CY TWOMBLY: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY THAT WASN'T

Yesterday I wrote this obituary of Cy Twombly for the Independent, but because of a glitch in my computer, I never actually filed the copy to them, and as they were unable to reach me later they had to rush to get another piece. This is the kind of mistake I hope I never make again, wasting their time and mine, and losing the opportunity to register my appreciation of Twombly in print.

I first wrote about Twombly after I went to the Tate Modern's 'Cycles and Seasons' exhibition in 2008, the very first post for this blog about art, which has been more irregular than was intended. You can link to that essay here. I had always been interested in Twombly, because of the Black Mountain connection, but that show was a revelation to me, because I hadn't realised how beautiful much of his work could be, and I was overcome by its ability to express emotion and move me. I regret messing up that assignment from the Independent, and apologise profusely to my editors there. What I wrote for them about Twombly follows.

CY TWOMBLY, ARTIST

The American painter Cy Twombly, who has died aged 83, was our last link with the glory days of the Abstract Expressionists, but his work was always an awkward fit with that movement, indeed with any modern movement. It was a mark of his idiosyncratic talents that he abandoned New York for Italy just as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline were at their peaks of success; moreover, where all of those artists died at the height of their fame, appreciation of Twombly's work progressed slowly, dividing critics and the public alike. Some of the reasons for this became evident in his hugely successful retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2008. Where individual Twombly canvases might seem ephemeral, random, and difficult, presented together their impact was intensified and became clearer. His mix of dripping colour, hand-written notes or fragments of poetry, and chaotic lines for many obscured his mix of classical and modern concerns. Cynical voices accused him of deliberate obscurantism, but Twombly never indulged in flamboyant display for its own sake, preferring to find new ways to express old stories.

If Abstract Expressionism wanted to go beyond the pure self-involvement of abstraction, Twombly's work can be seen as constantly seeking more direct expression, and even in a European context, spoke of a uniquely American perspective. Like the Abstract Expressionists, there is a sense of American pragmatism, but there is also the intellectual curiosity which allowed him to absorb European classism, and meld it into something sui generis.

He was born Edward Parker Twombly, Jr., 25 April 1928 in Lexington Virginia. His nickname came from his father, a pitcher in baseball's major leagues who was called 'Cy' for his resemblance to the great Cy Young. He studied in Lexington with the exiled Spanish artist Pierre Daura, and after finishing high school, he spent a year at a prep school in Georgia followed by brief spells at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts school. In 1950 he got a scholarship to New York's Art Students League, where he met and became close to Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg introduced him to Franz Kline, and persuaded Twombly to enroll at Black Mountain, an experimental college in North Carolina, where Kline, Ben Shahn and Robert Motherwell taught, and where Twombly's affair with Rauschenberg would lead to the breakup of the latter's marriage.

The influence of Kline and Motherwell was apparent in Twombly's first New York shows, one arranged by Motherwell at the Samuel Kootz gallery, and another at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery, where he shared the space with Joseph Cornell. But Black Mountain's influence extended beyond painting. The college's rector was the poet Charles Olson, and much of the writing on Twombly's canvases recalls Olson's 'Projective' verse, and his dictum that 'form is never more than an extension of content'. Kline's work is often compared to Chinese written characters, and Olson drew on Ernest Fenollosa's studies of them; we can often see Twombly's graffiti as objects in themselves. John Cage taught music at Black Mountain, and the silences in his work might be seen to have their equivalent in the large expanses of blank canvas in many of Twombly's larger works.

A grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts allowed Twombly to travel to southern Europe and North Africa. 'Virginia is a good start for Italy,' he said, referring to his Southern sense of faded glory, but he returned from that first trip to go into the Army. His service as a military cryptographer also had a profound influence on the writing he would include in his paintings. Moving back to New York, he worked closely with Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who were was breaking away from Abstract Expressionism, and would be crucial in the foundation of Pop Art. Twombly left Stable for Leo Castelli, fast becoming New York's most influential modern art gallery, but by then he had moved to Italy, and, in 1959 married Tatiana Franchetti, the sister of one of his patrons.

