CY TWOMBLY
(this is an essay I wrote about Cy Twombly for college. He passed away on July 5th. Yeah. RIP)
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect on my first trip to the United States, let alone New York. We were staying in Manhattan during the coldest winter they’d had in 30 years. To be honest, the place wasn’t quite what I imagined it would be, though visually dazzling and architecturally goliath; I found the stream of tourists and business men to be a far from who I would want to interact with in a city. I remember writing in my journal “For all the steaming gutters and beautiful Jewish girls, I just can’t see the good in New York, or the good people”. But then; MoMA. I could probably write a thesis length essay on all the things I saw in that astounding place, though I would like to focus on one particular artist who caught my eye. At the time of my visit, January 2011, there was a very interesting exhibition called “On Line; Drawing through the twentieth century”. Amongst colossal Julie Mehretu drawings and gorgeous Picasso collages, lay a gem. Cy Twombly’s Untitled (1955) [below] : a frantic pencil drawing on paper, 62 x 91.7 cm in size. I had never seen something like it, so gorgeously flowing, primitively aggressive and honest. It seemed like the sort of thing No Wave guitarist/composer Glenn Branca would make if you replaced his guitar with a pencil. Inspired and intrigued by what I saw in New York, I decided to read into his life and the theory behind his work (though for this essay I will be focussing on his life up until the late 50s). I found the MoMA published Cy Twombly: A Retrospective a very useful resource in this regard.
Cy Twombly’s Untitled (1955), 62 x 91.7 cm
Read more after the jump
Edwin Parker Twombly Jr, nicknamed Cy by his father, was born on April 25th 1928 in Lexington, Virginia. Twombly was recognised to have a painterly talent at a young age, and at age 12 received private lessons from veteran avant-garde Spanish painter Pierre Daura. His first formal training came after high school, when he went to the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts which leaned towards training teachers, focussing on practical matters of technique and materials (Varnedoe, 1994, pg11). After this, in 1950, he went to New York to study at the Art Students League. It was in New York that he saw firsthand the advanced abstract paintings by artists such as Pollock, Rothko and Kline, who inspired him to try simplified forms of abstraction, and to purge residual figurative aspects from his art (Varnedoe, 1994, pg12). It was also at the League that he met fellow student Rober Rauschenberg. Vernadoe writes that a “general affinity of energies sparked the relationship: Twombly has said that this was the first time he encountered someone close to his own age who shared his interests and goals as an artist.” After a summer spent under Ben Shahn and Robert Motherwell’s tutorage in Black Mountain College, Twombly was ready to stop being a student and start being an artist (Varnedoe, 1994, pg13).
Cy Twombly - Min-Oe, 1951 Bitumen and house paint on canvas, 86.4 x 101.6cm
Twombly’s work from the early 50s is distinctly primitive in its approach. Twombly himself writes “So much art looks affected and tired after seeing the expressive simple directness of [American Indian, Mexican and African] art.” He says “For myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary). I’m drawn to the primitive, the ritual and fetish elements, to the symmetrical plastic order (peculiarly basic to both primitive and classic concepts, so relating the two).” An interest in ancient textures can clearly be seen in his early work such as Min-Oe 1951 [above]. After visiting Twombly’s studio at Black Mountain, Charles Olson wrote “… the dug up stone figures, the thrown down glyphs, the old sorrels in sheep dirt in caves, the flaking iron: these are his paintings” (Varnedoe, 1994, pg14).
Page from North African sketchbook, 1953, conté on paper
An important influence on Twombly’s work is that of travel. He and Rauschenberg travelled to Rome, then to North Africa, through the Atlas Mountains to Marrakech, and finally Tangier, where they stayed for a while before returning to the States via Rome. Twombly pursued archaeology in Tangier, while Rauschenberg photographed the local tombstones (Varnedoe 1994, pg 16). The experience was such an influence on Twombly that he wrote “It is difficult to begin to tell of the many, many things I saw and experienced – not only in art and history but of human poetry and dimensions in the fleeting moment and the flux. I will always be able to find energy and excitement to work with from these times. I see clearer and even more the things I left. It’s been like one enormous awakening of finding many wonderful rooms in a house that you never knew existed”. (Varnedoe, 1994, pg17) Upon returning Eleanor Ward asked the pair to do a joint exhibition at her new Stable Gallery. Africa had a huge influence on Twombly’s work for this exhibition, the main one being that of whiteness. “On a notebook page [from his stay in North Africa] where he enumerated what he saw of materials and of colours, the largest, last notation, set off by a ruling line, is ‘Chalk White’” [right] (Varnedoe, 1994, pg18). The exhibition was greatly misunderstood and underappreciated. Eleanor Ward writes “I lost friends over that show. A great many people thought it was immoral. I had to remove the guest book from the gallery, because so many awful things were being written in it” (Varnedoe, 1994, pg19).
