Cy Twombly
"Cy Twombly" by David Gleeson, Winter 2008, pp. 106-107
Nicholas Serota’s position as Tate’s director has allowed him to reprise and amplify some of his favourite shows from his previous job at Whitechapel. Important exhibitions of the work of Max Beckmann, Howard Hodgkin and Frida Kahlo took place there under Serota’s directorship and these artists have in recent years been treated to Tate retrospectives. The latest of these grand revivals involves Cy Twombly, for whom Serota’s personal regard is such that he is (with Nicholas Cullinan) curating the show.
The exhibition, “Cycles and Seasons,” traces Twombly’s work chronologically since the 1950s via discernible themes. The first room covers the early 1950s, showing the nascent subversive’s notable beginnings with a selection of four sculptures and five canvases. At this early stage, Twombly’s paintings were an apt pastiche of Abstract Expressionist gestures, but his sculptures already balance purity of form and elegant simplicity with deceptive clumsiness.
By the end of that decade, Twombly’s characteristic painterly style had developed. It has both horrified and delighted audiences ever since. A sophisticated knowledge of art, classical literature, travel and history, allied with a sensitive awareness of colour, light and form, resulted in a body of work that has both subverted and reinvigorated the discipline. Paintings like Olympia (1957) and Arcadia (1958) hum with a subtle intensity that is transmitted by Twombly’s scratchy automatic writing in pencil and crayon over white house paint. Half a century ago these canvases heralded a new talent who simply and confidently set about redefining pictorial space in terms of his singular, teeming vision.
His Ferragosto series (1961) is the work of an artist who is completely sure of his medium. The first painting is dominated by the pale, blank canvas; Twombly has crudely scrawled phalluses and smears of pink, red and brown paint upon it. Over five paintings, the contents build to become a violent, cacophonous hemorrhage of impastoed colour. Seeing this series in its entirety allows us to appreciate Twombly’s seemingly chaotic yet brilliant orchestration of form and ideas, how he combines paint and literature to depict the emotional moment.
Not all of his series paintings work as well. Two versions of Treatise on the Veil (1968 and 1970) rely on their size for effect rather than their ascetic black-and-white composition; and the three Bacchus canvases (2005) suggest a master who might finally have lost his muse. But these cannot tarnish the impact of the penultimate room, where the London and New York versions of Quattro stagioni (or Four Seasons) are united for the first time. Each is a huge masterpiece: together they evoke a sumptuous vision of the sublime, making Twombly a modern Turner. No wonder Serota likes him so much.
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