; the rough-and-ready figurative canvases, inspired by cave paintings, created by Jean Dubuffet and his partners in the Parisian movement known as art brut.

Twombly’s own art of the time reflects the eclecticism of his interests. Adopting the monochrome colour schemes favoured by a number of the Abstract Expressionists, he paints canvases that resemble urban graffiti, like dark scribble on dirty cream walls. He gives them titles such as Quarzazat and Tiznit, names borrowed from the North African towns that he has so recently visited.  He also makes small, ramshackle sculptures like fragile totems or votive objects, using pieces of wood tied together with twine. Untitled of 1953 is a pan pipe made from tiny spars of whitewashed wood bound together with bandages, into which nails have been hammered at variously wonky angles. It is a thing of frail beauty that seems to contain, within it, the knowingly hopeless dream of being able to re-enchant the world – a fool’s instrument left out in the hope that Apollo might return to play upon it. Untitled (Funerary Box for a Lime Green Python) consists of two upright palm leaves, mummified in a thick coating of white paint, jutting upwards from a narrow, rickety white box. Memories of modern Morocco and dreams of ancient Egypt merge with impressions of New York. An urban American sensibility seems to have been shaped by a European sense of deep history, and the pathos of its passing.

“Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons” is the principal exhibition of the summer at Tate Modern. The show marks Twombly’s eightieth birthday, and is the first large-scale display of his painting and sculpture to have been mounted in this country for more than fifteen years. It is a retrospective, although its uneven emphases reflect the sporadic energies and inspirations of the nomadic Twombly himself. 1951 is taken as a starting point, with the artist’s early work represented in particular strength and depth. The works created in the immediate aftermath of the painter’s travels in North Africa are succeeded by three pictures painted in 1955, just after he had been conscripted into the American army and trained as a cryptographer. The experience seems to have deepened his interest in cryptic symbols and codes, to judge by the paintings themselves, which are entitled Criticism, Academy and The Geeks. Each consists of a nervous flurry of scribbles on a ground of off-white oil-based house paint.

While working as a cryptographer, Twombly had taken to making drawings in a pitch dark room, somewhat in the line of  the Surrealists’ so-called “automatic” drawings. The drawing in his three paintings of 1955 looks as though it might have been produced by a similar method. Lines are stabbed, traced, scratched and scrawled. Some layers have been half-erased, as in a palimpsest. Twombly makes no attempt, as the Surrealist Andre Masson would have done, to tease out the shapes of his own most inchoate scribbles – to find figurative possibilities in the forms of his own untutored gesture, to evolve the involuntary mark into a psychosexually charged dreamscape. Instead he just leaves the lines alone, suggesting a form of dumb language, a mockery of communication to which there is no key. The pictures are sullen, deadpan: messages without meaning carried on an idiot wind.

Within two years, Twombly had left America for Italy, where he was eventually to settle for good, although his career would continue to be marked by regular journeys, odysseys to Italian islands, to the archaeological sites areound Naples, and other places, undertaken in search of ideas and inspiration. Leaving the epicentre of American modern art, he first moved to a studio in Rome, centre of the ancient world. The first pictures that he produced there remain stubbornly idiosyncratic. There are more of his characteristic off-white grounds, once again enlivened by slurries of graffiti-like scribbling, but this time legible words surface into view – words like “Olympia” and “Arcadia”, which also serve as titles to the paintings – suggesting the fantasy of reconnection to a mythical past. They look like pictures that Jackson Pollock might have painted under the influence of narcolepsy. They amount to a form of anaemic Abstract Expressionism, which at one level they may indeed have been meant to parody.

Twombly has often painted on a large scale but his work is by and large opposed to the blue-collar, macho monumentality that marked so much Abstract Expressionist painting (and later American art). In his youth he was not an artist with much sense of – or yearning for – the sublime. His early work is often self-consciously regressive, and frequently evokes the smudges and smearings of infantile protest. This is particularly true of a number of the works in his exuberant, brightly colourful Ferragosto series, which might almost have been painted by an overexcited class of primary-school children. The thickly clotted smudges and splodges of colour do not resemble paint so much as the entire contents of an Italian gelateria, hurled on to the wall that is the canvas.

