History and Desire: A Short Introduction to the Art of Cy Twombly
ion. On the other hand, the Italian Communist Party, following the lead of the policies instituted in the Soviet Union, emphasized the need for art's subservience to politics. What was required for the rejuvenation of culture, in their view, was art with clear, legible content. Stylistically, this meant realism. This cultural program created conditions in which younger Italian artists sympathetic to the abstraction of an international avant garde felt increasingly isolated. Twombly's art seemed to point to a way out of the impasse. Also in 1957, Twombly took a studio overlooking the Coliseum in Rome. There, he resumed painting larger canvases with a new material cementito often using a very restricted palette. The relatively even surfaces of works such as Sunset, Olympia TR31 and Blue Room TR33 appear less dryly encrusted than the preceding ones. While a palimpsest of marks and inscriptions continues to activate a play of scarred surface and neutral depth, the overall scattering and dispersal begins more emphatically to suggest a luminous and atmospheric sparseness. A diagonal drift from lower left to upper right appears, as if the pictorial elements have been wafted on a breeze. Simultaneously, simple graphic marks cluster and begin to form recognizable pictograms: sideways eights marked with scribbled dots at their crossings become butterflies with wings, or hearts, or parts of human anatomies. Lines become windows, graphs, letters, and words. In L'Esperienza moderna, Twombly offered his enigmatic thoughts about this new monochromatic work: The reality of whiteness may exist in the duality of sensation (as the multiple anxiety of desire and fear) Whiteness can be the classic state of the intellect, or a neo romantic area of remembrance or as the symbolic whiteness of [the French poet Stephane] Mallarme. The exact implication may never be analyzed [but] one must desire the ultimate essence even if it is "contaminated." Each line [in my work] now is the actual experience [of] a crucial moment of sensation or release 22 the art of cy twombly with its own innate history. It does not illustrate it is the sensation of its own realization.29 Whiteness is neither blankness nor emptiness. Perceiving Twombly's whiteness is simultaneously the occasion of mind's transparent selfreflection and of the body's sensate feeling. They are inseparable. A solo show at La Tartaruga in May 1958 featured these canvases. For an Italian audience contemplating the meaning of art, freedom, and society in a post Fascist climate, idiosyncratic and eccentric gestures of individual expression could not be allowed to trump clear demonstrations of social engagement. The novel contribution of Twombly to the situation of Italian art lay in the way his paintings seemed to mitigate purely subjectivist impulses a danger identified with Abstract Expressionism. His personal graphic marks, which could appear to border on the neurotically obsessive and utterly private, somehow also seemed to address something like a general public sphere. In Olympia, the words "Olympia," "Roma," and "Morte" appear as graffiti, the anonymous but common language of the urban environment. Cesare Vivaldi recounted in 1961 that Twombly had "[a] way of approaching the canvas with the attitude of an action painter, but at the same time with such a shrewd charge of irony as to offset any melodrama[tic] possibility, any danger of egotism and unbridled self exaltation."30 The combination appealed to collectors in Milan, who bought every canvas when the show traveled there in November 1958. Twombly's success immediately preceded a six month return to New York, where, in a flurry of events, he ended his contract with gallerist Eleanor Ward, opting to be represented instead by Leo Castelli (who had sponsored successful shows for both Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns) married Tatiana Franchetti, and produced a major cycle of paintings. expanding the frame 23 The Lexington Paintings Anticipating a show in late 1959 at Castelli's gallery, Twombly rented a studio in Lexington in February and began work on a group of ten large canvases. All of them untitled, it is expedient to call them the "Lexington paintings" (see TR36 TR37 and TR41 In a letter to Castelli concerning which paintings would be included in the exhibition, Twombly asserted the coherence of the group by advocating their display as an exclusive set. He resisted Castelli's suggestion of showing additional oil paintings alongside them, explaining "I like the image of seeing just the paintings you have with a few drawings The new [works] are naturally more active and physical so a certain poetry would be lost with juxtaposition with these."31 Although the exhibition was postponed for a year, and ultimately excluded these particular canvases, the set indicates the trajectory of his ongoing development of his unique pictorial poetry. Rejecting conventional