jon
ird
Indeterminacy and (Dis)order in the
work of Cy Twombly
Jon Bird
atUniversityofWashingtononOctober27,2014http://oaj.oxfordjournals.org/Downloadedfrom
atUniversityofWashingtononOctober27,2014http://oaj.oxfordjournals.org/Downloadedfrom
Indeterminacy and (Dis)order in the work
of Cy Twombly
Jon Bird
And let poetry be, let it dwell and remain, by the echo that painting can make of it . . .
(Hubert Damisch1
)
Prologue
My interest in the work of Cy Twombly and in how we might understand its
particular appeal and significance – what critical terms and descriptions
would be adequate to account for his practice – originated in an
argument. Some years ago in New York, possibly the mid-1990s, I was in
the initial stages of planning a large exhibition of the paintings of Leon
Golub, a project which eventually became his retrospective.2
I had, on
occasion, visited shows with Golub – an activity that could be rewarding
and exasperating in equal measure, depending upon his interest or respect
for the work we were viewing. In this particular instance, the latter was
the case as we found ourselves at the Gagosian gallery and the display of a
single, very large painting by Twombly. (I think, in retrospect, it must
have been ‘Untitled’ 1994.) This was at a time when Golub was very
conscious of his own historical place in (or, rather, exclusion from) the
narratives of post-war American art, and the operations of a gallery like
Gagosian, and the success and celebration of an artist such as Twombly,
were not at all to his taste. We discussed, argued and agreed to disagree
about Twombly and I felt frustrated in that I had been unable to answer his
criticisms with convincing counter-arguments. I cannot now remember
the precise terms of our debate, or even the general nature of his critique,
but I do recall thinking that some of Golub’s paintings shared certain
formal and textual characteristics with Twombly, and that there were
certainly thematic interests in common. Golub’s early works, particularly
the classically derived Heads and Figures of the 1950s painted in oil and
enamel depicting Prophets, Kings, Shamans, Priests and Philosophers
emerging from brutally agitated surfaces (often these were painted on
board), using a technique verging on the awkward and edging towards the
grotesque, share an affinity with the scratches, scribbles and erasures of
Twombly. (Indeed, in a catalogue essay for Golub’s 1957 exhibition in
Chicago, the critic Lawrence Alloway concluded that ‘Golub’s images are
battered and corroded and, as we can infer from their original state of
wholeness, we read paint as signs of interference’, an assertion that could
equally apply to Twombly’s works of the same period.)3
However, a
stronger connection comes from their shared interest in Antiquity,
although where Golub found a tragic masculinity in the struggling giants
depicted in the high reliefs of the Great Altar of Zeus at Pergamon,
Twombly’s classicism is directed more towards the sensuous image and its
hedonistic qualities. It is only in Golub’s late works, particularly the
drawings that occupied his final years, that Bacchanalian revelry asserts its
presence.
1. Hubert Damisch ‘As to the Title: Painting
Under Cancellation’, in Cy Twombly exhibition
catalogue (Galerie Karsten Gere: Koln, Paris,
Milan 1997), p. 96.
2. Leon Golub: Paintings 1950–2000, opened at
the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, July
2000.
3. Lawrence Alloway, catalogue essay for Leon
Golub, paintings from 1956–57 (Alan Frumkin
Gallery: Chicago, 1957).
# The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.3 2007 484–504
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcm024
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So began a process of thinking about and looking at Twombly – another
key encounter being the display of the Lepanto series of works at the 49th
Venice Biennale in 2001. Finally, the exhibition ‘Fifty Years of Works on
Paper’ at the Serpentine Gallery in April/May 2004, and the symposium I
was invited to co-organise, provided me with the opportunity to reflect
upon Twombly’s art and the critical writings that have addressed his
practice over the years, and even to follow Roland Barthes’s example to
try and replicate a drawing as a way of seeing.
Part 1
A few drops of ink, a sheet of paper as material for the accumulation and co-ordination of
moments and acts, are all that is required. (Paul Vale´ry4
)
Before everything else, there happen . . . some pencil strokes, oils, paper, canvas. (Roland
Barthes5
)
Both Barthes and Vale´ ry make it seem so simple. Encouraged to take up paper
and ink after looking at some Twombly drawings (he even gives us the date
and time of day – ‘still dark’ on 31 December 1978, and ‘still raining’),
Barthes soon discovers, however, that, in the actual practice of
mark-making it is a far from straightforward endeavour to ‘go about
drawing a line that isn’t stupid’.6
The critic turns artist in the forelorn
attempt to comprehend what his critical tools have failed to provide – an
interpretation adequate to its object: ‘I realize that I shall never be able to
reproduce this background . . . I don’t even know how its done’.7
Despite
this lament over his failure at (re)production, he had earlier asserted that
‘Twombly’s art consists in making us see things’. But what is there to be
seen is not a question of subject matter, always an elusive quest with
Twombly anyway (‘look not for the Italians’ warns Barthes, despite that
painting’s nomination), but resides in the materia prima of painting: the
trace of graphite across a surface, the presence of colour – ‘this touch of
pink, this brown smudge’, of the responsibility in any reading to also pay
close attention to the signifier.8
Some of this can be described as a
practice which, through repetition and the body’s habituations, becomes
accessible to the inquiring eye. Twombly, Barthes asserts, employs a
working method in the service of ‘dirtying’ the virgin surface, be it paper
or canvas. For this artist, dirt is not the abjected substance once described
by Mary Douglas as ‘matter out of place’, but, rather, a truth of painting.
There is an extensive literature on Twombly and an artistic career that now
spans over half a century, an archive that, given his range of intellectual and
artistic interests, includes contributions from artists, writers, poets,
philosophers, critics and art historians: Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara,
Robert Motherwell, Marcelin Pleynet, Roland Barthes, Hubert Damisch,
Katharina Schmidt, Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, Stephen Bann and
Simon Schama in the catalogue for the Serpentine exhibition and, most
recently, a critical monograph by Richard Leeman. Charles Olson – the
poet and Rector of Black Mountain College from 1951 to 1957, wrote one
of the first texts on Twombly and discerned, even at this formative stage,
characteristics of his practice that recur in much of the subsequent critical
writing: ‘honor and elegance are here once more present in the act of
paint’. Add to this O’Hara’s impressionistic account of Twombly’s first
4. Paul Vale´ ry, Degas, Manet, Morisot,
trans. D. Paul (Princeton University Press:
Princeton, NJ, 1960).
5. Roland Barthes, ‘The Wisdom of Art’
(1979), in Nicola Del Roscio (ed.), Writings on
Cy Twombly (Art Data: Munich, 2002),
pp. 102–13.
6. Roland Barthes, ‘Non Multa Sed Multum’
(1976), in Nicola Del Roscio, Writings on Cy
Twombly, pp. 88–101.
