Tate Modern's retrospective to mark the 80th birthday of American artist Cy Twombly displays just why his body of work elicits both fascination and exasperation, writes Aidan Dunne
THE STRIKINGLY-NAMED Cy Twombly is something of a patrician figure in American art. He has the air of a southern gent, but one who flew the coop, decanting to the Old World to experience at first hand the grandeur and decadence of the classical past, and marrying into a family of Italian art patrons. While Jackson Pollock could be presented as an authentic American hero, rough-hewn and independent, Twombly seemed to go out of his way to emphasise his links to European cultural tradition, investing his work with references to literature and mythology, and settling in Italy.
Yet if the references and allegiances almost ostentatiously proclaim an attachment to high art, the work itself is positively unruly and intractable. The archetypal Twombly painting is a rushed-looking amalgam of blotches, drips and smears of pigment arranged in untidy patches, with scrawled lettering in pencil or crayon, some legible, some illegible, some crossed out or painted over, often featuring crudely indicated ribald or scatological imagery. There's something intimate about it, as though it's a page of doodles writ large, or the initial, preparatory stage of a work to come, not something ever intended to be seen. Yet it also withholds, because we can't quite get inside the head of the person who made the marks, we don't quite know what problem he is addressing or what he's trying to do. You might find this fascinating or simply exasperating, and Twombly's work attracts both responses.
Tate Modern's Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons is a huge, generous retrospective that marks the artist's 80th birthday this year. Curated by Tate director Nicholas Serota, no less, it is consistently engrossing, drawing together major works from every phase of his career, including a series of angry red Bacchus paintings from 2005 and both his versions of The Four Seasons, including one from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It also highlights a less well-known aspect of his output: his sculptures. Casually informal monuments lathered with thick white paint, they recall his long-term fascination with Stephane Mallarmé's "symbolic whiteness".
TWOMBLY WAS BORN in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia. His father had been a professional baseball player, a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, and worked as an sports coach in Lexington. The family also spent time regularly in Maine and Massachusetts, and the mix of southern and northeastern settings clearly helped to shape the young Cy. His artistic talent was noticed and encouraged from early on, and he studied at the Boston Museum School, visited New York and then returned to Lexington, where a new university art department had opened. If much of his formal training was grounded in a representational tradition, he made sure that he was also conversant with contemporary developments in American and European art. Armed with a scholarship to the Art Students League, he moved to New York in 1950.
There he met Robert Rauschenberg, and for several years the two were pretty much inseparable, spending time at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and travelling through the US, Europe and north Africa, and working closely, sometimes collaboratively, together. Twombly is famously reticent about his personal life, but it is fair to say that the dynamic between himself, Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns was pivotal. Artistically, all three of them shared a certain critical stance in relation to the big hitters of abstract expressionism.
Compared to the heat of Pollock's "action painting", their work was several degrees cooler, putting some analytical distance between themselves and the gesture.
It was Johns who was the most analytical, and who became the most successful of the three. He and Rauschenberg embarked on a relationship soon after they met in the winter of 1953-1954. At this time, Twombly had to do his military service, during which, intriguingly given the direction his painting took, he was assigned to the army's cryptography department.
Thereafter he taught and worked and exhibited, but he evidently wanted to get back to Europe, and to Italy specifically, and managed to do so in 1957. It has been pointed out that Twombly embarked on his self-imposed exile while Johns's star was in the ascendant. He himself had a generally rough time with the critics in the US, most notably when Donald Judd attacked his 1964 exhibition in New York, something that prompted his one, incongruous, but not at all bad excursion into minimalism with his Treatise on the Veil series, which is included in the Tate exhibition.
In any case, he was making a new life for himself in Italy, having met the Franchetti family. In 1959, he married Tatiana Franchetti, a portrait painter (their son, who is now a painter, was born that December). Although he did periodically revisit the US, he lived and worked in Italy, in one or other of several residences, until he secured studio space and bought a house in Lexington in the early 1990s, and began to spend more time there, describing himself as an old dog going home to die - though he wasn't that old, and he's been very much alive and busier than ever since.
One of the show's highlights is an entire room devoted to a group of Nini's Paintings, made in the early 1970s as a tribute following the death of Nini Pirandello, a friend who was married to Twombly's Roman gallerist, Plinio De Martiis. Inevitably, the works are about loss in a wider sense, or about the wrenching inconclusiveness of loss, as something both absolute and unfinished. They evoke two quite different things immediately: handwritten texts, and the surface of the sea. In fact they are, in many respects, equivalent to handwritten texts, though they are built up layer over layer, with washes of colour, and seem always on the point of legibility without ever becoming legible. Their meaning is indefinitely deferred.
There is a beautiful, poised classicism to Nini's Paintings, but generally Twombly's work is more promiscuous and heterogeneous and shambolic. He embraced the exuberant vitality of Mediterranean culture, its hedonistic sensuality, in several groundbreaking series of paintings from the late 1950s onwards. He has remarked that he loves the landscape, so much that it drew him to Italy in the first place.
THAT MIGHT LEAD one to think of thematic richness, density of content, the continuity of a central tradition. Yet in fact there is something nullifying about what he does. We find fragmentation, erasure, failure evoked through repetition, the short-circuiting of conventional representational structure by simply scrawling a nominal subject across the canvas, and a governing spirit of denial.
This sounds negative, and it is, but not in a detrimental sense.
In a way, from early on Twombly's paintings are about the impossibility of making a painting, the pointlessness of trying to perpetuate a tradition. If he moves too far away from that stance, he comes to grief. With Untitled (A Painting in Nine Parts), for example, made for the 1988 Venice Biennale, he incorporated some elaborate rococo formats and set out to make relatively conventional studies of water. It reads as a half-hearted, poorly painted attempt to reinvent one of Monet's panoramic studies of waterlilies, and is oddly empty and hollow.
HE IS ON MUCH surer ground when, rather than aiming for a grand narrative, he gravitates towards the edges and the ephemeral. His characteristic visual language is concocted of elements of graffiti, marginalia, informal calculations and preparatory sketches, terse notes and scribbled nonsense, splodges of dripping pigment. It's as though we're faced with an allegorical composition in which any higher motives are reduced to base drives and desires, bodies to caricatures of sexual parts, fluids and fecal matter, or with a still life in which the fruit is all rotten and putrefied, the flowers wasted and decayed. In fact, one of Twombly's sculptures is essentially a small alter on which a pile of flower-heads withers.
Yet it is at this end-point of exasperation that interesting things begin to happen. Somehow a work emerges out of erasure and nullity. There is something positively Beckettian about this idea that art happens through a process of rejection and the experience of desperation.
Indeed, in his writings about art and about writing itself, Beckett arrived at the conclusion that all predictable possibilities have to be exhausted or eliminated before anything viable can be achieved. Why go further along the same familiar road, he asked rhetorically, as the Italian painters who looked at the world through the eyes of building contractors?
Twombly, too, repeatedly considers and consistently rejects such an option. Classicism cannot be merely restated or elaborated upon. So he is in a bind, an ongoing bind, but also an immensely productive one.
• Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons is at Tate Modern in London until Sep 14. Admission £10, concessions £8. A fully illustrated catalogue edited by Nicholas Serota accompanies the exhibition at £35 (hardback) and £25 (paperback)