Untitled 1954. Pencil on paper. 48.2c x 63.5cm
A pivotal point in Twombly’s career was when he was drafted to the US Army in 1953, and sent to Camp Gordon. He claims that the drawings he did in a hotel he rented on weekends in Augusta, Georgia established “the direction everything would take from then on.” (Varnedoe, 1994, pg19). Twombly had become concerned with his draftmanship, and wanted to develop a more personal linear matter. To achieve this, he tried to defeat his trained habits by drawing at night with no lights on [left](Varnedoe, 1994, pg19). Roland Barthes wrote on this; “The eye is reason, evidence, empiricism, verisimilitude – everything which serves to control, to coordinate, to imitate; as an exclusive art of seeing, all our past painting has been subject to a repressive rationality” (Leeman, 2005, pg27). This form of drawing which is heavily present in the Untitled 1955 piece I saw in MoMA, is routed deeply in the animalistic and primitive ways of old which Twombly was interested in. By abandoning the paintbrush and using the pencil, he was in essence, trying to remove the difference between drawing and painting. Alfred Barr at MoMA even said of Twombly that “He wants to destroy painting!”; a powerful quote (Leeman, 2005, pg43). Katharina Schmidt writes in her 1984 essay on Twombly; “Direct, personal characteristics are expressed in the small works on paper more by the flow of fine, kinetically determined lines and in their duration than in the act of painting” (Muller-Westermann, 2000, pg37). It seems that Twombly was trying to use drawing to transcend the factual, in order to make visible a spirituality in his work (Muller-Westermann, 2000, pg44). Leeman writes that “Twombly’s interest in primordial motifs was therefore not simply imitative, a reasoned working of the ancient traces of human history; it was also a response to an inner need: the immediate expression of a desire that drew something from ancient symbolic systems and resorted to a language that was still being formed” (Leeman, 2005, pg29).
Untitled 1954, House Paint, crayon and pencil on canvas. 174.5 x 218.5 cm
Twombly’s attachment to the cryptographic service in the US army weighed heavily on him, as the slightest error could have been seen as sabotage. His time spent in the military was a period of unbearable pressure. After refusing to be moved to another camp, he was put under psychiatric observation and was released from service in August 1952 (Leeman, 2005, pg29). Upon leaving Camp Gordon, his style began to change. The ancient aged surfaces from his previous work began to be replaced with connotations of flesh, skin and fluid – of spillage, excess, and overflow, as opposed to erosion, as seen in Untitled 1954 [above] (Varnedoe, 1994, pg20). Varnedoe writes of the paintings of this period (1954-1955) “It is difficult to say whether it was the irrational or the rational aspects of these works that were more disconcerting for eyes adjusted to Pollock and de Kooning: the apparent mindlessness of a linear activity pursued, both obsessively and indulgently, without concern for compositional drama of the whole” (Varnedoe, 1994, pg22). The aggressive paintings of this era owe alot to the ideologies of the New York School, which thought that “their gestural abstraction expressed the notion that the most acute moments of self-realization were epiphanic and to be externalized only by heroic acts of Zen spontaneity, disengaged from control and committed instead to dynamism, risk and chance” (Varnedoe, 1994, pg24). These scribbley marks possess such power in their immediate instinctual nature. Critic and poet Frank O’Hara described Twombly’s Panorama painting of 1955 [below] as “the ramification of the experience” (Leeman, 2005, pg31).
Cy Twombly, Panorama 1955, House Paint, crayon and chalk on canvas 254 x 340.4cm
A main idea in Abstract Expressionism of the time had been about forming some sort of resolution from the artist’s inner chaos, though Twombly’s scrawling implied no such drama. They instead “adulterated the grand angst of the previous generation with a different kind of anxiety, compounded of impetuosity and frustration, obsessiveness and idle disregard, transgression and self-doubt”. Drawing from the influence of Jean Dubuffet (who was interested in drawings by children/the insane), Twombly recalled in his pieces childish disorderliness and impatience with boundaries or niceties of logic (Varnedoe, 1994, pg24). His art was far removed from the idea of the wholeness of a unique individual temperament, but on the intuition of the self as a society of feelings, and impulses that can disgorge themselves, independently and interdependently, into the act of creation (Varnedoe, 1994, pg24). Twombly’s work evolved alot through the 60s,70s, 80s and to present day, but his theory and reasoning remains mostly intact, with his style changing in relation to his often changing surroundings. All his work is perhaps linked to a text he wrote in 1957; “To paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of sensation or release; and by crisis it should by no means be limited to a morbid state, but could just as well be one ecstatic impulse, or in the process of a painting, run a gamut of states.” He notes very importantly that “Each line now is the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate – it is the sensation of its own realization” (Varnedoe, 1994, pg27).
I found that studying Twombly’s ideologies towards painting and drawing greatly influenced how I currently work. The idea of instinct within the creation of art is one that I am very interested in, having previously studied the writings of Jean Dubuffet who wrote; “While the alleged ‘talents’ attributed to ‘artists’ are in my opinion, very profusely widespread, it is on the contrary extremely rare to find people who have the courage to use them in all purity and with license, people who free themselves from social conditioning – or at least put themselves at some distance from it. It should be noted that this freedom from conditioning implies an antisocial temperament – a position that sociologists classify as alienated. It is precisely this temperament, however, that seems to us to be the very mainspring of creation and invention” (Dubuffet, 2006, pg103). This is an interesting point, which applies to Twombly greatly, considering his work was often misunderstood and underappreciated at the times of exhibiting throughout his career. I am very fond of home-recorded music, which is totally instinctual and uninfluenced by outside parties. This idea is seen heavily in the marks made by Twombly, and is perhaps what subconsciously attracted me to his drawing when I saw it hanging in a room of equally impressive pieces. Pierre Restany sums up the beauty behind Twombly’s art; “Expressing nothing but himself, totally – that is the fluctuating rhythm, contradictory, secret and esoteric, of the creative act” (Leeman, 2005, pg35).
Cy Twombly, Ferragosto IV, 1961. Oil, crayon, and pencil on canvas. 165.5 x 200.4cm
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