7. Barthes, ‘The Wisdom of Art’, p. 105.
8. Barthes, ‘The Wisdom of Art’, p. 112.
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major exhibition of wall-sized, graffiti-covered paintings at the Stable Gallery,
New York in 1955: ‘A bird seems to have passed through the impasto with
cream-coloured screams and bitter claw-marks’, and we have examples of a
significant tendency in Twombly appreciation, an emphasis upon sensation
and sensibility that Barthes, somewhat later, did nothing to negate and
Schama takes to rhetorical extremes.9
Barthes’s essay ‘The Wisdom of Art’, commissioned by the Whitney
Museum of American Art for the catalogue for the artist’s mid-career
retrospective, 1979, favours poetic metaphor over historical or biographical
detail. Given Barthes’s consistent attentiveness to the semiotics of the
image it is perhaps surprising that he so rarely directed his critical gaze
towards painting, although the choice of Twombly for not one, but two
essays, does clearly make a kind of sense. (‘Non Multa Sed Multum’ was
written for Vol. 6 of the Catalogue Raisonne´ of Works on Paper, 1976.) In
both essays Barthes is extremely selective in the works he cites (mostly
from the early 1960s) and extremely generous in extrapolating from details
of facture and figure to an ‘ecriture’ of style and expression founded on
gesture, event and the body. In ‘Non Multa Sed Multum’, Twombly’s
drawings and paintings are interpreted as a scene of writing: ‘Twombly
tells us that the essence of writing is neither form nor usage but simply
gesture – the gesture that produces it by allowing it to happen’. This
imaginative gesture – ‘something on the order of the supplement to an
act’ – is then likened to the Japanese term for a Zen state, ‘satori’, an
interruption to the sequence of cause and effect that awakens the subject to
‘a radical negativity’: ‘I think of Twombly’s “graphisms” as so many little
satoris’.10
‘The Wisdom of Art’ opens with Barthes drawing attention to the primary
signifiers of pictorial meaning – the materia prima (the alchemical reference
connotes the transformational aspect of the creative process): just as the
universal access to language is codified into literary style in the
particularity of sentence structure and composition, so the visual artist
works with the materials of art: ‘Before everything else, there happen
some pencil strokes, oils, paper, canvas’. Despite the will to form, for
Barthes it is Twombly’s emphasis upon the materiality of his art – a
‘being there’ – that precedes and succeeds any secondary representational
property. This is, then, an art of embodiment, of a corporeal presence
transmitted via instrument (brush, pencil) and matter (paint, graphite) to
surface: enunciatory gestures that can be categorised as ‘scratching’,
‘smudging’ and ‘smearing’, although each category includes a complex and
diverse variety of exemplars such as direction, weight, rapidity of
movement – all the possible motor-reflex operations contributing to the
nature of a mark-making process that can best be described as rhythmic.
Barthes, however, suggests that there is a generic quality to each sub-set
of gestures: ‘we would say that the essence of things is not in their weight
but in their lightness’.11
Here, perhaps, his insistence upon Twombly’s as
an art of poesis and sensation leads him to ignore aspects that imply a
more analytic or systematic aesthetic.
Twombly’s use of proper names and forms of writing raises for Barthes the
central question of representation. The viewer follows the interpretive
suggestion offered by a name – ‘The Italians’, ‘The Sahara’, ‘Adonais’ –
and is frustrated. Looking, we find nothing except ‘the painting itself’; a
transformation has been performed and the viewer ‘has an intimation of
another logic’, the logic of painting. The relevant paragraph can still frame
9. Frank O’Hara, ‘Cy Twombly’ (1955) in
Nicola Del Roscio, Writings on Cy Twombly,
p. 34.
10. Barthes. ‘Non Multa Sed Multum’, p. 106.
11. Barthes, ‘The Wisdom of Art’.
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any current discussion of contemporary painting. ‘Although abstract painting
has been in the making for a long time . . . each new artist endlessly debates
the question again: in art, linguistic problems are never really settled and
language always turns back to reflect on itself. It is therefore never naive . . .
to ask oneself before a painting what it represents . . . It is all the more
legitimate to tackle again and again the question of meaning, that it is
precisely this question which prevents the universality of painting. If so
many people have the impression of “not understanding” a painting, it is
because they want meaning and this painting does not give them any’.12
Letters, words, names and phrases appear in Twombly’s paintings and
drawings from the mid-1950s and the graphic dimension of text is a
constant – the gestural aspect of writing as an identifiable linguistic sign
emerges painfully, but also sensuously, from the chaos of scribble.
In the genealogy of expressive figuration, Twombly’s art, despite the debt
to Pollock, describes hand/eye coordination; even across the expanded field
of his largest canvases what is suggested is, in Hubert Damisch’s term,
‘restrained action’, calligraphy rather than choreography. What the viewer
beholds are the encoded memories of the body’s experiences and
potentiality interwoven with, and figured through indexical traces of actual
movement. Even in the early works, apparently random or semi-chaotic
passages co-exist alongside order and regulation – a Hericlitean flux that
simultaneously registers the body’s pulsions and the mind’s cognition.
Thus four of the ‘Bolsena’ works (1969) look like something and nothing,
suggesting notations made in the process of some form of assemblage,
maybe a carpenter’s measurements or an architect’s jottings: rectangles,
numbers, vague forms, words, all apparently made hurriedly and with
an eye to something else (Fig. 1). The kind of semi-intentional,
semi-abstracted doodles made whilst attention is focused elsewhere –
making a phone call, a meeting, a situation of slight boredom where the
mind wanders from the immediate present allowing other thoughts,
images, the texture of reality to impress upon consciousness and leave
their trace. We tend to overlook the everydayness and matter-of-factness
of the work of the work of art – all the devices, tricks, deferrals and
delays that either combat boredom or pass for reverie. It is worth noting
that Twombly initially experimented with Surrealist techniques of ‘psychic
automatism’ (Breton) when he produced the Augusta drawings at night, in
the darkness, while completing his military service at Camp Gordon,
Georgia and Leeman also connects this procedure with Olson’s equating of
poetic verse with the breath of life.13
There is much to be said on boredom and failure – or, the avoidance of the
former and fear of the latter in the making of art. This is other than the
artist’s intention of engaging the viewer’s interest, rather of the interest of
the work for the artist. The aim of not making boring art arises from the
desire to avoid being bored, and yet many of the processes and procedures
of art-making are boring: laborious, repetitive, wearisome and, yet,
necessary. Perhaps this is more to do with creating a (mental) space where
nothing much happens in order that something unexpected might occur,
an essential stillness through which the peripheral, the overlooked, the
liminal, might inform the imagining consciousness. Or, pace Freud, the
function that unconscious intentions perform in the aesthetic imagination,
the ‘symptomatic acts’ described in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life that
give rise to neurosis can, in another register, signify the deliberate errors
that maintain a tension between control, risk and uncertainty that is the
12. Barthes, ‘The Wisdom of Art’, p. 148.
13. Richard Leeman, Cy Twombly, trans. Mary
Whittall (Thames & Hudson: London, 2005),
p. 31.
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most productive state. (There is another history of Modernism to be written
on the dialectic of boredom and failure, from Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ to
John Cage’s Composition 40
3300
supposedly composed as a direct response
to viewing Twombly’s and Rauschenberg’s exhibition at Eleanor Ward’s
Stable Gallery in 1953, to Warhol’s ‘Brillo Boxes’, Nauman’s studio
videos, etc.) Many of Twombly’s drawings suggest this, which has also led
to associations with the mark-making of children, which is characterised
by an uneven attention span and a sense of the contingent, and to the art
of Paul Klee. Two early drawings, ‘Untitled’ (1954) suggest a feverish
activity as the hand appears intent upon simply obliterating the blank space
of the paper ground, the lines tracing an agitatedly active movement, a
repetitive circling and up-and-down scratching of pencil and crayon. What
reveals an aesthetic intention, the coordination of hand and eye, is the
variety of mark, of intensities across the surface, of the suggestion of an
order and direction motivating the expressive dynamic. (Barthes expresses
this thus: ‘In short we don’t see anything, except perhaps a kind of
intelligibility’.14
)
Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life enumerates the events that
commonly interrupt the flow of daily life and experience, the slips of the
tongue and the pen, the misreadings, bungled actions and errors that
reveal the unconscious at work. In a section exemplifying his observation
that ‘nothing in the mind is arbitrary or undetermined’, he considers the
use of numbers, apparently selected at random, but which, on closer
examinaton, are revealed as symptomatic of a determination from the
unconscious. From these and similar cases, Freud arrives at the conclusion
that ‘the mechanism of parapraxes and chance actions’ corresponds to the
structural elements in the analysis of dreams and dream-work: ‘In both cases
we find condensations and compromise-formations (contaminations)’.15
If
this seems like a detour in our analysis, my defence is that it is a way of
addressing the frequent observation of writers on Twombly of the play of
14. Barthes, ‘Non Multa Sed Multum’.
15. Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life, trans. Alan Tyson, The Pelican
Freud Library, vol. 5, 1976, pp. 303–42.