If his 1959 'Poems To The Sea' show a fusion of Kline's art and Olson's poetry while celebrating the peaceful Mediterrean shore, Twombly was already creating new work which reflected the heat and passion of Italy, such as 'Crimes of Passion' and 'Murder of Passion', as well as more classical influences, including Roman myths, particularly Leda and the Swan. His series based on the Discourses of Commodus, which he painted to reflect the assassination of John Kennedy, received a savage reception from the critics when shown at Castelli in 1964. Although that setback caused his production to slow down, he began returning to the States more often, working both in Lexington and in New York. His painting reflected this part-time change of setting, particularly the series Treatise On The Veil, whose strong brush strokes and serenity remind one of late Rothko. At the same time, the elegaic Nini's Paintings seem an almost violent grief in response to the death of the wife of his Roman dealer.

One can see pieces of Shahn's emotional impact and Cornell's cool found-object commetary co-existing in Twombly, but his scale was always increasing. By the Seventies, massive works like his deliberately-mistitled 'Fifty Days At Iliam', based on the Trojan War had restored his reputation, prompting a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1979. He began spending most of his time in the southern Italian coastal town of Gaeta, producing sculptures based on boats and paintings with watery themes, like his version of the myth of Hero and Leandro. Twombly showed at the Venice Biennale three times, thirty-seven years apart, and had retrospectives in Zurich and Paris before the monumental 1994 show at New York's Museum of Modern Art, In 1995 the Cy Twombly Gallery was opened at the Menil Collection in Houston.

One of the highlights of the Tate Modern show, titled 'Cycles And Seasons', was Twombly's two versions of what his arguably his greatest work, 'The Four Seasons'. Although influences of music and poetry abound in the paintings, there is an obvious reference point to Poussin, and just last week the Dulwich Picture Gallery opened 'Arcadian Painters', a joint exhibition of Twombly and Poussin, which does much to answer the still-spiteful voices in the British press who, even after his death, rushed to deflate his reputation. Twombly died in Rome 5 July 2011, after a long struggle with cancer. His wife predeceased him in 2010; he is survived by his son Cyrus Allessandro, and by his long-time companion Nicola del Roscio.

Note: this essay appears also at Irresistible Targets

ROBERT CREELEY IN ARTISTIC COMPANY

IN COMPANY: ROBERT CREELEY’S COLLABORATIONS

NOTE: This is another piece I originally wrote, in 2000, for Alan Ross at London Magazine, which languished in his files. In Company showed at the New York Public Library, the Witherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro North Carolina, the University Of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, and the Green Library at Stanford University. The catalogue, including a CD Rom and edited by Amy Cappellazzo and Elizabeth Licata of the Castellani Art Museum, Niagara University, New York was published by University of North Carolina Press. Creeley, of course, has since passed away, but I've left it in its original, present, tense.

“I Know A Man”, the best known of Robert Creeley’s poems (one line from it spawned a Jeremy Larner novel which became a Bob Rafelson film starring Jack Nicholson), begins:

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,--

We think of poetry as a lonely art, but Creeley doesn’t. The most striking feature of “In Company”, an exhibition of the Bollingen Prize winning poet’s collaborations with artists, is sheer exuberance. When the exhibition opened in the refined surroundings of the New York Public Library’s Salomon Exhibition Hall, the works almost seemed to leap from their cases in an attempt to pull the viewer into dialogue with them, in much the same process as occurred, one imagines, between the poet and these artists.

