Cy Twombly: A Retrospective

“My kid could paint that”: a sentence we might do not want to hear when correlated to contemporary artworks. However, it has been so vastly used to describe Cy Twombly’s work that MoMa dedicated a whole essay to the topic and called it “Your kid could not do this and other reflections on Cy Twombly”. The simplicity of his work reminiscent of infantile scratches combined with the depth and width of the topics treated with his art are exactly the reason of his genius and the impossibility to encapsulate him into a defined aesthetic movement.

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011), Untitled, 1963

Cy Twombly approached abstract art but was never recognized as an integral part of any artistic movement, freeing himself from any kind of definition by creating art in a unique and personal way. Although he was widely recognized as an artist, he is often marginal to the after-war art history and he is hard to include into any artistic movement of the 20th century. His work reminds of Jackson Pollock’s action-painting for the causality of the gestures, although in contrast to Pollock, he never fills the canvases and instead leaves blank spaces on white, cream or black backgrounds.

 These backgrounds combined with frenetic lines, graffiti-like scratches and infantile writing were a trademark of his whole work. The 60’s series called “grey paintings” is an example of his signature style: a grey ground filled with white scrawls similar to chalk on a blackboard. The scrawls are frenetic, fluid, continuous lines that keep recurring in his work. In order to reach this effect, he used a particular technique: sat on the shoulders of a friend, who shuttled back and forth along the length of the canvas. Looking at his work, we can now see how the random graphic marks reiterate in his productions through time and look more like a meta-script to abbreviate thoughts and emotion, a vocabulary of signs and marks, more than a simple asemic writing. However, this infantile writing has not to be interpreted: it is the artist’s personal elaboration of the emotions of the moment.

Cy Twombly, Venus and Adonis, 1978

Despite the casual nature of the gestures, the titles of the works and the contents are not casual at all. Thus, some are inspired by people, as “Nini’s painting”, a tribute to Nini Pirandello (Twombly's gallerist Plinio De Martiis’ wife) or by geographical places, for example “Bolsena”, a lake in Viterbo in Italy. Other works were a reflection on seasons, nature and the passing of time, as “Four Seasons” of 1993-5 where colors evoke the brilliance of the Mediterranean light combined with scrawled poetic fragments from several sources. Many other works have been inspired by the classic history and myths, such as “Nine Discourses on Commodus”, the portrait of the Roman emperor conceived while Twombly was studying the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet and Francis Bacon. He often inscribed the names of mythological figures on paintings. As a fact, Twombly was deeply influenced by ancient and modern european art and moved to Italy in 1957. Since then he worked between Rome, Gaeta and Naples, while travelling in Europe and US. Living in Rome gave him the chance to work in close contact with classic sources, historical reminiscences and gods and heroes from the antiquity that often recur into his paintings, sculptures and even in the design of his houses.

All the features characterizing his artistry are visible in sculptures as well. He uses objects of everyday life, waste and wood to create abstract sculptures that he assembles and covers with white painting. The white painting covers abandoned, old objects and unifies the parts to give a new life to the sculpture. He once said “white painting is my marble” and even in this declaration of intent we see the depth of the influence Rome left him.

 Twombly constantly creates a tension between these two worlds: the instinctive emotional expression, through action-painting, asemic scratches, infantile scrawls, the use of colors, and the intellectual engagement in cultural memory. He does it by quoting authors from literature, poetry and history, such as Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke and John Keats as a proof of the poetic dimension that permeates his works. Otherwise, he inspires to gods and heroes from classic myths. In Twombly’s work classical mythology, poetry, ancient and contemporary history, and the Mediterranean are translated into paintings and sculptures. In conclusion, the beauty and depth in Twombly’s work is that he re-elaborates human emotions represented by myths, poems and literature pieces through his personal sensitivity that is a visual, emotional and aesthetic response.

Cy Twombly, Untitled (Roma), 1963