Penguin Books, London.
Fig. 1. Cy Twombly, ‘Bolsena’, 1969, pencil and colour pencil on paper, 70 Â 100 cm. # Cy
Twombly.
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intention and chance, deliberation and accident, mark and erasure, that
characterise his work, and the assumption that something more than idle
doodling, scribbling or pattern-making is going on. Many drawings and
paintings from the late 1960s and early 1970s abound with numerical
jottings, corrections, repetitions, some connoting measurement and
distance, others proportion or duration, a spatio-temporal (anti)logic that
opens the field of reference to the time of myth and the space of the
cosmos. Thus the four panels forming ‘Veil of Orpheus’ (1968) offer a
linear chart of immesurable distance and temporal flow, interrupted by
arbitrary intervals marked by a word: ‘stop’, ‘time’, ‘infinite’. Similarly,
the later drawing ‘Study for the Treatise on the Veil’ (1970) combines
legible and indeterminate inscriptions above and below a broken line
bisecting the paper (Fig. 2). The word ‘before’ is written to the left,
‘time’ in the centre and ‘after’ to the right; the number ‘40000’ occurs at
the top of the collaged paper rectangle, and the date and location of
the drawing – ‘Capri, July 70’ – are scrawled beneath the drawing’s title.
Also legible are the words ‘green duration’, ‘wall’ and ‘veil’; the rest,
however, is inference or erasure. (In The Judgement of Paris, Damisch’s
enquiry into the philosophical and psychoanalytical discourse on the
relation of the beautiful to visual pleasure, he develops a theory of
‘analytic iconology’ to account for matters of representability, linking
‘art-work’ to ‘dream-work’, recognising that what connects them are
questions of transformation: ‘The rule of structural thought . . . applies
here as it does elsewhere: what counts is less what a work – whether of
art or philosophy – represents or manifests as what it transforms.’16
)
Damisch, in a catalogue essay for Twombly’s exhibition at the Galerie
Karsten Greve, Cologne (1997) reinterprets Barthes’s ‘prima materia’ as
an ‘instinctual archeology’ – an exploration of the relationship of painting
to poetry whose visual tropes are ‘cancellation, blurring and erasure’, a
visual rhetoric figuring ‘iteration, repetition and overlay’. Paying close
attention (unlike Barthes) to the specifics of pictorial meaning, Damisch
16. Hubert Damisch, The Judgement of Paris,
trans. John Goodman (University of Chicago:
Chicago, IL, 1996).
Fig. 2. Cy Twombly, ‘Study for the Treatise on the Veil’, 1970, wax crayon, pencil, colour pencil,
scotch tape and collage on paper, 70 Â 100 cm. # Cy Twombly.
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observed the reccurence of operations that suggest a kind of geometry;
of lines becoming planes, measurements, and a marginalia of numbers,
scales, coordinates: ‘the digits (or ciphers) sometimes follow each other in
simple numerations or in enigmatic progressions; they scatter, line up,
superimpose, and are occasionally joined by the signs for addition,
multiplication, or subtraction and function as the residual witnesses of an
operation or demonstration whose meaning escapes us.’17
Furthermore,
the act of erasure carried a certain ontologial weight in the early 1950s as
a process of both correction and negation given the accretion of meanings
around the gestural mark as the signifier of authenticity, spontaneity and
‘freedom’. The critic Robert Rosenblum linked Twombly’s incessant
erasures to the iconic work of Rauschenberg when, in an act of ‘patricidal
exorcism’, he meticulously and laboriously rubbed out a drawing given to
him by de Kooning. (‘Erased de Kooning Drawing’,1953.18
) However,
Rauschenberg’s anti-gestural performative action makes more sense in the
context of his ‘White Paintings’ of 1951, and ‘Black Paintings’ of 1953,
the influence of John Cage via his time at Black Mountain College, and the
temporary rupture in his close relationship with Twombly. Rauschenberg
had painted ‘Should Have Come First’ in 1951 shortly after meeting and
becoming involved with Twombly, an event coincidental with his wife’s
pregnancy. Charles Olson commented on the emotional intensity of the
relationship between the two artists in a letter to fellow poet, Robert
Creely: ‘I had noticed, a few nights ago, Twombly’s concern for this boy . . .
that sort of attention, and warning one takes as feminine, guarding the
beloved’.19
Rauschenberg subsequently overpainted ‘Should Have Come
First’ following his return to America from Europe in 1953, transforming
it into one of the Black Paintings.
Part 2
Twombly’s interest in Paul Klee is frequently alluded to in the critical
literature. Indeed, his North Africa drawings parallel both the orientalist
recordings made by Klee during the brief period he spent in Tunisia in
1916, and Dubuffet’s sketches of the Sahara made a few years earlier. (In a
letter sent to his friend, Leslie Cheek, from Tangier, Twombly enthused
‘I can’t begin to say how Africa has affected my work (for the better
I hope)’.20
) Twombly was also following a long line of artist-travellers to
North Africa and was certainly aware of the sketchbooks of Delacroix.
However, there is another connection through the trace of the Bauhaus at
Black Mountain College, where Twombly attended in 1951, and the
influential role of Klee’s Padagogisches Skizzenbuch, the second of the
fourteen Bauhaus Books edited by Walter Gropius and Lazlo Maholy-Nagy
and first published in 1925. The exercises described and illustrated by Klee
in Pedagogical Sketchbook (published in an English translation in 1944)
became a cornerstone of art education across Europe and North America
and Twombly must have been familiar with Klee’s instruction to take ‘An
active line for a walk’, particularly as the tutor in drawing was that veteran
of the Bauhaus, Josef Albers. (Although, after sixteen years, Albers left
Black Mountain for Yale in 1950, his influence persisted during the period
of Twombly’s attendance.) Pedagogical Sketchbook is divided into four
sections: ‘Proportionate Line and Structure’, ‘Dimension and Balance’,
‘Gravitational Curve’ and ‘Kinetic and Chromatic Energy’. Along with the
Jena Lecture (January 1928), later published as On Modern Art (1945), Klee
17. Damisch ‘As to the Title’, p. 86.
18. Robert Rosenblum, ‘Cy Twombly’,
catalogue essay for Art of Our Time: The Saatchi
Collection, vol. 2 (Lund Humphries: London and
New York, 1984).
19. Jonathan Katz, ‘Lovers and Divers:
Interpictorial Dialog in the Work of Jasper
Johns and Robert Rauschenberg’, lecture for
Dartmouth College, 1998. www.yale.edu/
lesbiangay/Pages/Academic/JK-vrs.html
20. Kirk Varnedoe, ‘Inscriptions in Arcadia’,
in Cy Twombly: A Retrospective (Museum of
Modern Art: New York, 1994), p. 56.