Now 73, Creeley, twice a Harvard dropout, World War II ambulance driver, and struggling chicken farmer, began his poetic career in collaboration. On his New Hampshire farm in the late 1940s he heard Cid Corman’s poetry program on the radio from Boston. Through Corman, editor of the ground-breaking literary magazine Origin, Creeley began an intense correspondence with Charles Olson, then rector of the experimental Black Mountain College. Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” provided the blueprint for an entire generation of post-modern poetry, from Allen Ginsberg to Robert Duncan, and one of Olson’s key precepts quotes Creeley directly: “form is never more than an extension of content”. This phrase echoes continuously through the present exhibition: a breaking down of the distinct , and discrete, distance between artistic technique and subject.

Creeley had moved to Mallorca, where he tutored Robert Graves’ children and began to apply his own aphoristic precepts, starting with an essay on the French artist Rene Laubies. Laubies returned the favour by illustrating Creeley’s first book of poems, THE IMMORAL PROPOSITION (1953). Laubies’ art lies flat on the page facing the poems: each painting shares physical space with the words. Form extends content: simple broad strokes accompanying “An Obscene Poem” suggest wave motion and boats, but only suggest. Increasingly Creeley was seeing words as things in themselves, rather than symbols. Sight is an important metaphor: Creeley’s straight-forward perspective may be the result of losing one eye when he was two years old. But the primary position thatsight takes also suggests the realms where the body’s actions and mind’s perceptions move together, like boats rocking in the water.

He returned to American and joined the Black Mountain faculty, which included dancer Merce Cunningham, composer John Cage, and the artist Franz Kline.In an essay, “On The Road: Notes on Artsts and Poets”, Creeley recalled listening to Kline’s sad stories while drinking with him and Jackson Pollock in New York’s legendary Cedar Bar. Creeley responded to the “non-verbal” quality of Pollock’s painting. The paradox fascinated him. Artists like Kline possessed the verbal facility to captivate poets with their stories. Yet Kline and Pollock’s art spoke to the emotions while doing away with story-telling entirely. Form is never more than an extension of content? For Kline, form was content. Out of this collaboration, Creeley learned to focus the expressive reach of his writing in each individual word.

-- John, I
sd, which was not his
name,the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, 

“If it’s you, he embraces it,” said the artist Jim Dine, whose etchings for Creeley’s MABEL (1977) try to make literal objects out of Creeley’s words, reflecting the way abstract expressionism saw painting as a process, manipulating its own materials. In an essay for this exhibition’s impressive catalogue, critic John Yau points out that Creeley’s move from Mallorca’s relative isolation to the myriad influences of Black Mountain, enabled a similar process: from using the external world as a “signpost” to thinking of words as material things.

He’d established artistic common ground. Creeley’s NUMBERS (1968), is a series of ten abstract poems, written to accompany Robert Indiana’s hard-edged silkscreens, trying to make the words equal to the numerals represented in Indiana’s art. Rather than suggesting a story for each number, Creeley simply tries to create that number for the reader. Think of Charles Demuth’s famous poster-portrait of William Carlos Williams “I Saw the Figure Five in Gold”. Unlike Demuth, Indiana dropped the backstory, and Creeley has not inserted one.

Given these aims, it is not strange that the only portrait of Creeley on show is by RB Kitaj, who did exceptional portraits of other 'Black Mountain' poets, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Paul Blackburn, and collaborated with Creeley on A SIGHT, published in London by Cape Goliard in 1967, and on A DAY BOOK (1972). The latter was Creeley’s attempt to write down the raw material of life without turning it into art. Kitaj’s DAY BOOK portraits are deceptively simple. As you can see at the top of this post, Kitaj's Creeley looks pensively from his one good eye, a playful wink implied behind his unique visual perspective.

or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

Experimentation is a constant. It’s a question of process, the energy at work between artist and writer parallels that between artist and materials. John Chamberlain once defined sculpture as “something that if it falls on your foot, will break it”. He sent Creeley completed prints; Creeley wrote FAMOUS LAST WORDS (1988) to accompany them. Chamberlain’s note to Creeley reads like a Creeley poem: “here are 10 prints/for whatever use to you—hope/they influence enough to find/words you haven’t used for/awhile.” The photo-copier images done by Creeley’s second wife, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, suggest there might also be a sexual element to artistic collaboration. So do Arthur Okamura’s tiny nudes, creating Busby Berkeley-ish mandalas for Creeley’s poems, or Susan Rothenberg’s mezzotints for PARTS (1993), completed entirely by post, but resulting in powerful animal images, like “Dog Leg Wheel”.

