Reading Cy Twombly

‘Poetry in Paint’ by Mary Jacobus

Among visual artists’ signatures, Cy Twombly’s might be the most immediately recognizable. The scrawled handwriting on his canvases has been commented upon extensively for its inimitable embodiment of gesture and how it performs an essence of writing, perhaps even some essence of what it means to be Cy Twombly.

However, in the book Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint, British literary scholar Mary Jacobus highlights the unique referential aspects of Twombly’s art, his allusions and citations, beyond the “trace” of the artist—what Barthes has called “the bait of a meaning” or a “Mediterranean effect” leading to jouissance. She warns this may seem to “run counter to Twombly’s [and by extension his audience’s] view of the artwork’s self-sufficiency, its gut-spilling immediacy.”

A sense of closeness, of intimacy, begins in art with the pulse of recognition, seduction, attraction, intrigue. Yet there’s a vacillation in Twombly, in his totemic handling of words, bits of poetry and objects in paint (which he called “a sort of infantile thing”), between an apparent intimacy and the right to be unknown—unreadable, in a way that surmises a fundamentally unknowable core in others. The novelist Henry Green’s pensive hesitation in portraying his characters was linked to his belief that people are strangers and that life itself is a mysterious business; he deemed prose a “gathering web of insinuations.”

Twombly’s art conveys both delicacy and the intensity of a “gathering web”; I love its emotional rawness and melancholy and the strain between lucidity and illegibility, between vigour and diffusion, between grace and shambles. Radiating through the atmospheric frenzy is an underlying beam of intent, the weight of things piling up in responsive meaning; as Jacobus puts it, “of unity in multiplicity.”

The artist himself noted that he “never really separated painting and literature because I’ve always used reference,” as Jacobus quotes Twombly in her introduction. “Lines have a great effect on painting.”

Though his scribbling, citational style is sometimes interpreted in the context of graffiti (following his purported determination to unlearn virtuosity or mastery through primitive mark-making methods and use of his non-dominant hand), Twombly said that “the feeling is more complicated, more elaborate … it’s more lyrical.”

His lyrical ambiguity leads Jacobus into the psychological or psychoanalytical meanings of his work. She is a specialist in Romantic literature, and her previous explorations of an “unconscious of reading”—the psychological implications for our subjectivity in the act of reading, what we read and see, and the objects with which we interact, which is another kind of reading—are all particularly apropos to Twombly’s artistic practice, which banks heavily on this sort of muddled, redolent repository of influence and memory. Engaging art as a form of knowledge beyond words, and tactics of abstraction, negation and colour as a “mode of thought,” Twombly used painting as a “form of thinking through (and not just about) painting,” she contends.

Her ultimate question, starting with Twombly’s own reading, is, “What does it mean to read a painting, collage, or drawing—to read a Twombly?” (An unprecedented access to his home library in Gaeta, Italy, alone makes this a remarkable book, and the included images of marked-up and paint-splotched pages of his poetry books are very moving.)

Jacobus’s own erudite, sensitive reading emphasizes obliqueness and philosophical complexity as she mines Twombly’s littered (lettered), enigmatic canvases for sources— poets from Basho, Virgil, Sappho and Ovid to Rilke, Mallarmé, Goethe, Keats, Pound and Pessoa, and artists such as da Vinci, Poussin and Turner. Her dense, inventive study resuscitates a “specifically twentieth century avant-garde context for [his referential] practice … tracing its relation to American literary Modernism … and contemporary avant-garde art practice.” This is supported by his early involvement with the Black Mountain College artists and poets such as Robert Duncan, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell and Charles Olson, all of them drawing on ancient history, art and esoterica, experimenting with intertextuality and interplay among disciplines, and inventing automatism and other open forms of composition.

According to Jacobus, poetry and other allusions in Twombly offer “a way to expand the limits of the twodimensional artwork, even when it appears most resistant to meaning, or most hermetically sealed.”

In assembling these allusions and tracing them to real cultural, political and personal events, her textual archaeology also illuminates his political and artistic engagement, often overlooked. Much of his work is disruptive, Jacobus argues, using “the past dialectically, to interrogate aspects of modernity”—including the history and representation of war, and matters such as cold-war politics and the spectre of atomic war—in contradistinction to analyses of his artwork as ahistorical or apolitical. She proposes, for example, that Twombly, influenced by his travel to North Africa and partial residence in Rome from the late 1950s onwards, “uses the mythos of the ancient world to reinterpret war from the perspective of his own (and our) historical moment.”

Subjectivity, she stresses, “is more than the sum of previous experience; it includes prior reading, moving from one state or place to another. Poetry quotation in Twombly’s work ‘means’ both the artist-subject and the act of looking back.”

Jacobus makes much of this idea of movement in Twombly’s work— between word and image, memory and representation, citation and abstraction, Europe and America, past and present. Employing the metaphor of translation, she examines the greater “problematic of meaning in modern painting and art criticism … to re-inscribe T’s work—not as ‘poetic’ but rather as a form of painting in which poetry prompts renewed acts of reading and writing, viewing and interpretation.”

In the book’s penultimate chapter, on Twombly’s late flower sequences, Jacobus revisits the relation between image and text in slightly different terms. As she writes, “Twombly’s use of the flower motif, whether in the repeated blossom-shapes or stylized rosettes, emphasizes their intervals, or what he later called ‘passages.’” The passages in these works illustrate, she suggests, Twombly’s attention to “temporality rather than narrative,” the irreconcilable gap between presence and absence, and the “noncoincidence” of image and text in his work.

Recalling abstract expressionism’s signature of the “subjective mark,” a “gestural painting (paint falling from the brush, using one’s hands, incising with a palette knife),” Jacobus returns to Twombly and his signature gap of desire, palpable in the weight of his blossoms next to poems, a singular “pleasure of the flower” even as it falls, as the paint drips, as words and paint attest to an indexical “once-ness” and erasure “at once tasted and resistant to translation,” as text and image oscillate and each “calls on and tries to illuminate the other in a form of endless ekphrasis.” ❚

Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint by Mary Jacobus, Princeton University Press, 320 pages, hardcover, $45.00.

Mariianne Mays Wiebe is a poet and writer with an interest in creative processes across the disciplines.