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outlined the creative imagination’s processes as a series of problem-solving
activities, from simple to complex, adding elements to art’s prima materia,
from line and tone to colour, form and content. In his Introduction to
Pedagogical Sketchbook, Maholy-Nagy described it as ‘the abstract of Paul
Klee’s inductive vision’, with each section advancing a paradigm case of
‘the path from the particular to the universal’.21
As an interpretive model,
Twombly’s pictorialism seems more accessible via Klee than Barthes.
What sense can we make of Barthes’s assertion that ‘It is in a smear that
we find the truth of redness; it is in a wobbly line that we find the truth
of pencil’ other than Klee’s observation that chromatic intensity is revealed
in tonal variation, and a ‘wobbly line’ is perhaps better understood as ‘an
active line . . . circumscribing itself’? In fact, the opening instructions of
Pedagogical Sketchbook could serve as directions for reproducing Twombly’s
graphic meanderings: ‘An active line on a walk, moving freely, without
goal . . . A walk for a walk’s sake . . . The same line accompanied by
complementary forms . . . Two secondary lines, moving around an
imaginary line’.22
In a short statement published in the journal Esperienza
Moderna, Twombly himself indicated that line functioned in his work to
articulate and organize experience and sensation: ‘Most painting defines the
image. It is at this point that I break with the more general process of
painting. Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate
history. It does not illustrate, it is the sensation of its own realization.
The imagery is one of private indulgences, rather than an abstract totality
of visual perception’.23
If Barthes poetics of line, gesture and event map one section of the
landscape of commentary on Twombly, another frequent approach
privileges the signified, tracing classical sources and their respective epic
mythological narratives derived from his titles and pictorial inscriptions.
Katherina Schmidt, who has had a long-term working relationship with the
artist as both curator and critical interpreter, best represents this
response, uncovering the literary sources and references derived from
the paintings and drawings. In one such essay written for the catalogue
to the Menil Collection: ‘The Way to Arcadia: Thoughts on Myth and
Image in Cy Twombly’s Painting’, Schmidt meticulously documents his
iconographic and iconological schemata, from Greek and Roman
archetypes to their subsequent transformations in the literature and art of
the western tradition up to the present. From The Iliad and The Odyssey to
Poussin’s ‘Empire of Flora’, and from the poetry of Keats and Dryden to
Mallarme´ and the Moderns, she describes a process of ‘circling Twombly’s
pictures with our interpretations, following lives, thinking about obscure
symbols, spelled names, and becoming involved in stories.’24
Schmidt’s
caution over too literal interpretations based upon tracing a classical or
literary source implied in the verb ‘circling’ is also emphasised by Richard
Leeman who suggests that ‘evocation’ and poesis are the primary values to
be inferred from words and phrases, thus shifting the interpretive register
from definition ‘into the realm of metaphor and connotation’.25
Then there are the biographical and art historical accounts on Twombly,
frequently selecting what are considered the significant moments,
conjunctures and connections marking his productive life. Generally these
narratives start with his early life in Lexington, Virginia and initial art
school training at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
followed by a period in New York at the Art Students League (he probably
saw the Gorky retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art at
21. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ‘Introduction’, in Paul
Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook,
trans. S. Moholy-Nagy (Faber & Faber: London,
1944).
22. Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook,
pp. 16–17.
23. Cy Twombly, ‘Signs’, Esperienza Moderna,
no. 2, 1957. Quoted in Linda Norden, ‘What
Painting Can Contain’, exhibition catalogue, Cy
Twombly: A Gathering of Time, Six Paintings and a
Sculpture (Gagosian Gallery: New York, 2003),
p. 10.
24. Katherina Schmidt, ‘The Way to Arcadia:
Thoughts on Myth and Image in Cy Twombly’s
Painting’, catalogue essay, The Menil Collection
(Houston Fine Art Press: Houston, Texas,
1990), p. 16.
25. Leeman, Cy Twombly, p. 96.
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this time). It was here that he met Rauschenberg, who soon after persuaded
Twombly to enrol at Black Mountain College. Much of this literature places
particular emphasis upon the formative period of the early 1950s when, in
Marcelin Pleynet’s words, ‘the New York scene started to move and
install itself in an avant-garde college located in the hills of North
Carolina’.26
Under the direction of the poet and critic Charles Olson,
many of the major figures of the New York literary and artistic post-War
movements passed through, either as tutors, students or visitors. During
the summer of 1951, when Twombly was in residence, the painting
department was co-taught by Motherwell, Franz Kline and Ben Shahn,
music had David Tudor and John Cage, Merce Cunningham led the dance
workshops, and Olson took classes in literature, poetry and criticism.
A shared experience across all art forms at this time was a re-engagement,
via the notion of ‘event’ and ‘gesture’, with the Surrealists’ experiments
with ‘automatic writing’ and ‘psychic automatism’ which, in Twombly’s
case, resulted in a ‘field’ of inscription determined by the performative
encounter of chance and causality, graffito and nomination.
Pleynet’s insistence on the formative influence of Black Mountain – ‘if you
want to understand what was happening in the United States among the
generation of artists and intellectuals who were twenty years old in the
1950s, it is necessary to understand what was being established, and how,
in that little North Carolina college’ – derives from his belief that this
marked a decisive shift between the immediate post-war generation of
American artists and those whose aesthetic language was generated from
Abstract Expressionism’s mediation of the Surrealists’ experiments in
automatic writing.27
Central to these younger artists’ concerns was a
subjective relation to the world inscribed in the relationship of painting to
writing, of gesture not (only) as the trace of the body imprinted as a
semi-automatic state of being, but as the interplay of sensation and
sensibility mapping a pictorial field of possibilities. What, for Pleynet, is
specific to Twombly’s figuring of the body/world relation is the ensemble
of factors framing the context for enactment (‘cultural, ideological’), a
context through which automatism was received and understood, and ‘a
body of work based on the unique moment of a personal syncretism’.28
Black Mountain College exerted a considerable influence on all who
attended the various studio programmes and workshops, partly through the
formidable tutorial teams assembled by Olson. (To give an indication
of the ambition and inclusiveness of the programme, Pleynet lists all those
invited to participate during 1950, although not all were able to attend
that year: ‘William Carlos Williams, Lionel Trilling, Paul Goodman,
Alfred Kazin, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Mark Tobey,
Robert Gwathmey, Jackson Pollock, Clement Greenberg, Adolph
Gottlieb, Yves Tanguy, Mark Rothko, Karl Knaths, Loren McIver,
Theodoros Stamos, Ben Shahn and I. Rice Pereira’.)29
Founded in 1933
and based upon the philosophy of John Dewey as an experiment in
communal living and educational innovation in the creative arts, the
college was temporary home for many of the American Avant Garde. The
year that Twombly attended coincided with a collaboration between Ben
Shahn and Olson, an exchange of work on the theme of Maya ‘glyphs’
(from hieroglyph), with additional contributions from the dancer
Katherine Litz and the musician Lou Harrison. For Olson, this project
represented the paradigm-case of Black Mountain’s cross-media,
trans-cultural investigations. Following this, Shahn’s painting underwent a
26. Marcelin Pleynet, ‘Designs in Letters,
Numbers and Words or Painting by Ear’ (1976),
in Nicola Del Roscio, Writings on Cy Twombly,
pp. 74–87.
27. Pleynet, ‘Designs in Letters’, p. 77.
28. Pleynet, ‘Designs in Letters’, p. 78.
29. Pleynet, ‘Designs in Letters’, p. 77.
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dramatic stylistic shift to what he described as his ‘palimpsest’ images.
