Vestiges: Cy Twombly

The First Part of the Return from Parnassus, by Cy Twombly (USA) 1961. Photo by whistlepunch, via Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Vestiges: Cy Twombly

Even after  studying his work for many years, and recently reading Chalk, a hefty biography of Cy Twombly, I still feel like I barely know him at all.

Twombly is an eternal paradox: his art is possibly the most free, loose, intuitive, raw, and expansive of anyone, anywhere, ever. Yet he is and always was incredibly guarded, private, contained, nailed shut. Artists by their very nature express themselves, but we know precious little about Twombly, his life, what he felt, or how he viewed the world.

What were his favourite bands? What kind of food did he like? What novels did he read for fun? What made him cry? Who did he vote for? Who did he love, and why?

Joshua Rivkin’s book, Chalk, is a stunning work of poetry, an intimate inquiry from a besotted fan of Twombly’s work. It is relentlessly thorough, sifting through every possible avenue to find Twombly and present something of him to his admiring audience, or to defend his work to his many detractors. And yet, we, along with the author, emerge from the pages empty handed. 

Rivkin asks, “What artist hasn’t wished to undo all the bounds that hold them steady to the earth?”

If some artists can be mysterious, enigmatic, contradictory, and elusive, Twombly takes it to the next level.

He was massively successful, popular, and eventually, filthy rich, yet he lurked behind the scenes and in the shadows, avoiding the spotlight entirely. He rarely attended his own openings. He seldom gave interviews, rationing out a measly handful- only four known- over a sixty-year career. He created ultra-contemporary works but eschewed the trends entirely to live among relics and ruins in the past in Rome. His paintings are instinctive, abstract, messy, and modern, huge works sprawling floor to ceiling, where the paint, graphite and crayon are tactile and raw. But his work is not about the now, and in some ways, not about the paint itself at all. Cy’s art is about the past, about poetry, fragmented scrapbooks of ancient civilizations, Etruscan artifacts, classical myth, the vestiges of the old Mediterranean world. 

Cy was a southern man, American through and through, but lived most of his adult life in the old world of Italy. He was from Virginia- his father a professional baseball player- but lived in aristocratic splendour in several palaces in Rome, in a cultured network of wealthy Italians who were patrons of the arts. His work was widely panned, mocked, and derided, but within just a decade of his debut, Cy’s art was selling to savvy, established collectors, and fetching tens of millions in his lifetime.

It was an open secret that he loved men, too, involved with a younger man for 47 years, but he was married to an Italian Baroness for even longer. They never divorced and lived together with their son for most of their lives, remaining close until death in old age, yet there are almost no known pictures of them together. There are few photos of Cy with his longtime partner Nicola Del Roscio, either, but Cy left his estate to his foundation with Nicola in charge, to maintain the walls of privacy and the strategic curation of information and images after his passing.

We do not even know the details of his death, at the age of 83. “From cancer,” is the only news that came from his estate. The kind of cancer, and his experience of illness, have not been disclosed. 

Cy was well liked and people sought out his company, finding him smart and funny. But he spent most of his time in solitude or with his wife or partner Nicola, avoiding parties and exhibition shindigs whenever possible. He sometimes ghosted people who thought they were his friends, slipping out of their lives without explanation, polite and evasive if their paths crossed again. 

His closest lifelong friend was the artist Robert Rauschenberg. They were briefly lovers in their younger days, then travelled to North Africa together, and occasionally worked together or showed together over the years. 

The photographer Sally Mann was also a longtime friend from his early days in Virginia. When he returned home in his later years to work there, Sally spent a lot of time with him, documenting his studio and his work with her camera over a decade. In the vast majority of the photos, Cy himself is absent. 

Twombly’s work is wild, impulsive, monumental, ecstatic, liberated. His massive canvases are messy with free-wheeling swirls and daubs and drips. They are incredibly elemental, like storms, like bodily fluids, like viscera. They thrum with primitive, primal energy, reminiscent of cave paintings and geoglyphs and effigy mounds. Yet there is something urbane and sophisticated about them too, an erudite elegance you can’t quite put your finger on. They wield a powerful spell in person, with visitors describing intense emotional experiences, even religious ecstasy. The mysterious infusion of classical myth and poetry is woven in graffiti and crayon handwriting, fragments of the past coming through the layers like an archeological dig. In their presence, we feel the old world in the new. We can’t help but feeling we are in the presence of the sublime. 