Despite their knowing incoherence, many of Twombly’s early Italian pictures have a strong sense of place. There is a shimmer on their creamy surfaces, like the heat-haze of Rome in July or August. They evoke the dense layers of Rome’s own history, the painter’s sense of it as a place where past and present violently collide. Scribbled phrases, sudden interjections, bits and pieces of drawing that conjure up all kinds of disparate images – a heart, a phallus, an ice-cream cone – all these things jostle for precedence in Twombly’s The Italians, of 1961. It is a picture possessed by the raucous energy of the streets, a modern pandemonium made visible.

The School of Athens, painted at the same time, makes a joke out of the contrast between Twombly’s new-found demotic language and the statuesque monumentality of Roman High Renaissance painting – Twombly takes the basic compositional formulae of Raphael’s most celebrated fresco, in the Vatican loggie, and treats it as an armature on which to hang all manner of scabrous scribblings. Seen in some depth, as Tate Modern’s retrospective allows, the artist’s work of the 1960s evokes all kinds of comparisons, some expected, others a little surprising. Dubuffet is confirmed as a significant influence. But there is a strong affinity too with the early work of David Hockney, in particular Hockney’s pictures of 1961-3, which evoke the scribbles in public lavatories – their graffitied forms, their blurted, confessional character, their raw energy and feeling.

Twombly emerges from this show as an artist who has responded, with some regularity, to the vagaries of aesthetic fashion. Despite his reputation as the unswerving follower of his own temperament, he has often bent to the prevailing winds of taste – especially at those moments when he has lost his way. In 1970, when Minimalism held sway, Twombly suddenly reinvented his own manner of painting to produce a brutal, minimally inflected grey wall of a picture entitled Treatise of the Veil. Valiant attempts are made, in the catalogue that accompanies the show, to suspend this inert object in a reviving bath of rhetoric; but it is a disappointing, portentous thing that cannot be saved by explication.

In the early 1980s, when there was a widespread revival of gestural, figurative painting, imbued with mythical overtones – especially in Europe, where the development was trumpeted as a “new spirit” in painting – Twombly’s own references to myth take flight and multiply. This does not necessarily signal a diminution of his powers, but it marks a decisive shift away from the cool, acerbic art of his earlier years. He becomes a rather baroque painter, almost a set dresser designing his pictures as if they were stage flats for an operatic performance of whichever myth he might have in mind. The results are theatrical but by no means all bad. The Hero and Leander series of 1984 is one of the most successful and lyrically affecting of his works in this strain, a watery liebestod effected in paint imbued itself with the implacable rhythms of a smothering wave. It is a work in four parts, its last panel consisting of no more than a piece of graph paper on which the artist’s spidery writing proclaims, of Leander, that “he’s gone; up bubbles his watery breath”.

Twombly’s later painting, the work of about the last twenty years, has been truncated to the extent that it occupies barely three galleries – perhaps reflecting curator Nicholas Serota’s recognition of its general thinness. The work in question tends to bear out the artist’s remark, in an interview given in the mid 1990s, that he thinks of himself as “a Romantic symbolist”. But his romanticism often verges on sentimentality, and his painting itself flirts with a fatal, lazy  imprecision. The so-called Green Paintings of 1988 resemble nothing so much as botched Monets (even though two of them are painted in the curlicued format of a Tiepolo ceiling decoration). The two series of Four Seasons paintings of 1993, ostensibly meditations on the flux and transience of nature, are bouquets of smudge and smear that push the language of art informel and, to a degree, that of Abstract Expressionism, further towards the style of chocolate box decoration than might have been thought possible. The last series of all in the show, a sequence of enormous daubs entitled Bacchus, paintred in 2005, seems meant to summon up some image of bloody Dionysian revelry. Huge wristy loops of drippy bright red paint spread across canvases of vast extent, but the effect is more abject than impressive: an exercise in vapid melodrama. Over the years Twombly has certainly created some grand, fascinating, subtle works of art, but his oeuvre as a whole seems disappointingly inconsistent. It comes across, ultimately, as the art of a somewhat directionless dilettante.