Although retaining the figure as a central and organising motif, his work
became increasingly gestural and a document of the corrections, alterations
and revisions that traced the process of image formation. A later account
of this period by his wife, Bernada Shahn, could also stand as a description
of Twombly’s drawing process: ‘He had found in the markings and tracings
that were left upon the picture . . . as he might wash out and rework an
image, an effective pictorial element. He called such an accumulation of
traces a “palimpsest”; he had, at earlier times, expunged such marks, but
now he studied their qualities, preserving the effect as part of the
completed work’.30
Following Pleynet’s account, Daniel Belgrad argues that creative
experimentation across the American Avant Garde during the immediate
postwar period exhibited the ‘defining characteristic . . . (of) spontaneous
composition in conjunction with unfinished “open” forms’.31
Added to
this was a shared interest in Native American symbolisation and the
construction of a visual or ‘ideographic’ language – a visual semiotics
rooted in the material referent but rich in connotational possibilities, an
approach exemplified in the pages of the journal Iconograph, published in
New York between 1946 and October 1948. Olson’s particular investment
in the ‘glyph’ was partly inspired by his studies into Mayan culture and
also his discovery, in 1945, of the earlier writings of Ernest Fenellosa on
Chinese ideograms, all of which informed his teaching at Black Mountain.
‘For Olson, the lesson of the Maya glyphs was to point poetry toward a
philological project that involved recovering (and in the process,
disclosing) the material histories of word-concepts’.32
The paintings Twombly made during his stay at Black Mountain were
exhibited at his first solo show at the Seven Stairs Gallery in Chicago,
organised by Aaron Siskind and Noah Goldowsky. Motherwell, in
his statement for the catalogue, described Twombly’s process as both
‘orgiastic’ and ‘rational, often surprisingly simply symmetrical, and
invariably harmonious’. For Motherwell, Twombly’s aesthetic heritage
derived from Picasso, ‘the massive, decadent surface . . . of Dubuffet, the
deliberate abandon and sensuality of the . . . New York School of abstract
expressionists’.33
Although not specifically mentioned in Motherwell’s
essay, it was Pollock’s interpretation of Andre´ Breton’s notion of a new
expressivity derived from automatism (which, for Pollock, manifested in
the dripped line as trace and location of the subject) that enabled his
personal language of figure/ground relationships: a layering of graphite and
coloured line and maculation that were cancelled almost at the moment of
their emergence, a process which, with accompanying poetic inscriptions,
lent an aura of historical accretion at both the material and the mythic
levels of signification. Damisch argues that what Twombly took from
Pollock was ‘a spreading out, a distribution or dissemination over the
canvas or paper of residual traces, presented as betokening the stages of a
process which cannot strictly be called painting, but which still lends the
picture . . . its meaning as such’, whereas, for Rosalind Krauss, it was his
reading of Pollock’s marks as ‘fundamentally violent’ that initiated his
break from a form of gestural abstraction that indexically traced an artistic
identity.34
For Krauss and others (e.g. Benjamin Buchloh), this connected
Twombly’s practice to that of the graffitist for whom ‘absence’ rather than
‘presence’ is the defining characteristic: a surface is despoiled in an act of
violent, and frequently sexual, ruination.35
Twombly’s awareness of the
30. Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity:
Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America
(Chicago University Press: Chicago, IL, 1998),
pp. 34–5.
31. Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity, p. 39.
32. Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity, p. 91.
33. Quoted in Varnedoe, ‘Inscriptions in
Arcadia’. The Chicago show was closely
followed by Twombly’s first New York
exhibition at the Kootz Gallery – ‘New Talent:
Gaudy and Twombly’, December 1951.
34. Damisch, ‘As To The Title’, p. 94.
35. See Rosalind Krauss ‘Cy’s Up’, in Artforum,
September 1994, p. 71.
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graffitied and eroded surfaces of buildings, from the Ancients to the
sub-cultural outpourings of Italian youth, is evident in both the form and
content of word and image – of marks which are, in their repetitive
intensity score (and scar) the pictorial ground, and in the style of the
lettering, suggestive of a furtive, hurried, slightly inept guiding hand; of a
performative act interrupted midway, trailing off into formless scribble.36
In The Optical Unconscious, Krauss reads Twombly’s drawings of the mid-late
1950s as an extension of the violent gestures initiated by Pollock, but
directed through a material semiosis – the graffitiist’s enactment of a
performative linguistics: ‘the desecration of a field . . . through the act of
dirtying, smearing, scarring, jabbing’.37
For Krauss, Twombly destroys
‘good form’, a corporeal attack (‘so many wounds and scorings’), an echo
of Bataille’s commentary in the short-lived Surrealist journal, Documents, on
L’Art Primitif, Georges Luquet’s text on the developmental schema of our
formal visual language from random marks to accurate representation.
Bataille argued against this logic of order and for a ‘destructive drive as the
motor of the creative impulse – the “informe”’.38
This, then, was the cultural arena in which Twombly was developing his
own pictorial language and against which, like Johns and Rauschenberg, he
could react, preferring in the 1950s a sparse, linear and textual
vocabulary, blurring the distinction between figure and ground and which
was in stark contrast to the hegemony of gestural abstraction. In addition,
what separated his aesthetic formation from his peers was his decision to
reverse the narrative of American modernism and embrace a European
classical heritage and Mediterranean culture including a particular quality
of luminescence. However, it is important to recognise that he took with
him an aesthetic vocabulary predisposed towards a critical engagement
with, rather than a celebration of, the tradition that combined Apollonian
and Dionysian tendencies; a structure and geometry but also the
carnivalesque and the ambivalence of identity: ‘Plato’ (1974) and ‘Apollo’
(1975) accompanied by ‘Pan’ (1975) and ‘Proteus’ (1984) (Figs 3 and 4).
Leeman refers to Twombly’s ‘complex weaving of mythological, historical,
artistic and literary references’ which include ‘Keats and Mallarme´ , but
also Rilke, Vale´ ry and Pessoa . . . Greek mythology, Plato, Homer and
Theocritus and, thence, Spenser and Marlowe and, thence, the
romanticism of Keats and Shelley’.39
Finally, Stephen Bann and William
Allen argue that, despite Twombly’s embrace of a ‘symbolic community
whose historical roots reach very far back’, he has, like Jannis Kounellis,
always leaned towards Byzantine culture whose otherness constantly puts
into crisis a purely Western imaginary.40
Part 3
In point of fact I further believe that the fundamental cases of pictorial metaphor are those
where a corporeal thing is metaphorized: the painting becomes a metaphor for the body, or
(at any rate) for some part of the body, or for something assimilated to the body. (Richard
Wollheim41
)
A rather different consideration of Twombly comes as a by-product of the
critical reworking of the history of Conceptual Art, particularly the
argument for a counter-narrative to Conceptualism’s linguistic turn as a
process of analytical reductionism. Thus Benjamin Buchloh links Twombly
36. Brassai’s black and white photographs,
dating from 1930, of graffiti scrawled over and
incised into walls in Paris and Saint-Ouen, were
exhibited at MoMA, New York in 1956. These
were certainly seen by Twombly and he may
have been aware of them from earlier
publications, for example in the Surrealist
journal Minataure. See Brassai Graffiti
(Flammarion: Paris, 1993).
Fig. 3. Cy Twombly, ‘Plato’, 1974, pencil,
colour pencil, wax crayon, scotch tape and
collage on paper, 100 Â 70 cm. # Cy
Twombly.
Fig. 4. Cy Twombly, ‘Proteus’, 1984, acrylic
paint, colour pencil, pencil on paper,
76 Â 56 cm. # Cy Twombly.