Twombly has been an enormous influence of my own work, where I declare the same intuitive freedom to follow my internal instincts for gestures, layers, and floating ephemera. The street-vibe of neoexpressionists like Basquiat, and pop-cluttered references to Warhol, Rauschenberg, are more obvious inspiration in my art, along with the bounty of collage materials in Raymond Saunders’ work, or Kurt Schwitters’. And I look, too, always, to Antoni Tapies for the tactile, raw, mark-making frenzied rituals of creation. But Twombly has been there from the beginning, especially in the presence of pencil and crayon, the layers of scribbled words, the breadth of inspiration.. 

As a writer, words have always been an essential aspect of my artwork, peeking through paint, submerged under imagery, fragmented from magazine ads, reduced to shapes for aesthetic oomph or popping out at random. Twombly resisted any connection to graffiti, feeling his words were more lyrical, emotional, literary. He felt graffiti was transgressive, an act of vandalism or protest. I don’t make this distinction for myself: I claim graffiti’s trajectory before and beyond the contemporary application. The word comes from the Italian “graffiare,” and means “to scribble or scratch.” I trace the urge to write one’s presence backwards through time from the modern streets back through the mists of time, to inscriptions uncovered in old Pompeii and Egypt, to the scribbles and images in caves and etchings in rock from people all over the planet.

I share, too, Twombly’s primacy of poetry, and its longstanding connection to art history. My art is filled with poetry, references both overt and submerged. Twombly’s taste spanned classical and French symbolism and modernist- Virgil, Catullus, Mallarme, Rilke. Mine is a medley of obscure contemporary writers, and of Yeats and e.e. cummings and poet-songwriters like Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon. Nonetheless, like Twombly, my work cannot be separated from poetry, it is foundational even if not obvious or even visible to the viewer. It is embedded in the very act of making what I make. “I never really separated painting and literature,” Cy famously said, quoted by Mary Jacobus in her masterful treatise Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint.

If historically, poetry in art was most often illustrated, not scrawled in word fragments that permeated abstraction, it was nonetheless an integral, recurring theme. Narrative paintings on Biblical and mythological stories have been the western canon’s constant bedrock, and such stories, are, of course, more often than not, poetry. The pre-Raphaelites and their followers frequently illustrated poems like Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” or John Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.” Japanese and Chinese art history frequently combined calligraphic poetry with images. Modern, abstract and collage artists in Twombly’s circle and beyond, and Robert Motherwell comes to mind, were keenly interested in the intersection of art and poetry and collaborated as writers and artists on experimental creations combining both. The list goes on.

For Twombly, homage could be as simple as scratching “Virgil” across the canvas, or Homer (and Alexander Pope) could inspire a massive, ten-part work, Fifty Days at Ileum. Another series, Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor, pays homage to the first-century BC Roman poet. He also drew from George Seferis, from Rainer Maria Rilke, from Sappho, and from Stephane Mallarme, to name a few. Books of poetry in Cy’s possession were often found marked up with paint splotches, crossed out lines, and pencilled in notes.

Many artists employ asemic writing, that is, the form and gesture itself of writing as an aesthetic act, created without a connection to actual words. Asemic writing is foundational to my own work. Twombly uses asemic practices in most of his works, using the form and gesture of writing in his “blackboard paintings” and everything else he made. Asemic writing mimics the truth that words formed in other languages have a visual appearance and no interpretation for those who don’t know the keys. I use snippets from multi-language books and newspapers, signifying the palimpsest of meaning bubbling up from diverse voices, present even when there is no interpreter.

Twombly worked as a cryptographer in the military when he was a young man, which contributed to his fascination with codes and written symbols. I connect words, poetry, and the physical act of writing to belief, ritual, and the mystical, spiritual power of creation. In magic practices the world over, words and images both have the power of conjure. Words are prayer, a direct connection to God. Words preserve personal and cultural narratives. God used words to bring the very world into being, in the beginning, when he said “Let there be…” and there was. Whether the words are legible or mysterious marks, readable or hidden, they are, for me, as essential and powerful as images and go hand in hand in the kind of art I’m driven to create.

I also share Twombly’s fascination with archeology and ancient history. The past infuses Twombly’s ultra-modern art, something that for him was not a duality but a conviction of truth. 

“What I am trying to establish is that Modernist Art isn’t dislocated, but something with roots, tradition, and continuity. For myself the past is the source, for all art is vitally contemporary,” Cy stated. If modernism was largely an act of rejection of tradition, Cy saw a bigger picture. Abstraction, lyric, emotionalism, reduction of forms was not a rejection of the ancient but rather a revival. Modern art and even modern science and medicine has not proved itself, after all, as the shiny new path of rationalism, but in the long-game has revealed a return to old ways. 

