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Thursday 4 December 2008

Traces of self

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

Twombly cares deeply about poetry, in particular Keats, Rilke, Pessoa, Eliot, Catullus and Archilochos, whom he calls his favourite poet. ‘I like something to jumpstart me — usually a place or a literary reference or an event that took place, to start me off. To give me a clarity or energy.’ Perhaps surprisingly for a painter so involved with the plastic nature of paint, so drawn to its expressive qualities, he has never hesitated to involve his art with the literary (a term of abuse for supposedly ‘pure’ painters). Here is one of the fundamental contradictions at the heart of Twombly’s work. He seeks access to the epic spirit he finds in classical literature, and mates it with a modern sensibility disposed to imperfection and the fragmentary.

Room 5 features some of the Bolsena paintings, in which one can only marvel at the extraordinary dynamic which holds together what should fly apart, while Room 6 is Twombly’s blackboard answer to Minimalism. Room 7 is one of the best rooms of the show, containing just four lucid canvases from the elegiac series ‘Nini’s Paintings’ (1971). These pictures, made in tribute to the death of a friend, have a smooth serene rhythm like the surge of the deep ocean, in contrast to the manic activity of waves breaking on a rocky shore which seems to characterise so much of Twombly’s earlier work. They seem far out of reach in their scrolling, undulating, looping forms, and to mingle earth, sea and sky in their brown and blue palette on a pale ground.

Next comes a room of sculptures. Twombly sees no distinction between painting and sculpture — it’s the activity of making that counts. He likes the formality of building objects, which he sees as very different from the ‘anything-goes’ paintings. The spirit of Giacometti hovers over Twombly’s sculptures, which are predominantly white-painted, even when made of bronze. ‘White paint is my marble,’ he says. Revealingly, he describes the Mediterranean, which infuses so many of his subjects and images, as ‘always just white, white, white’.

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