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with Nancy Spero as artists interested in reconnecting the Avant Garde’s
investment in the literary, via the influence of Robert Motherwell, in their
own practice, leading to an exploration of ‘the status of painterly
representation as a linguistic signifier’.42
In addition, Buchloh suggests that
both artists were not only investigating the significance of writing and
cultural myth as pictorial constructs, but were also ‘reinvesting the
painterly mark-making process with a profoundly different type of
corporeality’. Similarly, but more prosaically, Yve-Alain Bois summarises
Twombly’s pictorial investment in the corporeal body as canvases ‘replete
with sexual . . . imagery; phalluses, ass cheeks, vaginas, breasts are the
floating inhabitants of Twombly’s maelstrom . . . But the newcomer is the
blob, the turd-like handfull of paint applied to the canvas and
unexpectedly remaining there – quite literally excremental when it is
brown’43
(Fig. 5).
The comments of Buchloh and Bois, representative as they are of the
critical attention paid to this aspect of Twombly’s art, take my thoughts to
Richard Wollheim’s anti-structuralist (that is, against a semiotic
interpretation of the image) study Painting As An Art. Across the various
chapters and examples, Wollheim advances the case for ‘a psychological
account of pictorial meaning’, which, in the particular context of pictorial
metaphor, relies upon the viewer’s affective experience of the work,
experience which, moreover, is a product of the body as sensory vehicle
and receptacle. Comprising the ‘affect’ are a range of physical and
psychological factors – ‘emotions, sentiments, phantasies’.44
Furthermore,
Wollheim distinguishes pictorial metaphor from its linguistic counterpart
through foregrounding ‘the picture as a whole’ as the first term in the
37. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious
(MIT Press: Cambridge, MA and London,
1993). p. 259.
38. See the discussion of this in Hal Foster,
Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin
H.D. Buchloh (eds), Art Since 1900: Modernism,
Antimodernism, Postmodernism (Thames & Hudson:
London, 2004), and Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind
Krauss (eds), Formless: A Users Guide (Zone
Books: New York, 1997).
39. Leeman, Cy Twombly, p. 97. See also my
review of Leeman in The Art Newspaper, vol. XV,
no. 166, February 2006.
40. Stephen Bann and William Allen, ‘Jannis
Kounellis and the Question of High Art’, in
S. Bann and W. Allen (eds), Interpreting
Contemporary Art (Reaktion Books: London,
1991), pp. 57–8.
41. Richard Wollheim, Painting As An Art
(Thames & Hudson, London, 1987), p. 305.
42. Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Spero’s Other
Traditions’, in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture
Industry: Essays on European and American Art from
1955 to 1975 (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA,
2000), pp. 429–42.
43. Yve-Alain Bois, ‘A Certain Infantile Thing’,
in Eva Keller and Regula Malin (eds), Audible
Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros (Scalo: Zurich,
2002), pp. 71–2.
44. Richard Wollheim. ‘Painting, Metaphor,
Body: Titian, Bellini, De Kooning, etc.’, in
Painting As An Art.
Fig. 5. Cy Twombly, ‘Untitled’, 1961–3, pencil, colour pencil, ballpoint on paper, 50 Â 71 cm.
# Cy Twombly.
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metaphoric relation. Whereas linguistic metaphor pairs unlike things in
order for the one to illuminate the other, in the case of painting, what is
illuminated is ‘corporeality’ (as defined by the OED, ‘the quality of being,
or having, a material body’). How is this quality of the corporeal
generated, and how might we read Twombly’s work through the metaphor
of the body?
The body is present, pictorially, as (1) the represented body; (2) a sense or
intimation of the body, that is, how the painting encourages the viewer to
engage ideas and/or phantasies of the body, and (3) as the inscribed
surface, for instance, the texture (or skin) of the painted surface. As Bois
observes, body parts feature consistently and repetitively in Twombly’s
drawing and painting from the 1950s to the present; secondly, line and
colour frequently allude to, or initiate thoughts and recollections of the
body in repose and action, or as vulnerable – as acted-upon, as movement,
gesture, flesh and blood so that we interpret a mark as trace or residue of
an action or event (remember Barthes’s description of the varieties of
mark-making, ‘scratching, smudging, smearing’). Colour plays its part in
referencing the body – its interiority connoted in the redness of blood
and entrails (the art historical trace of Rembrandt and Soutine), while the
pinkness of flesh spreads across surfaces and coalesces into pools of colour
with mammarian or penile suggestiveness.45
Finally, the ‘blob’ that Bois
references (and how can this be specified – when does point become line,
line become plane, or blob become smear/smudge?) functions both
metaphorically – as ‘shit’, dirt – and metonymically – as brute matter
that arrests the flow of signification, as if Twombly wanted to take us back
to art’s prima materia. (The blob is more than just a chromatic point; for it
to function actively it needs extension – Twombly’s colour often starts
life as an extended point.) This raises a more general issue of
representability and interpretation. I want to suggest that there is a
constant interplay between recognisability and a blockage or failure of
signification, as if the visual clues, including textual trace elements and
titles, lead in multiple and contradictory directions. Similarly, Leeman
identifies a number of repeated male and female sexual pictographs,
including hearts, horizontal Figure 8s, dots and crosses, rough oval or
spheroid scribbles (breasts, vaginas, anuses, etc.), and many varieties of
penile form, again emphasising that any reading of sexual signifiers has to
be within the context of that work’s overall pictorial meaning.46
The
undecideability that accompanies Twombly’s visual language is perhaps best
expressed in a passage by Meyer Schapiro in a key work on abstraction and
non-communicability. ‘Painting’, he writes, ‘by becomming abstract and
giving up its representational function, has achieved a state in which
communication seems to be deliberately prevented. And in many works
where natural form is still preserved the object and the mode of
representation resist an easy decipherment, and the effects of these works are
unpredictable’ (my italics).47
Returning to Wollheim, of the paintings he
examines to support his argument – Titian, Giovanni Bellini, Thomas
Jones, Willem de Kooning – it is his analysis of the post-war American
Abstract Expressionist de Kooning that most proximates to Twombly in the
treatment of the corporeal body, or, more precisely, of the painting as a
container for bodily sensations. (Twombly remembers, on being asked by
Ben Shahn at Black Mountain College which painters he liked, replying ‘de
Kooning and Ingres’).48
Wollheim’s de Kooning resonates with the pulsions
and drives of infantile life: ‘sucking, touching, biting, excreting, retaining,
45. See also Leeman, Cy Twombly, pp. 129–41.
46. Leeman, Cy Twombly, pp. 55–65.
47. Meyer Schapiro, ‘Recent Abstract
Painting’, in Modern Art 19th and 20th Centuries:
Selected Papers (Braziller: New York, 1978),
pp. 222–3.
48. Varnedoe, ‘Inscriptions in Arcadia’, p. 55,
f. 30.
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smearing, sniffing, swallowing, gurgling, stroking, wetting.’49
Clearly this list
of the oral, anal and olfactory coincides with the figural characteristics
attributed to Twombly by Barthes, Bois and Leeman. However, despite
wanting to use some of the same terms for the metamorphising of the body
for de Kooning and Twombly (excreting, smearing, stroking, wetting) there
are significant material and compositional divergences. Wollheim describes
de Kooning’s canvases as ‘enormous shallow saucers’ in which the
articulations and ‘lusciousness’ of the paint ‘slops around, but is kept back
by the rim’, whereas Twombly has a much greater emphasis upon line, is
sparser in his distribution of inscribed areas to spatial zones, and is less
concerned with the ‘drama between the mark and the edge’.50
In this
respect his ‘primitivism’ is of a different order: not the trace of the subject’s
transition from the imaginary to the symbolic, Twombly’s metaphorics of
the body are placed in the register of the symbolic/real. (There are many
petits morts in works by Twombly: a line, smear or trace expires, suddenly,
in the midst of frenetic activity; a looped line arabesquing diagonally across
space collapses in upon itself, or fades into obscurity through overpainting;
pricks are flacid in post-coital repose, breasts sag, buttocks slump, cunts
yawn and bite.)