We have not purged religion, ritual, herbology, hunting, war, magic, storytelling, or “primitivism” from the page, but rather, have returned to it. Everything new recycles the old. Like Cy, I collect cultural artifacts. If my studio is full of “contemporary archeology” from pop culture, dolls and Smurfs and plastic gewgaws, it is also full of icons and amulets, wooden German angels, Roman rings and coins and dice, a Tunisian ceramic doll, Ethiopian crosses, Berber talismans, Mexican stanhope rosaries, fox teeth, a Congolese nkisi nkondo or nail fetish doll, and even medical specimens, human rib bones. Pop art is part of the human story. But the human story and pop art itself are predicated on the lineage of older artifacts. 

My longstanding subscription to Archeology Today, and love for ancient artifacts, is connected to my unending passion for art history as a whole, all eras, all cultures. Historically, every mask, every tool, every vessel, every piece of jewelry, was handmade, and more often than not, ritualistic or holy. Art.

If my art owes a major debt to Twombly, if it has a long-running intimacy with his, still, I cannot know him. The immediacy of his work, the immersion into emotion that one experiences in its presence, does not bind the viewer or other makers to him. Cy remains elusive even when he surrounds us, even when we enter the space he created, the paint he touched. Some people are open books, see-through, transparent. Others guard their privacy tightly, during their lives and after it. 

Theories abound on the why of it all. Most blame Cy’s hidden side on early and ongoing criticism. His work was widely panned, with a famous ArtNews review by Donald Judd in the early ‘60s calling it a “fiasco.” Judd wrote about Cy’s Nine Discourses on Commodus, “In each of these paintings there are a couple of swirls of red paint mixed in with a little yellow and white and placed high on a medium-gray surface. There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line. There isn't anything to the paintings.” Frequent criticism derided his art as scribbling. He sold nothing at major shows in those days. The story goes that Cy retreated into himself and away from the art world, wounded by hostile reception. 

The vitriol continued even after his death. Charlie Finch did not mince his distaste at all on Artnet: “Twombly was a no-talent elitist closet case who shamelessly borrowed high cultural references from Homer to Cavafy to justify ugly undisciplined blobs of house paint gagging the senses for mural-sized stretches of canvas which mindless idiots, hiding behind the loose skirts of Twombly's pretensions, overpaid for, making the artist superrich and amplifying his phony, grandiose indulgences.”

But every artist faces the bad review and the zero sale exhibition. It’s the usual story, not the exception. Cy’s work began selling anyways, eventually fetching exorbitant prices in his lifetime. Certainly, too, an intelligent man, he knew the game. 

Other theories blame society and homophobia. Life has historically been difficult for gay and bisexual people, forced to hide their love and desire to avoid facing persecution. True as this is, Cy broke out in the ‘60s when the times were a’changing, and countless gay artists of the era approached the world as flamboyant dandies. 

Perhaps Cy told us all we need to know about the mystery of his seeming inaccessibility. In a 1994 interview with Dodie Kazanjian for Vogue Magazine- one of only four known interviews given over his six-decade career- Twombly said simply, “I was brought up to think you don't talk about yourself.”

In the age of Springer and Oprah, and the barrage of reality TV that followed, in times of over-sharing and confession, of influencer fame and never-ending selfies, those who live apart from the public gaze are anomalies. Like the cryptic writing and dazzling array of historic, mythological, and literary allusions in Cy’s work, Cy himself is a puzzle that remains. Here and there, we glimpse bits and pieces of biography. But we remain outside of him. And perhaps this is how it should be. 

Humans are naturally curious, nosy, even, about others. We want to know their story. As a reader and a writer and an artist, too, I hunger for the whys, the juicy morsels of drama that make up a life. But Cy owes me nothing. He doesn’t know I exist. How then can I expect that I should know him?

To those who adored his art, and those who didn’t, Cy preferred not to explain his work. His art was something to simply be experienced, something to feel, something that would provoke different emotions in every viewer.

A very dissimilar artist, surrealist Rene Magritte, spoke nonetheless the same desire for his work. He tantalizingly providing us with an array of symbolic images, then asking us to simply experience the images rather than resolving them. “The feeling we experience while we look at a picture is not to be distinguished from the picture or from ourselves. The feeling, picture, and ourselves are united in one mystery.” 

Having Twombly's art to experience is everything, even if we want more.

If Cy had his way, he would remove even this bridge between us entirely.

“I swear if I had to do this over again, I would just do the paintings and never show them. And then after I’m dead, they could talk about them all they want. I’m just not interested in myself that way…Why should I have to talk about the paintings. I do them, isn’t that enough?”

It is. It has to be.
​
Lorette C. Luzajic
 

part of Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor, by Cy Twombly (USA) 1994. Photo by Keith Ewing, via Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0

Two from Quattro Stagioni, by Cy Twombly (USA) 1995. Photo by Anna Toss. Via Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0