In his poem “For Jim Dine” Creeley refers to “the confounding, confronted/pictures of world/brought to signs/of its insistent self.” Later he speaks of the “intervals between silences”. For fifty years, Creeley has sought the insistent self behind the world’s pictures. His words have filled those silences, and in these collaborations, the intervals do grow smaller, and disappear.

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.

CY TWOMBLY: CYCLES AND SEASONS

The best art exhibitions are those which open your eyes to something you haven't seen before, and Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, at the Tate Modern through 14 September is one of those. It forced me to re-think and come to a whole new appreciation of Twombly's art, which was never as strong for me as, with hindsight, I can see it probably should have been, given his background at Black Mountain College, and his close association with so many people whose work I have found centrally important.

Part of this is context. The single Twombly encountered in a gallery may seem pleasant, but often gives off an unfinished, almost fragile, quality. A single Franz Kline can overwhelm you. But seeing Twombly's works in groups, in rough chronological order, and watching what he does with the elements of squiggles and words, with colour and with the physicality of brush and pen strokes, reveals the powerful emotion which becomes more explicit in some of his later works, particularly the two Four Seasons sets on display.

It's easy to see in Twombly's work the theoretical foundation of Black Mountain poetry, as articulated by Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, that 'form is never more than an extension of content' (which I've always taken to mean 'should never be more'), and that 'one perception should lead immediately to another'. Although his pencil stokes are often seen as subverting Pollack's calligraphic gestures, some of the paintings in the exhibition's first room, notably 'Tiznit' (1953) suggest something halfway between Creeley and Kline, with whom Twombly studied at with Black Mountain. The heavy whites and blacks give way to seeming doodles, as if Creeley had stopped by to write a short poem on a Kline canvas. By 1955's 'Criticism' the marks actually do seem like writing. 'Poems To The Sea' (1959) carries this even further, and I found myself again thinking of Kline, this time crossing his work with Olson's more epic writing.Kline worked in black and white for most of his career, and there's sense here in which Twombly seems wary of colour, as if not trusting, at this stage, its intense, uncontrollable emotionalism.

By the start of the 1960s 'Crimes Of Passion' and 'Murder Of Passion' move in a different direction, discarding the pencil-strokes for smears of paint which suggest both passion and anxiety, and not a little eroticism, expressed in hints in representational painting, reminding me of DeKooning. Perhaps it was a reflection of Twombly's move to Italy, set free of American context, and confronted with the heat of Italian summer in Rome. Within this, references to classical works, like 'School Of Athens' homage to Rafael, suggest an elegance that somehow doesn't seem to fit. When 'Ferragosto' (1961) adds a rusty red to his palette, it seems more than thousands of miles removed from the effects of pencil lines around strong blacks and whites. All these elements begin to merge in his 1969 paintings, made in Italy, whose calculations reflect his experience as a cryptographer in the 1950s, while celebrating the moon landings. It's a mix of American pragmatism and European classicism, and it works brilliantly. There are graphs, diagrams, geometric forms, but there is still an overarching asceticism which suggests someone learning from the past while being overcome with the future.

There is an element of challenge involved here too. Twombly's was the generation immediately following the abstract expressionists. Their emotionalism was replaced by the cool stylings of pop art, and have evolved into the heavily ironic commentaries of the modern world. Twombly, in sense, reminds me of Richard Diebenkorn, convinced the concerns of the artists he grew up with were valid, and looking for new means of executing them.