There is one more significant feature in common, particularly in the larger
paintings by Twombly (de Kooning mostly worked on large canvases) worth
commenting upon; the relation between overall size and passages of detail
which funtion to create a scene of intimacy, even across the largest,
wall-scale works. Wollheim suggests that de Kooning achieved this through
a process of layering and the different drying times for his paint mixes
which, through spotting and cracking, render a surface which ‘simulates
the palpitating, mottled breast of a very small bird’.51
(Here perhaps it is
worth recalling O’Hara’s likening of Twombly’s line to the traces of a
bird’s passage ‘through the impasto’.) Twombly’s intimacy comes from the
line or mark that repeats upon itself – looping, spiralling, crossed out and
overlaid, and the semi-legible writing and numerical notation which draw
the viewer closer either into frustrated acts of visual interrogation, or,
upon successful decipherment, reconfigure the image as a distant echo of
an episode from classical mythology.
Part 4
in aesthetic experience the emotions function cognitively. (Nelson Goodman52
)
Part of the allure of Twombly’s art to which Barthes succumbed is the
apparent simplicity of mark and line, figure and ground, an invitation to
(re)discover a childish delight in the application of pencil and paint to a
flat surface, a further stage in the processes of symbolisation after fort/da:
of making a mark on the world. However, as Barthes quickly realised,
drawing in the shadow of Twombly is a lure for the unwary, whatever
hand/eye skills might already be in place. This is also a self-realisation after
my own unsuccessful attempts to reproduce a Twombly drawing from
1983, ‘Anabasis’, which appears, at least in reproduction (and in the
memory of an actual viewing at the Serpentine gallery) deceptively
straightforward (Fig. 6). ‘Anabasis’ combines Twombly’s familiar format of
image and text, a title (‘Anabasis’), a proper name (Xenophon), the
artist’s signature and a date (C T Nov 20 83), placed above an image: a
49. Wollheim, Painting As An Art, p. 348.
50. Wollheim, Painting As An Art, p. 349.
51. Wollheim, Painting As An Art, p. 350.
52. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An
Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Oxford
University Press: Oxford, 1969), p. 248.
Fig. 6. Cy Twombly, ‘Anabasis’, 1983, oil
pastel, oil, pencil on paper, 100 Â 70 cm.
# Cy Twombly.
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roughly drawn circle divided into sections, partly obscured by horizontal
over-scribbling, a smeared area of indigo pigment and a blob of crimson.
I had determined to try and mimic this drawing as accurately as possible to
access something of Twombly’s working procedure whilst also paying
attention to the drawing as a rebus: to follow both line and referent.
So, to make a beginning – which I decide is the circular form. This is pure
supposition, maybe Twombly starts from a name, the ideas and emotions
evoked by a fable, an intimation of the antique, a genus loci – Bassano,
where he has a house and studio. (In fact, he has said as much – that a
poetic phrase or word can initiate or influence the origination and
development of a work.53
) But as this is primarily an exercise in
translation – copying (not a search for ontology) – my circle is drawn,
crudely and somewhat compressed and straightened on one side as if
flattening itself against an impending collision with the paper’s edge. Even
this basic act confirms a truth about Twombly – that his is an art of
movement and the body, implied and actual. One side of the circle is
more pronounced than the other, increasing pressure on the oil stick
makes a stronger, thicker and bolder line – the left circumference is only
faintly described and goes slightly squidgy at the bottom. (Another
realisation: the descriptive terms I am searching for to account for what
is formally apparent constantly evoke a sense of the corporeal, the body’s
pulsions and location within the world.) I am fairly confident that this is
how this image originated as the line describing the mis-shapen circle is
overlaid at points by the other elements of the drawing. Next the circle
is bisected by four rapidly drawn lines – again the greater pressure, and
thus intensity, falls towards the right side, and each line alters direction
slightly as it passes through the centrepoint of the circle – creating eight
divisions, although, as the circle is not really circular but lumpy and
enlarged on one side, the sections are unequal in size. Now my drawing
shifts from the register of geometry to the domain of representation: it
begins to look like ‘something’, recognisable proporties that suggest a
wheel with eight spokes.
Twombly has had a long-term and recurrent interest in the chariot form of
classical antiquity and the iconography of processions and battles; of ritual,
honour and death. This can traced to Giacometti, who introduced the
chariot form into modern art (e.g. ‘The Chariot’, 1950) and continued
with the American sculptor, David Smith, for whom the chariot was a
recurrent motif. Reduced to its simplest formal expression – a disc and
triangle with their mythic associations of accelaration and attack – the
chariot appears in Twombly’s art from the late 1970s, initially as a small
cart-like processional vehicle bearing a painted blue tree (‘Untitled’,
Rome 1977), then in the archetypal castings, possibly derived from a
fourth century Etruscan chariot, ‘Untitled’ (Rome, 1979) and ‘Untitled’
(Bassano in Teverina, 1979), and in the sculpture that prefigures the
‘Anabasis’ drawing (1980). The chariot as the symbolic representation of
conflict is also a key element, depicted as a stylised triangular shape, in
the ten-part cycle of paintings, ‘Fifty Days at Ilium’ (1977–8).
The process of reproducing ‘Anabasis’ gets more complicated as the image
of the (chariot) wheel is cancelled, partly obliterated by a repetitive
effacement made through irregular horizontal sweeps of oil stick of a
darker tone, probably raw umber (comparitively, it appears close enough),
my arm and hand moving from left to right (this does appear to be the
dominant directional flow in Twombly’s art), back and forth across the
53. See Leeman, Cy Twombly, p. 96.
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lower half of the wheel. (This also confirms that the systematic action
originates from the shoulder.) Trying to repeat the direction and rhythmn
of Twombly’s line which is not exactly frenzied, nor overly controlled,
more a determined or excited gesture as the line redoubles on itself, not
entirely obscuring the underlying drawing, but serving to emphasise the
impression of movement and direction: a wheel in motion, under duress.
I am beginning to suspect that Twombly builds the image through phases of
activity and repose in which figure and ground are in constant struggle for
pictorial supremacy as ground invades figure and figure penetrates ground.
(What might count as a ‘mistake’ or ‘error’ in this process? When does
erasure – as painting over [with white] or reconfiguring an image record a
correction to, or an amplification of, the overall composition. Indeed, is
‘composition’ a useful term to describe this process of making, unmaking
and remaking?) Further patterns of movement are traced in sienna:
meandering lines irregularly spiralling within the circumference of the
wheel, altering hue to a light pink, possibly picking up tone from the
umber, at one point – the bottom of the wheel – breaking the circle in a
smear of a lighter brown ending at the paper’s edge (perhaps this was
originally a larger drawing as lines end at the edge in several places).
Finally two larger areas of smeared and smudged paint, a violet arabesque
which I can only get near by using a finger to rub the pigment across the
paper, and crimson, a bloody trace (ejaculation) originating from just
within the circumference at the wheel’s apex and moving diagonally
upwards and to the right. Faint spatters of both violet and crimson appear
across the image. In the end, I am left with the traces of a range of
repetitive and compulsive movements of arm, hand and wrist, a sense of
haste, but also deliberation, and an image that is suggestive of both
circular and lateral motion.
