TIME: Almanac 1995

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ TIME: Almanac 1995 / TIME Almanac 1995.iso / time / 101794 / 10179925.000 < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1995-02-27 | 7.4 KB | 150 lines

<text id=94TT1419> <title> Oct. 17, 1994: Art:The Grafitti of Loss </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994 Oct. 17, 1994 Sex in America </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> ARTS & MEDIA/ART, Page 72 The Grafitti of Loss </hdr> <body> In nuanced abstractions, America's Cy Twombly shores up scribbly fragments against the ruins of the past By Robert Hughes You don't have to be an all-out fan of Cy Twombly's--though he certainly has them--to welcome the show of his paintings and drawings at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Kirk Varnedoe, it is a handsome affair with a cogent, detailed catalog introduction. Neither show nor catalog exactly inflates its subject, and yet one may not be quite convinced that Twombly, despite the past slights inflicted on his reputation in America, is the powerful artist of the first rank that moma would like him to be. By now, with recorded auction prices of $3 million and up, he must be the most fashionable abstract painter alive. Born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928, Twombly belongs to the generation of American artists that followed Abstract Expressionism and had to contend, Oedipus-like, with its influence; he is the Third Man, a shadowy figure, beside that vivid duumvirate of his friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. But unlike them, he made his life in Europe. After some gestation in one of the wombs of the postwar American avant-garde, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, he went to Italy in 1957 and has lived there ever since. His work is cryptic, devoted to nuance and practically impossible to reproduce. No color plate conveys the way those little scribbles and blots can keep the whitish-blond surface of a big Twombly in coherent tension. Since reproduction creates reputation, this put his work at a disadvantage. Besides, Twombly could not have had less to do with the direction American art in the '60s took toward Minimalism and the iconic blare of Pop Art; being an expatriate counted against him in a New York art world saturated with cultural chauvinism. He had sided with the beautiful Italian losers, against history. His American reputation bottomed out in 1964 with a show of nine florid paintings called Discourse on Commodus. They were trashed as a fiasco, in print and by word of mouth. Commodus was the degenerate son of Marcus Aurelius; he became Emperor in the 2nd century A.D., went mad and was strangled. Given the New York art world's self-absorption at the time, it seems fitting that Commodus' assassin was an athlete named Narcissus. Perhaps because of the trauma of their reception, the Commodus paintings are not in moma's show. In any case, Twombly was repatriated to America 20 years later by the enthusiasm that younger European artists and collectors felt for him. He acquired American imitators. Twombly was one of the first American artists to interest himself in graffiti. Forty years ago, the term didn't suggest city kids' spraying their aggressive colored tags all over subway cars and buildings. It wasn't bound up with the seizure and degradation of public space. It was, so to speak, more muted and pastoral: harmless scratches, small obscenities, chalk on Roman distemper. To adopt graffiti to the painted canvas was to pay homage to European art informel--Fautrier, Wols and especially Jean Dubuffet. Their influence plays on Twombly's earliest paintings of the 1950s, with their lumpish glandular forms, the movement of the paint slowed up by mixing it with earth but then accelerated by a nervous, hairy scratching around the edges. He had to deal with Abstract Expressionism. Everyone in the late '50s and early '60s did; that came with the fact of being an American artist. But his solution was cunning: he created an irritably stylish version of Ab-Ex gesture, in which the all-over squiggles of Pollock got absorbed into the loopier, body-based rhythms of '40s De Kooning. In effect, he turned Pollock's rococo lacework into its cruder cousin, graffiti. Did this imply a degree of loss? Certainly; but loss (and a barely suppressed anger at it) is one of the chief themes of Twombly's art. Its model is the palimpsest, the document in which a later text effaces the earlier. Through his paintings trickles a current of double nostalgia--on the one hand, for the closed-off "heroic" possibilities of Modernism and, on the other, for the ancient Mediterranean world, experienced at a remove by living in modern Italy. Love (or its facsimile) among the ruins. Twombly will insert "dirty" bits in a painting--a little graffiti-style penis, odd smears of paint with the look of dried sperm--in the hope they will enhance some sense of a Baroque cityscape--but much of the time, they don't. Though lyrically involved with the Italian past, Twombly seldom quotes directly from its dead artists. An exception is Leonardo, whose temperament--combining a fastidious eye for minute incident with a pessimistic, even apocalyptic imagination--evidently intrigues him.The most successful trace is in Leda and the Swan, 1962, which enlarges the turbid vortices of the Deluge studies into a frenzy of scribbles and feathers, sexual and comic at the same time. In sum, Twombly is a textbook case of High and Low in one parcel: an Alexandrian painter in love with entropy and yet capable of toughness. He can summon a carnivalesque energy, as in Ferragosto IV, 1961. He enjoys the blooming and buzzing of nature, though his responses to it in recent years--evocations of the rural hill landscapes around his studio in Gaeta--are formulaic and hark back to Dubuffet and, earlier, to Soutine's Ceret paintings. The phrases he writes on the canvas are place names and snatches of poetry, done in a faint cursive script that is always on the point of trailing off into illegibility; they suggest fatigue and forgetting. But the structure of the paintings themselves, the placement of the marks on the big field, is energetic and often brilliant. The sight of all these orts and fragments in Twombly's pictures seems to have convinced his more ardent admirers that he's a classicist, saturated in the myths and literature of the ancient Mediterranean, exuding them from every pictorial pore. All he has to do is scrawl a wobbly triumph of galatea or et in arcadia ego on a canvas, and suddenly he's up there with Roberto Calasso, if not Edward Gibbon. When an audience that has lost all touch with the classical background once considered indispensable in education sees virgil written in a picture, it accepts it as a logo, like the alligator on a Lacoste shirt. The mere dropping of the name, or the citation of a tag, suggests that a classical past still lives, solid and whole, below the surface. But a toenail paring isn't a body. No wonder that the work Twombly was doing 30 years ago, before the debate about Post-Modernism blew up, now seems like a talisman to certain Post-Modernists. Po-Mo's relation to the past was all about the sort of skittering, rather affectless quotation, the shoring of fragments against the ruins, that is written all over Twombly's work. One detects the artist's own hand behind the hyperbole of his admirers. But he is still a considerable painter. </body> </article> </text>