13 CY Twombly Art-Solemnity of Masterful Abstraction
CY Twombly-canvas sold at record price
I always found abstract art fuzzy until…
“I work in waves, because I’m impatient. Because of a certain physicality, of lack of breath from standing. It has to be done and I do take liberties I wouldn’t have taken before”
C Y Twombly’s tranquil power of art caught me by the jugular his canvas being sold at record price left me agape. I always found abstract art fuzzy, when I was a mere visitor to several art exhibitions and galleries, growing up. With no technical education in Art, handholding my father for weekend gate aways, they looked distant, unfathomable and complex.
Until two years back, when I started to paint on canvas, graduating from pottery/wood/fabric, that I realized the fun and depth of an abstract painting. For me, my Abstract paintings are personal, intimate and direct conversation between my thoughts and my brush, clawing on a present or emotions fleeting. It is in the moment, unique and distinct, which may not be replicated ever, if the creative surge is let pass.
That is when I realized how Abstract Art, has found its place above fine art, still life, portrait or even nude canvases, which could be replicated at some point of time, but never an art of abstraction. It harps on techniques of minimalism in terms of use of colour, stokes and form to create an illusion of visual reality, independent from visual references in the world. An Abstract canvas is an offspring of the artist’s observation mingling with his/her imaginative self, created as a combination of what he/she visualizes around him/her and what he/she wishes that to be, lending the canvas an extra-world experience. It becomes a personal statement of the artist, told in his/her ways, emanating from the core of his/her thought without any external influence — thus making it original, concise and hence unique.
And this is where I was drawn to Cy Twombly’s amazing works of abstraction.
“When I work, I work very fast, but preparing to work can take any length of time”
Edwin Parker CY Towmbly Jr (1928–2011), was an American Painter, sculptor and Photographer. An artist who was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928 and moved to Italy in the 1950s, is in many ways very French. In the Salle des Bronzes Antiques at the Louvre museum in Paris, where ancient Greek armour waits silently for wars that will never come again, the room’s vast ceiling is painted by CY Twombly with a bright expanse of blue, its intensity illuminated by silver and gold suns and moons as if the light of the Mediterranean were infusing the museum with desire and danger.
But his signature works come in the form of acutely minimalistic abstracts deploying the barest rudiments of art — jots, dots, lines, doodles, dashes, loops, scribbles, scratches, little glyphs, weird ruins, rising Gothic skeleton structures, ziggurats, wobbly frame shapes, and (perhaps more effectively than any Western artist who ever lived) hard-to-read handwritten words and phrases, whole poems, and the names of ancient poets and places — Twombly has been able to make an art that rises to the level of epic poetry and fills you up with the sweep of history and fiction. He sometimes scratched the canvases with his fingernails or used pencils, palette knives or brush tips to leave lines in the paint, prompting poet Frank O’Hara to write in 1955: “A bird seems to have passed through the impasto with cream-colored screams and bitter claw marks.”
“Every line is the actual experience with its own unique story”
Contemporary to and initially influenced by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Jones, Towbley became an emerging figure in the New York school of Art, between 1955–1959, purging figurative aspect of his work, and encouraging as simplified form of abstraction. He became fascinated with tribal art and used their style to invoke primitivism in his canvas, reversing the normal evolution of the New York School.
His early days spent in US army as Cryptologist, impacted his work which can be visualised in the above provided canvas.
What seems like chalk scribbles on a slate is actually an oil-based house paint and crayon artwork.
What’s interesting is the way he produced this artwork. He sat on the shoulders of a friend, who kept on walking along the length of the canvas, enabling Twombly to create fluid lines. The painting’s then owner, Audrey Irmas, a philanthropist, parted with the painting to raise funds for her foundation for social justice. Interestingly, Irmas bought the painting for $3.85 million in 1990.
“I never really separated painting and literature”
Twombly often inscribed on paintings the names of mythological figures during the 1960s.Twombly’s move to Gaeta in Southern Italy in 1957 gave him closer contact with classical sources. From 1962 he produced a cycle of works based on myths including Leda and the Swan and The Birth of Venus whichwere frequent themes of Twombly’s 1960s work. Between 1960 and 1963 Twombly painted the rape of Leda by the god Zeus/Jupiter in the form of a Swan six times, once in 1960, twice in 1962 and three times in 1963.