But the real fulcrum of the show comes with the next two series, starting with 1970's 'Treatise On The Veil'. It is minimalist, a grid structure of repeating rectangles, adorned with measurements; one in black and the other, opposite, in gray. It suggests the music of Philip Glass, and apparently were influenced by Muybridge's photos of a bride in motion. But looking at the shades of gray and black, and the strong brushstrokes, I was reminded of late Rothko, and it struck me that these slabs on their ends were like drawings for a Rothko mural, and that they may have been inspired, or influenced, by Rothko's suicide. Certainly they carry the same kind of quiet impact of the Tate's Rothko room, which at the moment is closed while the major Rothko retrospective is being prepared.

My feeling of elegy continued and was amplified in the next room, which contains 'Nini's Paintings', a response to the death of his Roman dealer's wife. Their mood takes the melancholy of the 'Treatise On The Veil' and transforms it to a sense of frustrated rage, like someone scribbling lines that make no sense because there is nothing useful to say. There is nothing minimalist or repetetive about them, there are no sombre grays or blacks. The brush strokes that were backgrounded in the Treatise, creating a deep atmosphere, are now in the foreground, like chaos released.

If I find those works a peak in Twombly's career, it's also evident that his work progressed on both the intellectual and emotional levels, and his white sculptures of found material seem almost like a relief. 'Two Squares' recalls Joseph Albers, another leading light of Black Mountain, and when the exhibition returns to painting, there is a greater exuberance, a more daring sense of control. By now living on the Tyrrhenian sea at Gaeta,his work begins to engage heavily with the sea, both in 'Hero and Leandro' where the waves become ever-increasingly harsh strokes of the paintbrush, and 'The Wilder Shores Of Love', whose sea effects in gray Turner might even admire.

Although the nine paintings of 'Untitled' were done for the Italian pavilion at the 1988 Biennale, and reflect 18th century Venice, they mark a progression from light to dark, in which again I find echoes of the Treatise, almost an allegory of life. Something that makes sense in light of the two versions of 'The Four Seasons' which move from the energy of Spring to the gathering darkness and pale light of Winter. Oddly, all the reproductions at the Tate are of the later version (1993-95), but I found the earlier one (1993) more powerful, particularly in the dying bursts of yellow that drop through the blacks on one side of 'Inverno' (Winter). (It's the later version of 'Inverno' which is pictured at the header of this essay).

The exhibition's end, Bacchus (2005) with its estatic vermillion ooze, came as a sort of winking coda to this, confirmation that the viewer had completed the kind of emotional journey those late paintings describe. It's a journey that reflects the progress of Twombly's art; an art concerned with perception and expression. Twombly's work, seen as a progression, takes on a modest, intellectual sort of power, unmistakably a searching for the right way to give emotional power to his apprehension of the world around him. It's a brilliant show, from a painter who's now the last,and maybe just being recognised as one of the greatest, of a crucial American generation.

Footnote: A couple of days after seeing this exhibition, I sat in as the analyst on Channel Five's Major League Baseball show. I mention this because Cy Twombly's father, also named Cy, was a pitcher in the major leagues, probably the second-best ever named Cy. The best, Cy Young, lends his name to the award for baseball's best pitcher. Baseball was surprisingly important to the people at Black Mountain, see Fielding Dawson's writing, particularly 'A Great Day For A Ballgame' (he also wrote 'An Emotional Memoir Of Franz Kline'). The abstract expressionists were always trying to prove they were red-blooded Americans, not longhaired eggheads or effete artistes. Moving to Italy was certainly a way for Twombly to get away from that need, perhaps from his own legacy. My own expat experience has been the opposite, as I always keep getting drawn back to sport as a profession, or part of it. As it is, moving from Cy Twombly to Cy Young doesn't seem unusual, their coexistence doesn't strike me as unnatural, though lots of people out there still think it should be!