|
Uploaded 20/11/02
Philosophy in Paint
Cy Twombly
Inverleith House, Royal Botanical Gardens, Edinburgh
9 August-27 October 2002.
The Cy Twombly exhibition appropriately shown
at Inverleith House 'the most ideal gallery in Britain',1 closed
at the end of October. It was an Edinburgh International Festival
exhibition and followed Ed Ruscha, 2001 and Lawrence Weiner (2000).
It was Twombly's first solo exhibition in Scotland.
The exhibition was a survey of 50 years of Twombly's career in
the different media he has explored: sculptures in bronze and plaster-covered
wood, works on paper and photographs. In the context of Inverleith
House, emphasis was on works-based botanical subjects and natural
forms, interpretations of flowers and gardens and landscapes.
The show displays Twombly's undoubted talent and originality. The
works are confident and beautiful. The obvious question is, 'Why
is he not as famous as Robert Rauschenberg or Jasper Johns?' Twombly's
career is an interesting one. His early success was assured. Born
in 1928, in Virginia, Cy Twombly was involved in the Black Mountain
College art-collective in North Carolina. The experiment there was
the brainchild of composer John Cage and was inspired by Marcel
Duchamp and Zen. Twombly was greatly influenced by Robert Motherwell
and Franz Kline. Instead of staying in America and benefiting from
the climate there, which supported abstract expressionist art, Twombly
travelled with Rauschenberg to Africa and Rome on a US Government
grant. In his application he stated: 'What I'm trying to establish
is that modern art isn't dislocated, but something with roots, tradition,
and continuity. For myself, the past is the source … I'm drawn
to the primitive'.
Had Twombly stayed on in the USA, he would have achieved the same
degree of critical attention as his contemporaries. Instead, Twombly
divided his time between New York and Rome. He found inspiration
in classical mythology, poetry and Italian frescoes. He increasingly
worked in metaphorical and allegorical styles. He also made sculptures:
delicate whitewashed arrangements of wood and plaster; the faded
frescoes inspired Twombly's chalky marks on large canvases. His
success was European rather than American, although he exhibited
with Leo Castelli from 1964. His big career successes were in Amsterdam,
Basle, Brussels and Munich. He has lived in Italy since 1957.
'Cy Twombly doesn't fit neatly into art history. He is of the generation
that followed hard on the heels of the abstract expressionists,
but his work doesn't dovetail neatly with contemporaries Jasper
Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He makes work that is literally post-modernist,
and that engages with post-modernism, referencing (pre-modern) literature
and myth, using street graffiti to define his own cryptic calligraphic
language.'2
Twombly is perhaps the most intellectual of the survivors of the
New York School. He was unwilling in the fifties to abandon his
ideas about expressionism. His friends, on the other hand, acquired
celebrity status for their work with found objects and pop art.
Twombly found himself out of synch with the new cultural preoccupations.
Although the Inverleith House exhibition may on first impression
imply that Twombly is a flower painter, his work is full of subtle
references to European culture and classical antiquity. His iconography
includes references to many aspects of European culture from Homer
to Mallarmé. At the Venice Biennale last year he was awarded
the Golden Lion Award when he exhibited his Lepanto series, (1994)
a twelve-part series of works based on a naval battle that helped
to rescue Europe from the Ottoman Empire. Roland Barthes singled
Twombly out when he was looking for an artist to emulate.
In spite of these impressive recommendations, the first impression
of Twombly's Edinburgh exhibition is of messy, childlike pieces
of art. The initial disappointment gave way, however, as one viewed
the works in toto, and as a certain momentum built up as one proceeded
through the exhibition. They were not so immediately comprehensible
as the works he showed as part of the National Gallery, London exhibition,
Encounters, in 2000. But as more works were studied or experienced,
the essence of Twombly was made manifest, in a subtle and distilled
form. 'Roughly speaking, Twombly is concerned with the place where
personal memory and public history collide; that sort-of Jungian
never-never-land we call Western culture. Look at the pictures in
Edinburgh and you see all kinds of histories and memories at work:
scrawled dates suggesting some kind of personal narrative; the history
of flower painting, and of the making of the individual works in
the show; the story of the artist's life.'3
Cy Twombly moved from being an action painter in the 1950s to an
artist who sought to include calligraphic signs and written words.
Barthes commented that Twombly's written words on a canvas or paper
were not writing as much as an idea of writing. There is essentially
an ephemeral, poetic quality in Twombly's work. The individual pieces
should be viewed almost in passing, in the manner that one might
read a Japanese haiku. Like haiku, Twombly's pictures aspire to
fleeting moments of beauty, passing thoughts, memories. In creating
such works, Twombly deconstructs the idea of botanical accuracy:
these works seek to capture the idea of an iris - its haughty
grandeur - but not its actual appearance. To help us in this process,
Twombly scrawls 'iris' and other scrappy bits of text across the
drawings with a red crayon. The artist's intention, his mark is
always in the forefront, not an illusion of the object represented.
It has been suggested that his bewildering use of language - place
names, repeated words and fragments of other texts - are due to
the fact that he was a cryptographer in the US army in the 1950s.4
The supremacy of the mark, is further intensified by Twombly, by
the fact that many works are dominated by the white paper or canvas.
This intensifies the gestural quality of his work.
There is too, an epic quality about Twombly's work, which makes
it difficult to appreciate in reproduction. His scribbled, snatched
lines, the impastoed application of paint, imply a private world.
The amplification of scale, however, assures their rightful place
as a visual poetry of great significance.
1. John McEwam, The Sunday Telegraph.
2. The List Festival Guide, Edinburgh, 8-5 August 2002, p.74.
3. Charles Darwent, 'Remember you're a Twombly', The Independent
on Sunday, 18 August 2002, p.9.
4. Elisabeth Mahoney, 'Flower Power', The Guardian, 20.08.02, p.11.
|