strategies of composition, eschewing all but the sparest use of color, and retreating from the densely marked surfaces of previous years, Twombly's paintings present the possibility of making art out of the barest minimum of means. As David Sylvester has noted, the painter's "insolent originality resides in an acute awareness of how little an artist can dare do in the course of creating great art Twombly does as little as possible."32 Perhaps we are meant to see the effacement of personality as a challenge to the overblown rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism, and as an attempt to facilitate a viewer's profound, if quiet, experience of "a crucial moment of sensation." In their usual installation, five of the Lexington paintings surround a viewer in the Cy Twombly Gallery, a building designed by the architect Renzo Piano in close collaboration with the artist. (It opened in 1995. The paintings' creamy white grounds suspend within their layers tiny marks of graphite and crayon. Twombly's irregular applications of paint (thick here, thin there) create patches of differential substance and sheen that give the canvases a variable 24 the art of cy twombly quality of surface and depth: more heavily painted areas seem to hover just in front of the surface of the painting; lightweight ones recede into an indeterminate spatial depth. The architectural envelope of Piano's building enhances the visual effect, where fluctuating intensities of natural light filtered into the galleries though a glass and canvas ceiling cause the paintings to appear to grow and shrink, their canvas surfaces to breathe, their dimensions to change in size and tone according to external conditions. The pictures flourish before a viewer's eyes. What might we infer is happening here? Is there a subject? A theme? A narrative? If there are any pictorial "events," they are so unconventional and so seemingly insignificant that they escape categorization: as we look, we simply gather the scattered inscriptions of Twombly's graffiti like squiggles, pseudo writing, heart and figure eight symbols, cloud like doodles, sparse hatchings, window frames, and an occasional recognizable letter, signature, or date. The distribution of marks follows no apparent organizational principle (although Twombly's characteristic diagonal drift is increasingly prominent) As the French literary critic and philosopher Roland Barthes perceptively noted, "the materials seem to be thrown across the canvas, and to throw is an act in which are enshrined at the same time an initial decision and a final indetermination."33 If there is any "direction," it is of a quirky, unregulated sort. Whatever patterns or tendencies we might discern in the Lexington group emerge artlessly, generated only by Twombly's unpredictable and additive responses to the material features of his developing surfaces. One thing happens after another, without necessary connections of cause and effect. Previous incidents, such as dried nodes of paint drips, simply attract later marks (or do not) Yet these "events" become spots of interest, motivating but not controlling Twombly's blooming affinities. He might return to them repeatedly, until an agglomeration of marks and drips becomes an autonomous pictorial constellation. The art historian Richard Shiff put it best: "an even distribution of nothing [has become] a charmed something." Here, expanding the frame 25 mere accident has been supplanted by a purposeful sense of things forming or coming together. A generative principle appears. The literary description of visual art requires the writer to demarcate "marks" from "drips," or "figures" and "grounds," but in Twombly's works these are indivisible. An organic notion, indivisibility suggests that Twombly's paintings, like living organisms, cannot be split into parts. His surfaces are continuous with themselves. Reflexively emergent, they spontaneously germinate, like life itself. This is part of the poetic effect of Twombly's environment: the promise of inevitable gathering and parting, of accretion and erosion, inherent in his process signifies to us the continuance of imperceptible change, the unmeasurable change of growth and decay, always non incremental and analog. The layers of the palimpsest could either wear away, revealing contents underneath, or build up even more resolutely, hiding forever the strata of marks below. The Lexington paintings are surfaces that allow fortuitous inception but resist final completion, just as notions of nature and the self as continuous with change and becoming deny absolute beginnings and endings. Immanent Departures The Lexington group contrasts in both scale and effect with Poems to the Sea, the intimate drawings Twombly made just after he returned to Italy in the summer of 1959 TRFig.24 and TRFig.25 Experimenting with oil paint squeezed directly from tubes, the drawings convey a sense of substantial physical materiality absent from the larger, atmospheric paintings. G