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Cy Twombly: like nothing else in art



Cy Twombly is the odd man out in the great generation of American artists that also includes Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Born in Lexington Virginia in 1928 and educated in the South, he came north to study art before attending Black Mountain College in North Carolina.


Violent passion: Ferragosto V (1961) contrasts remarkably with Twombly’s restrained early sculptures
Coming of age during the high noon of Abstract Expressionism, his early black-and-white paintings are indebted to the art of Franz Kline and Willem De Kooning, but his sculptures look like nothing else in American art at the time.

After a trip to Morocco in 1952 he began to work with found materials, making crude panpipes by bandaging together pieces of wood with fabric, or an altar decorated with palm leaves mounted on wooden sticks.

All his sculptures are painted white so that, for all their simplicity and lightness of touch, they look as though they had been excavated from an Etruscan grave site, or like fragile offerings found in the tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh. It is one of the many strengths of Tate Modern's survey, Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, that the curator Nicholas Serota has given so much space to the relatively little-known sculptures, for in them Twombly finds a depth of poetic feeling that exists nowhere else in 20th-century art.

Seeing the early sculptures near the beginning of this show, you understand at once why Twombly could not have stayed in the US. In 1957, at the very moment when pop art and minimalism would usher in a golden age of American art, Twombly moved to Rome, where he has remained ever since.

advertisementWith hindsight, it is obvious that it was the only city in the world where an artist so temperamentally attuned to the art and poetry of the ancient world could possibly have lived. Like an earlier American expatriate, Ezra Pound, Twombly needed to feed at the source of classical and Renaissance culture - to immerse himself in European art, yet to stand apart in order to make it modern, make it new. What enabled him to do this, I think, was his American identity - the essence of which is detachment from the past.

In The Italians of 1959 he uses oil paint, pencil and crayon to capture the chaos, gaiety and unfocussed energy of Italian life. As you look at the airy, free-floating composition, your eye moves restlessly from one cluster of visual activity to another, much of it in the form of cartoon-like scrawls of buttocks, breasts and male and female genitals, many of them half-erased or painted over, a palimpsest in which the past, though hidden, is only just beneath the surface.

The picture is like a diary in which Twombly evokes his experience of living in the hedonistic city Fellini had just celebrated in La Dolce Vita. Whenever I look at it I see Vespas roaring past the Pyramid of Cestius, and rude graffiti chalked on the ruins in the Largo Argentina.

There is no illusion in these early paintings - you can see for yourself exactly how the artist made every mark in them, using a brush, a pencil or paint squeezed straight from the tube.

In his homage to Raphael's School of Athens he uses pencil to draw the highly structured composition, which is loosely inspired by the architecture in the Renaissance picture. Then he applies squiggles and smears of white, yellow and pink paint like blasts of helium gas to fill the picture with light and make it airborne. In this way, the usually spontaneous act of drawing in pencil becomes the delicate armature that holds the picture together, while the more ponderous medium of oil-based paint is made to look light and impulsive.

Though his calligraphic and episodic style of painting doesn't fundamentally change in these early paintings, the mood of the pictures varies dramatically. Six paintings executed over the stifling hot summer of 1961 make up the series called the Ferragosto paintings.

In them, fluid smears of purple, pink and magenta gradually turn into impastoed blobs of faecal brown and sanguinary red, which are sometimes slapped onto the canvas with an open palm. These impacted, violent compositions exude heat, frustration and low-down sex. Beauty and filth exist side by side in pictures painted by a man fully in touch with own polymorphous perversity. In them, paint becomes a metaphor for sexual experience, at once violent and tender, exciting, degrading, and shameful.

In a New York art world that was attuned to pop and minimalism in the Sixties, this kind of thing looked too much like a revival of the emotional excess the now passé Abstract Expressionists had wallowed in.

Reacting to this criticism, Twombly reined in his sensuality to create works in which he reduced his paintings to white marks on a grey-black ground, painted with a dragged brush or drawn in white chalk. One of the greatest of these "blackboard" paintings is the vast Treatise on the Veil which was apparently inspired by a photograph by Eadweard Muybridge showing the progress of a veiled bride passing in front of a train. More than anything he had done so far, these works spoke not just of movement but of the evanescence of human experience - what remains when time erases words and images, like film exposed to sunlight.

Close in spirit to the blackboard paintings are Twombly's sublime later sculptures, including a ravishing piece from 1979 made out of the simplest materials to evoke a ghostly barque, which you could imagine carrying Orpheus to the underworld.

Critics have been getting Twombly wrong for 60 years, and I count myself among them. In 1987 he showed a series of dark-green paintings that simply depicted flowing water, like Monet's late waterscapes.

When I saw these at the Venice Biennale I found them corny and disliked their lush romanticism and hated their shaped frames, which resembled painted ceilings in Italian baroque palaces. Seeing them again at the Tate in the context of Twombly's entire career it is clear that are the culmination of a lifetime's interest in depicting water that began with his series of 24 works on paper Poems to the Sea in 1959. What's more, the emotion he'd held in check in the blackboard paintings and sculptures suddenly pours out in floods of intense magentas, forest greens and silvers.

From this point on we can speak of Twombly's late style, which includes the well known Four Seasons at Tate Modern, and culminates in his most recent series, a cycle of eight monumentally scaled paintings collectively entitled Bacchus. Now great loops of bright crimson paint cover an orange ground in a sort of orgy of visual pleasure and sensual release. Throughout his career there has always been a dialogue in Twombly's art between the Apollonian restraint of the sculptures and blackboard pictures and the Dionysian excess you see in the Ferragosto series. These paintings are at once exalted and barbaric, elegant and crude - the summation of a life lived through the senses.