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Monday 1 December 2008

Traces of self

Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons
Tate Modern, until 14 September

The first impression is of supreme elegance and delicacy, but then the febrile nature of the mark-making, the anxiety in the attempt to communicate, starts to make an impact on the receptive viewer. But any meaning remains cryptic, and the handwriting might easily be decorative rather than semantic. Words appear or are half-painted out. His pictures often have the informality of a scrawled list or a diagram in a notebook. They manage to fuse ideas and feelings in a rush of high-octane creativity which is like an adrenalin buzz. There’s nothing else quite like a Twombly, partly because his interpretation of the artist’s role is so steeped in a raw mixture of intuition and high culture. In 1957 he settled in Italy which has remained his principal home ever since. The move was symbolic as well as actual and marked a diminishment of his involvement with Abstract Expressionism. Thereafter, Twombly brought the classics back into his art — poetry, mythology, history.

By Room 3, the heat is on. The beautiful series of 24 drawings called ‘Poems to the Sea’ has washed over us in Room 2, and various crimes of passion are now making themselves known through imagery which intersperses letters and numbers with orifices and phallic pointed forms — agitation and sometimes aggression are apparently the order of the day in the early 1960s. One especially remarkable painting, ‘Herodiade’, has all the raw energy and freedom that David Hockney was striving for in his early paintings, but without the encumbrance of figuration.

The painting is like an arena for an athlete: a site for the spending of pent-up energy and skill, though the artist has the advantage of leaving a more definite and lasting mark behind — a trace of the self. What should be emphasised is the visceral nature of the work, the smears and gouts of paint, the blood reds and earthy, even excremental browns that start to appear in the hectic savagery of the ‘Ferragosto’ paintings in Room 4, celebrating the Roman festival of fertility and maturity. In some of the most heavily impastoed paintings of his career, Twombly never loses contact with the white (or cream) of the canvas. Here the sexiness is embedded in the paint, however fierce at times the fight to evict it.

More articles from: Andrew Lambirth | this section

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