Traces of self
Andrew Lambirth
Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons Tate Modern, until 14 September
This year, Cy Twombly celebrated his 80th birthday. As the leading modern American artist who decamped to Europe and went his own way regardless of developments at home, Twombly was for many years out in the wilderness. But he held his course and now he is the darling of the art glitterati. However, his work is not so easy for the uninitiated and many feel slightly at a loss when confronted by one of his scribbly canvases. Those with closed minds tend to dismiss him, and, as Nicholas Serota in the foreword to the exhibition catalogue (£24.99 in paperback) points out, Twombly’s art is ‘elusive and, for many people, even enthusiasts of contemporary art, unfathomable’. As a major exhibition of his work from the last half-century opens in London (there was a much smaller show at the Serpentine in 2004), I offer some reflections on his difficult but rewarding art.
For a start, it should be noted that this is not a Twombly retrospective so much as a series of potent groupings of themes and interests. The show begins with a powerful trio of black-and-white paintings from the early 1950s, showing Twombly’s origins in Abstract Expressionism and his stylistic affinity to Jackson Pollock. (Actually, it soon emerges that he was closer to de Kooning or Robert Motherwell, who inspired his interest in calligraphy and the automatic drawing techniques of the Surrealists.) In this first room we are also given our first taste of Twombly’s addiction to scribble, his determination to access the state of mind below the conscious. This is much more than a naughty schoolboy scribbling on a blackboard; it’s a deliberate strategy to seek the deeper meanings below the obvious. Twombly’s pencil stutterings and graffiti-like scratchings, some in colour on his signature cream grounds, look like the incisions on ancient tablets or walls.
The first impression is of supreme elegance and delicacy, but then the febrile nature of the mark-making, the anxiety in the attempt to communicate, starts to make an impact on the receptive viewer. But any meaning remains cryptic, and the handwriting might easily be decorative rather than semantic. Words appear or are half-painted out. His pictures often have the informality of a scrawled list or a diagram in a notebook. They manage to fuse ideas and feelings in a rush of high-octane creativity which is like an adrenalin buzz. There’s nothing else quite like a Twombly, partly because his interpretation of the artist’s role is so steeped in a raw mixture of intuition and high culture. In 1957 he settled in Italy which has remained his principal home ever since. The move was symbolic as well as actual and marked a diminishment of his involvement with Abstract Expressionism. Thereafter, Twombly brought the clas sics back into his art — poetry, mythology, history.
By Room 3, the heat is on. The beautiful series of 24 drawings called ‘Poems to the Sea’ has washed over us in Room 2, and various crimes of passion are now making themselves known through imagery which intersperses letters and numbers with orifices and phallic pointed forms — agitation and sometimes aggression are apparently the order of the day in the early 1960s. One especially remarkable painting, ‘Herodiade’, has all the raw energy and freedom that David Hockney was striving for in his early paintings, but without the encumbrance of figuration.
The painting is like an arena for an athlete: a site for the spending of pent-up energy and skill, though the artist has the advantage of leaving a more definite and lasting mark behind — a trace of the self. What should be emphasised is the visceral nature of the work, the smears and gouts of paint, the blood reds and earthy, even excremental browns that start to appear in the hectic savagery of the ‘Ferragosto’ paintings in Room 4, celebrating the Roman festival of fertility and maturity. In some of the most heavily impastoed paintings of his career, Twombly never loses contact with the white (or cream) of the canvas. Here the sexiness is embedded in the paint, however fierce at times the fight to evict it.
Twombly cares deeply about poetry, in particular Keats, Rilke, Pessoa, Eliot, Catullus and Archilochos, whom he calls his favourite poet. ‘I like something to jumpstart me — usually a place or a literary reference or an event that took place, to start me off. To give me a clarity or energy.’ Perhaps surprisingly for a painter so involved with the plastic nature of paint, so drawn to its expressive qualities, he has never hesitated to involve his art with the literary (a term of abuse for supposedly ‘pure’ painters). Here is one of the fundamental contradictions at the heart of Twombly’s work. He seeks access to the epic spirit he finds in classical literature, and mates it with a modern sensibility disposed to imperfection and the fragmentary.
Room 5 features some of the Bolsena paintings, in which one can only marvel at the extraordinary dynamic which holds together what should fly apart, while Room 6 is Twombly’s blackboard answer to Minimalism. Room 7 is one of the best rooms of the show, containing just four lucid canvases from the elegiac series ‘Nini’s Paintings’ (1971). These pictures, made in tribute to the death of a friend, have a smooth serene rhythm like the surge of the deep ocean, in contrast to the manic activity of waves breaking on a rocky shore which seems to characterise so much of Twombly’s earlier work. They seem far out of reach in their scrolling, undulating, looping forms, and to mingle earth, sea and sky in their brown and blue palette on a pale ground.
Next comes a room of sculptures. Twombly sees no distinction between painting and sculpture — it’s the activity of making that counts. He likes the formality of building objects, which he sees as very different from the ‘anything-goes’ paintings. The spirit of Giacometti hovers over Twombly’s sculptures, which are predominantly whitepainted, even when made of bronze. ‘White paint is my marble,’ he says. Revealingly, he describes the Mediterranean, which infuses so many of his subjects and images, as ‘always just white, white, white’.
He says he’s not primarily interested in colour, but ‘in creating intuitive or emotional form’. The instinctual approach is far more important to him than rational structure, yet Twombly has a way of organising his imagery which presents it to its very best advantage. (He has a superb instinct for placement.) Look, for instance, at ‘Hero and Leandro’ (1981–4) in Room 9. This marvellous wave painting unfolds over three canvases and then culminates in a drawing on graph paper, which incorporates a Keats quote. Twombly breaks the rules all the time, or rather makes his own rules, mixing painting and drawing, parodying Tiepolo in his green, algal paintings, or reverentially echoing Poussin in his two cycles of ‘Four Seasons’. The last room contains three bright vermilion paintings from 2005 on the theme of Bacchus: frenetic, deliquescing, yet unmistakeably magisterial. A glorious finale.
It’s not often that I find large exhibitions at the Tate uplifting, but this time I did. The show has been very well installed. There are more than 100 exhibits and for once there didn’t seem too many, nor did these often lacklustre galleries seem wearisome. Twombly brings them alive.
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