Cy Twombly

The Cy Twombly retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris is a vast exhibition organized chronologically, the first following his death in 2011 at age 83 years. Included are sculptures and photographs, although the main attraction is, of course, his painting. Twombly’s great contribution is that of a story in which touch and materiality are told in painting, as painting, by a painter of singular commitment.

Twombly doesn’t make paintings, he breaks into painting. His destructions analyze and reconfigure the already finished, already dead, shredding the visible into torn stains and scribbled invocations, doodles that trace out the drive to paint. Perhaps most obviously this has been accomplished with his insertion of handwritten script into abstract painting, but also with his allegorical use of figures and events adopted from Homeric myth.

From the perspective of a painting amateur, Twombly’s paintings present a poignant “felt sense” of what it is to paint and to paint these paintings, these works that present painting in all its sensuous particularity. This is often due to his having arrived, in any given painting, at a finally unfinished state of provisionality. The paintings rest in an ambiguous state of making and unmaking, situating us within the painting’s process. This relief from conventional linearity is a typical gift we receive from Twombly. Also a large part of the appeal of a Twombly work is in that sense of play that the psychoanalyst DW Winnicott appraised as being essential to creativity and thus to our health and to the world’s health. And though creativity and art are not identical in Winnicott’s eloquent descriptions, artistic activity has roots in the rawness of childish expressivity, and with this in mind, art can sometimes be a route that cuts through contemporary alienation. Even if this occurs only momentarily, the results can be emancipatory. When we have encounters of this sort we connect with what Tacita Dean in her obituary of Twombly described as “a rare degree of emotional beauty” (Guardian, 6 July 2011).

The elements of the emotional beauty, Dean remarks, have everything to do with the recollection of our bodies that Twombly enacts. His means are an incredibly astute deployment of sensuous materials and perception, these being considered as “flesh”in the sense meant by Merleau-Ponty. Although it might seem incongruous to speak of practised spontaneity, that is exactly what Twombly accesses. Perhaps he uses his investment in literary and historical events as inspirations, the better to wind himself up prior to what appear to have been outbursts of radiant energy on canvas. In any case, what Dean called “emotional beauty” must rest in the return of a subject’s subjectivity, a re-enchantment of the world, a recovery of the perceiving body. Or perhaps we could simply say that this joyful pleasure is an aspect of what is meant by beauty.

Such pleasure is in this case articulated through dynamic tensions. Twombly poses rough against smooth, slippery and dry, line and surface, fast and slow, empty and full, and many other pairings in diacritical bondings. We are literally “touched” by his surfaces, scratched and scribbled, blurred and stained as they are. Touch is for Twombly’s paintings sometimes a caress and at other moments a scraping, scratching abrasion. These kinds of combinations and juxtapositions play with our sensory bodies, send little waves of nervous shock through the fabric of the visual. And while Twombly is in no way emulating nature, he does take us there.

Throughout his career there have been the flowers, a theme with which he has posed the intimate against the monumental and spectacular. The flowers are sometimes ambiguously presented as wounds, at other times as gastronomic delicacies. Or as Jonathan Jones writing in his Guardian review said, “Flowers of feeling that float in space” (8 October 2016). This would be the sense of a completely abstract painting such as Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus, 1962. This painting, among others, suggests one side of Twombly, the side of fragility where the painting is almost nothing, just a couple of little coloured scribbles and scratchings floating against a nearly empty 2 1/2 x 3-metre canvas.

Two tracks of commentary are visible following this and the earlier retrospective at the Tate Modern (2008). One proposes that Twombly’s work, like Rauchenberg’s, declined in later years, and the other that Twombly has not been influential among artists in the way that Rauchenberg and Jasper Johns have, even though Twombly has had immense success with the museum world. The former seems simply to be open to dispute; the latter is more interesting—reasoning suggests that it was the change in the stylistic environment as abstract expressionism devolved into minimalism in the early ’60s just as Twombly was really getting started. The value of this opportunity for a broad public to see Twombly’s work is considerable, especially for those persons fortunate enough to also see Twombly’s friend, sometime lover and artistic collaborator Robert Rauchenberg’s simultaneous retrospective at London’s Tate Modern. The two taken together add to the conventional perception of Twombly somewhat, complicating it with aspects of Rauchenberg’s irreverence. Alone, Twombly can appear somewhat nostalgic with his insistence on past great events such as the Trojan War. Nonetheless, the outcome of this magnificent retrospective will undoubtedly be to initiate new and unforeseen directions with regard to Twombly’s reception. ❚

“Cy Twombly” was exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Paris, from November 30, 2016, to April 24, 2017.

Stephen Horne is an art writer living in Montreal and Paris.