To grasp just how much experimental and staged pictorial and graphic information springs from Twombly’s drawings, recalling that immediately after the 19-year old Jean-Michel Basquiat saw the 1979 Whitney Museum retrospective — which included several of these exact drawings, notably Apollo and the Artist, in which the words “Apollo” and “artist” appear on a surface surrounded with free-floating notations — Basquiat aesthetically detonated and began making his own assembled works with words, graffiti, crowns, arrows, and names. In this genesis moment he took Twombly’s speed of history and amped it up to the speed of life. In that same Whitney show Basquiat saw the beautiful Ode to Psyche, with its great arch at the bottom of the page, counting numbers enumerated, flying words and phrases like Keats’s “kiss to outnumber, at tender eye-dawn of Aurorean Love.” Feel the luminous atmospheric streamers and charged particles that must have ignited in Basquiat’s mind in the same ways that Twombly must have experienced with Rauschenberg
“To my mind, one does not put oneself in place of the past; one only adds a new link”
As the astronauts made their celestial flight that summer, Twombly followed the press coverage closely. The mission, he said, ‘filled his thoughts’. Many had questioned the wisdom of sending a man to the moon. Novelist Norman Mailer had written that he ‘hardly knew whether the space programme was the noblest expression of the 20th century or the quintessential statement of our fundamental insanity.’ For Twombly, with his keen interest in Classical mythology, the tension between madness and reason was echoed in the emotional impulses of the Greek gods Dionysus and Apollo. It seemed apt that the space mission was named after the latter. Untitled [Bolsena] is a rare example of Twombly responding to contemporary events. The cool overlays of white paint interspersed with scorched black lines evoke the upward thrust of the rocket’s journey as it arches its way into the unknown. Numbers, diagrams and graphs reflect the calculations made back on Earth. Whatever the rationale, the painting in its entirety is a hypnotic rhapsody to human endeavour. Just as his star was in the ascendant, Twombly abandoned the epicentre of modern art and moved to Rome.
In Italy Twombly became fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of nature, which were characterised by ‘innumerable dissections, diagrams and codes’.
According to the art historian and great supporter of Towbley’s work, Kirk Varnedoe (1946–2003), Twombly’s departure was not as inexplicable as it first appeared. The academically-minded artist wanted to fully understand the history of art and his place in it. Europe provided him with the means to do that, and besides, he ‘liked the life’. In Italy he became fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of nature, which were characterised by ‘innumerable dissections, diagrams and codes, driven by a demon of secret knowledge, and freighted with a private poetry of obsession’. Over the next few years, Twombly’s style evolved to incorporate his study of Classical and Renaissance art. His canvases became less frenetic as the anxiety of his New York years gave way to paintings with a more visceral atmosphere. Works began to allude to Greek tragedies and French poetry, with scribbled references scratched into the paintwork.
Criticism Of Cy Twombly’s Work:
“I swear if I had to do this over again, I would just do the paintings and never show them” — Cy Twombly
Twombly occupies a unique and bizarre place in the story of modern art. His paintings — let’s call them that — refer in a visceral, unmistakable way to the human body, but have nothing in common with figurative art. Neither are they abstract, for their fields of organic suggestiveness break every purist abstract rule going — and that’s even before you get to the words written on them.
No wonder it took others decades to be even partially understand this artist. The earliest paintings here are fierce, wilfully chaotic psychic meltdowns that strip art down to something not far from an obscenity on a subway wall. Twombly’s early art has less in common with his later erudite sources such as Homer or the historian Edward Gibbon than it does with Allen Ginsberg’s Beat poem Howl.
He delights in reducing the lofty seriousness of the abstract expressionist painters who dominated New York art at the time to something scabrous, base, dirty and depraved.
His art reveals the raw violence at the heart of Twombly’s imagination. He is the most civilised and civilising of recent artists, a man who read endlessly and expects the same of his beholders.
But a tension between the civilised and the barbaric runs right through his art. It is the very essence of it. Both the savage and the scholarly — or as Lévi-Strauss might have put it, the raw and the cooked — are part of what makes Twombly a genius for our time.
Twombly’s rawness never left him. It keeps his art from turning into lyrical irrelevance. He is truly, and unforgivingly, our contemporary. Twombly saw the primitive roots of the civilised, and sowed the seeds for art’s rebirth as a thing of blood and love.
Art Critic & columnist, Jerry Saitz rightly observed, “Thus Twombly has given us rising and setting suns, the passage of a day or a life or an era, ships ablaze on flowered grounds, and this final call to psychic and physical shore. The cycle is complete. All that remains is every nerve in your body straining with this overload of irrational beauty, desire, mannered pretension, incipient need, esoteric information, cryptic incantation, and what look like bird footprints run through milky paint to some further Mediterranean shore.”
It is interesting to note the ‘high’ art Towbley produced, which fetches the mind boggling price in any Art action, is a legacy created overly through ‘low’ art techniques of often just graphite scribbles.
His Art is housed in several Museums around the world including : Menil Collection,Houston, Tate Modern,London, Museum Brandhorst, Munich MoMA, NYC Musée du Louvre, Paris
A good details of his life and work is chronicled and featured by Cy Twombly Foundation.
Author’s Note: I can call myself a Student of Art without attending art school on the same. I learn about the subject mainly from my visual experience and the readings I do.From the day I discovered Cy Towmbly’s canvases I wanted to read, learn and understand the person, his mind and the creative process behind this Brilliant scribbles. It took me three days to come to writing this article, which I think is only the tip of the iceberg, given the enormity, veracity and depth of his work. It was difficult to choose just six of his work from an ocean of distinctive different style, concept and technique. https://nefelibata.in/2023/04/21/drawing-graphite-sketch/A genius, from every angle he can be studied for years without being really understood. But I consider it a good start and would really like you to share your view/trivia/anecdotes that you can conjure about this amazing artist. It can be a discussion on Art worth its grain.
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