In 1962, in a studio overlooking Campo de’ Fiori in Rome, the city he had moved to in 1957 from the US and which he still regards as his home, Cy Twombly made a painting that could have been construed as a calculated affront to — even a philistine rejection of — la Citta Eterna with its magical light and fountains and churches, and all the ruins of classical civilizations.
Twombly’s practice in those years was to cover the whole of a large room with canvas and then start working close to the floor or up under the ceiling, wherever his eye took him. When many days had passed and all the walls were smeared with smudges of paint and fecal-looking stains and spidery unravellings of graffiti, he would hack off a section that looked as if it might have the makings of a painting and nail it to the wall without a stretcher.
Untitled of 1962 was typical of the work coming out of his studio during this time: with its spurts and scrawls and gougings and deeply incised, nearly legible scribbles (the New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl once described the mess of Twombly marks as being like what a dog does when it’s getting ready to lie down), it looked like a panel from a particularly unruly public convenience. Or, as an Italian reviewer remarked at the time, like the proliferating graffiti on the scarred marble of Rome’s walls and monuments.
“His is an act of desecration, vandalization, of bringing the language of abstract expressionism out of the realm of personal expression and into the world of writing and language,” the American critic and great Twombly champion, Kirk Varnedoe, wrote of the 1962 painting. (Twombly needed a champion in America for a 25-year period, beginning in the mid-60s, when his Europhile and old-world painterly tendencies combined to keep him out of fashion.) “Everything about its gushiness, its expression,” Varnedoe continued, “is filtered again through the idea of defacement and negation. This is not the cool, beautiful continuity of abstract expressionism, but a rather jerky, hesitant, intermittent negotiation of a set of signs.”
The signs in question were ones that would be familiar to any playground doodler or rest-room dawdler: gash-like orifices, rampant phalluses, rude, cartoon-like ejaculations of paint. Rosalind Krauss has written about the “crude violence” and the “obsessional formulation of bodily parts” that characterized Twombly’s paintings of the early 1960s.
Twombly first visited Rome in the company of Robert Rauschenberg during an eight-month tour of north Africa and Europe between 1952 to 1953. They had met at the Art Students League in New York and had attended the progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina together in the summer of 1952, where their teachers had included Franz Kline and the poet Charles Olson, as well as Rauschenberg’s future friend and long-term collaborator, John Cage.
When Twombly returned to Rome in 1957, he returned alone, and moved into a large studio with views of the Colosseum. Coincidentally living in Rome at the same time, in a draughty palazzo off the Piazza Venezia with his young family, was a writer who, although nearly a generation older than Twombly (who was born in 1928), seems to have shared his outlook and preoccupations, and even his temperament, to a marked degree.
It is unclear whether John Cheever and Twombly ever met during Cheever’s 12-month sojourn in Rome. Twombly crops up in Rachel Cohen’s book A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, but it is in the context of Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham and their bohemian downtown New York crowd. Cheever, the so-called “Chekhov of the suburbs,” mixed in different circles: for decades, the locus of his fiction remained the drawing rooms, swimming pools, churches, clubhouses and beaches of the Hudson Valley he had moved into with his wife and children in the early 1950s. Cheever was never wealthy. But (like Twombly) he had a naturally patrician manner that suggested breeding and money, and a notion of him as part of the country squirearchy — a kind of laminated placemat figure complete with hunting dogs, wooded estate, staff and saddle horses — took root. (Cheever’s father had been a prosperous shoe manufacturer who lost his fortune in the stock-market crash of 1929; Twombly’s father was a former pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, a former pro golfer and, in later years, the head of the athletic department at a small college.)
RSS