The upper third of the paper’s surface is given to the word, ANABASIS
inscribed in red capitals, each A written as a triangular form, not in the
halting (child-like) and uneven character of other Twombly writings (an
‘effect’ of writing wrong-handed), but so that each letter suggests a
struggle over its formulation, a hard-won and deliberate process of
enunciation. Underneath the title a proper name – XENOPHON – only
faintly legible as if the word had been written (in pencil) and then an
attempt made at erasure. A final inscription, the artist’s initials and a date,
also in pencil, clearly and precisely delineated.
A subject, then, ‘Anabasis’ – an account of a battle and hazardous journey
written by Xenophon, friend of Socrates, who narrates (in Books 1 and 2) the
events of the military expedition of Cyrus, Governor of Persia, against his
brother Artaxerxes, named King of Persia after the death of their father
Darius, and of Cyrus’s death in a battle at the intersection of the Tigris
and Euphrates rivers. Following Cyrus’s downfall, Xenophon, who was
serving in Cyrus’s army at the time, led the Greeks back from the gates of
Babylon to the coast, the journey nominated in the title March Up Country.
That this narrative had particular meaning for Twombly is evidenced not
only in the two works bearing the title, ‘Anabasis’, but also in the word
games that are a feature of his interest in language and etymology.
Anabasis, although derived from a classical source, also means a ‘going up,
a military advance’, and ‘the course of a disease to its climax’ (OED).
I imagine these different definitions would appeal to Twombly and could,
without too much interpretive licence, frame the works under discussion.
Furthermore, Cyrus also references the artist’s father, a notable baseball
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player who was known as Cy, a tribute to Cy Young, one of the greats in the
history of American baseball. The artist perpetuated this genealogy when he
named his own son Cyrus Alessandro. In The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and
the Greek Family, Philip Slater interprets Xenophon’s account as ‘a
self-justifying effort, the hero of which is the author, continually under
attack, always unjustly so, but always extricating himself with honour from
every situation’?54
What can be extracted from this exercise in copying?
Perhaps simply the confirmation of the extent to which meaning in the
visual arts derives from a way of doing things – of an immersion in the
matter of art, its materiality and facticity, as a way of annexing sensation
to experience. In Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman (a philosopher who,
like Wollheim, always paid close attention to the artist as maker) argues
for the interplay of emotion and intellect in the aesthetic apprehension and
understanding of works of art, expressing something that is crucial for the
encounter with Twombly: ‘that what we know through art is felt in our
bones and nerves and muscles as well as grasped by our minds’.55
This was
reinforced for me when, in New York (Autumn, 2005), I saw Twombly’s
recent paintings at the uptown Gagosian gallery, a series of eight large
works with the generic title ‘Bacchus’ (Fig. 7). It was impossible to view
these wall-sized canvases without pondering their method of execution –
how the brush was wielded (possibly attached to a stick or other extension
in order to cover the total area ), the degree of control exercised over the
gravity-induced paint runs, the rhythmic movement of the whole body
creating circles and arabesques as if a giant hand had been dipped in wine
and then wandered purposively over the surface, lingering at moments in
order to allow the colour to pool and coalesce. In a review of the
exhibition for Artforum, Yve-Alain Bois is reminded of Matisse ‘sketching
the composition of his Barnes “Dance” of 1933 with a piece of charcoal
affixed to a long bamboo stick’. However, Twombly is working with
brushes between 2 and 4 inches thick laden with heavy liquid paint.
54. Philip Slater The Glory of Hera: Greek
Mythology and the Greek Family (Beacon Press:
Boston, MA, 1968), pp. 41–2.
55. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 259. See also
Wollheim, On Art and the Mind, pp. 290–314.
Fig. 7. Cy Twombly, ‘Bacchus, Psilax, Mainomenos’, installation shot, Gagosian Gallery,
New York, 2005. # Cy Twombly. Left, ‘Untitled’, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 316.2 Â 403.9 cm;
right, ‘Untitled’, 2005, 325.1 Â 487.7 cm. # Cy Twombly.
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‘How’ Bois wonders, repeating Barthes, ‘does one do that, really, and with so
much control?’56
Looking at these works I was again reminded of my conversations with
Leon Golub, not only our disagreement over Twombly (and I wondered
what he would have made of these new paintings), but also of the essay by
Adorno that he first drew to my attention some years ago and which
preoccupied him during his final years, particularly Adorno’s notion of late
works as the ‘catastrophes’.57
There is something catastrophic about the
Bacchus paintings, something unsettling in their rhythmic sensuality and
pictorial organisation. They are all in the same colour range – red on a
cream linen ground – and are compositionally reminiscent of the
‘Blackboard’ works with which Twombly announced his ‘return’ to
exhibiting in America in the late-1960s.58
Some of the central motifs from
his oeuvre are restated in these late works: the blurring of the boundary
between writing and drawing (the graphic and the textual), the scribble as
both a trace of the body’s rhythm and as the origination of an intentional
marking of surface and delineation of figure/ground relationships, of a
classical reference opening the interpretive field to cultural meaning, of
colour as both mimetic – the red of wine and blood – and symbolic –
the Dionysian bacchanale – and of the repetitiveness of both style and
theme (earlier works bear similar titles – ‘Bacchanalia – Winter (5 Days
in January)’ [1977], the triptych ‘Bachus’ [1981] and Leeman sees a
connection of these works with the symbolism of seasonal change and the
four panel ‘Quattro Stagioni’ [1993–4]). (In a contextualising essay for the
catalogue accompanying the exhibition at Gagosian, the classical scholar
Malcolm Bull makes the comparison of Twombly’s method with the
duality of the drunken madness of Bacchus and the rage of Achilles59
[Figs 8 and 9]).
56. Artforum, February 2006, p. 194.
57. Theodor Adorno, ‘Late Style in
Beethoven’, first published in 1937, in Der
Auftakt: Blatter fur die tschechoslowakische Republik,
17/5–6.
58. In 1967 the Leo Castelli Gallery,
New York, exhibited large all-over grey
paintings whose surfaces were interrupted with
simple geometric forms and numerals inscribed
in white chalk.
59. Malcolm Bull, ‘Fire in the Water’,
catalogue essay for Cy Twombly (Gagosian
Gallery: New York, 2005).
Fig. 8. Cy Twombly, ‘Untitled’, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 317.5 Â 401.3 cm. Courtesy of Gagosian
Gallery, London. # Cy Twombly.
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Surrounded by this series of paintings, what absorbed this viewer was the
emotional intensity of colour and line, and the interplay between the
intentional and the accidental accumulation of marks across their surfaces.
Occasionally there is evidence of erasures and corrections – whitened out
areas that clarify the directional trace of the brush – but, mostly, the line
remains as the evidence of a captured movement suggesting that each
canvas was executed rapidly, but not in haste. The overall effect is elegaic,
visceral, fluid and, despite the hot palette, almost melancholic – as if the
coloured line might suggest both the flow of life blood, but also its
draining away, the downward pressure of gravitational force returning the
materia prima to the earth from which it came, a reminder, perhaps, that
at the culmination of every Dionysiac ritual there has to be a reckoning.60
60. Leeman attributes Twombly’s ‘Bacchic’
aspect, a repetitive feature of his creative
imagination, to his ‘Dionysian melencholy’.
Cy Twombly, p. 277.
Fig. 9. Cy Twombly, ‘Untitled’, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 325.1 Â 494 cm. Courtesy of Gagosian
Gallery, London. # Cy Twombly.
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