Twombly’s “literariness” is something that has consistently told against him, along with his fancy foreign ways and his “insinuating elegance.” But his art, as Serota acknowledges in the catalogue, has always been elusive and, for many people, even enthusiasts of contemporary art, unfathomable. Twombly himself has maintained an unusual reticence. In the mid-50s, he wrote a short statement for the Italian art journal L’Esperienza moderna: “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.” More than 40 years later, in 2000, he gave an interview to David Sylvester. In between there was nothing. He needed somebody to speak for him. And when, apparently unbeknownst to them both, he wasn’t being ventriloquized by Cheever, he looked to the poets and the ancients, whose words he then tended to violate and smear and inter in paint.
A good number of his drawings, paintings and sculptures consist of little other than an inscription. “Twombly writes as if he were seeking out the meaning of the poetic words through the physical act of producing their graphic signs,” Richard Shiff has written. “The word as disembodied sign becomes the word as embodied mark, imbued with the spirit of a gesture and located in a particular place and time.”
Twombly’s has long been an art of indirection; a palimpsest of obfuscations and excisions, of rubbings out and submergings. Like Rauschenberg, who as a young man spent three weeks erasing a drawing he had acquired from Willem de Kooning, Twombly, in Serota’s words, evokes rather than describes.
Nowhere is his genius for evocation — for suggesting the mood or feeling of a place or a moment — more apparent than in the set of 24 drawings he made in 1959 called Poems to the Sea. “The sea is white three-quarters of the time, just white — early morning,” Twombly told Sylvester. “The Mediterranean at least ... is always just white, white, white. And then, even when the sun comes up, it becomes a lighter white.”
Of the same coast, Cheever, the unseen companion of his days, once wrote: “The light was golden, but then the golden light changed to another color, deeper and rosier ... . Then it paled off, it got so pale that you could see the smoke from the city rising into the air and then through the smoke the evening star turned on, burning like a street light, and I began to count the other stars as they appeared, but very soon they were countless.”
Twombly is a celebratory painter, as Cheever was a celebratory writer. His hope, he once wrote, was “to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream”; it was to hymn “the sense of life as a privilege, the earth as something splendid to walk on.”
RSS