JOIN THE DISCUSSION: CY TWOMBLY

Cy Twombly, whose spare childlike scribbles and poetic engagement with antiquity left him stubbornly out of step with the movements of postwar American art even as he became one of the era’s most important painters, died in Rome on 5 July 2011. He was 83.

Please send us your views: What role has Cy Twombly played in modern art? What influence, if any, has Cy Twombly's art had on you?

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Keith Morant, New Zealand, 9 October 2011:

Generally speaking, I do not talk about or give personal assessments of artists (dead or alive). While one may comment objectively on the work, my feelings are that whatever one says, it is an individual statement that easily slips under into the vernacular of criticism. As a creator, while I perceive, feel and acknowledge a lot within myself, I am highly alert to outside comments and the reasoning agendas behind them.

However, in this case I will relent and tell you my honest reaction to this artist.

I have never had a problem with Twombly and have always held him in the highest regard as a painter who traversed the most delicate and distinctly sharper edges of human consciousness. Miro said: “Genius is childhood wilfully regained” and it is with this in mind that I view the oeuvre of Twombly. Another great mind that comes to me when viewing his work is that of the Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. If you read Klein, especially her work with children, you will understand my point.

With regard to the ‘child’ in Twombly, one must remember that the greatest influence on his development was Paul Klee, especially in the combining of the elements of art and language. Klee’s dictum of ‘taking a line for a walk’ was literally adopted by the younger Twombly. His natural penchant for graffiti, with its directness and immediacy of expression became his ongoing line of enquiry. In his adopted home of Gaeta in Italy, this matured into a deep link with the historical and classical antiquity of the Mediterranean coast. He often quoted from the Classical myths in a scrawled hand that exuded an immediate dual impression of both historical record and the child as witness.

Here was a new and deeply meaningful mastery that, at first viewing, could be easily dismissed as irrelevant daubing, but as time passed the questions, as with all true art, were finding their answers.
Here, after all, was a message to be considered. The child is our ancestor and the record is the hand of the child reaching inexorably into the mind of today and the future.

I could say much more on the great achievements of this man but, as I said, it is only the private view of one individual, and therefore not to be overworked.

I conclude by saying that my own personal golden moment with Twombly was earlier this year when, on a trip to Sydney, I visited the Gallery Of New South Wales where they have his great triptych; “Three Studies From The Temeraire’. These works were first shown alongside of J.M.W.Turner’s 1883 masterpiece ‘The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last resting berth’ at London’s National Gallery in 2000. I was overwhelmed by the incredible sense of history that emanated from these works. For me it was a great reminder of how art must serve art and thereby preserve our teleological destiny.

David Kastner, USA, 28 September 2011:

Near the end of the nineteenth century leading into the twentieth, art in Europe went through dramatic changes as artists sought to embrace new paths of creativity. Certainly we can look back to this time to understand how Kandinsky, Malevich, Boccioni, Klee, Brancusi, Picasso, Braque, and others re-wrote the definition of art (painting, etc.).

As these artists traveled along the path of what has become known as modern art, we can only marvel at the extreme measures of creativity, artistic freedom, and pursuit of new directions that came to fruition during this era.

Karl Maenz, Switzerland, 20 September 2011:

I admit prejudice. Travelling through normally orderly Switzerland, graffiti smears too many bridges, trains, sound shields, etc. I know, graffiti – since the Greeks and Romans – testifies of freedom of expression. To me, here and now, it's mostly an assault on public and private property. I once withdrew from a course on Japanese calligraphy when the teacher praised her son’s nocturnal activities in the rail-yards of Lausanne. And art? The repetition of vulgar, puberescent clichés turn me off.

Yet two encounters recently mellowed my prejudice, albeit for slightly different reasons: Last year’s exhibition of Jean Michel Basquiat at the fabulous Beyeler Foundation in Basel, and the wonderful book on Cy Twombly, Cycles and Seasons.

Jean Michel Basquiat (SAMO©) had expressive creativity and energy not seen since the German expressionists. And he lived, expressed, influenced and commercialized “street culture” of the 1970-80’s like no other. Warhol, Rauschenberg & Co. all fade in comparison. This is graffiti as art form and a social phenomenon. I reluctantly lowered my prejudicial barriers – SAMO© is “in”, admittedly with hindsight.

But Twombly? What has post-modern automatic doodling on a blackboard to do with art? Been there, done that - Dada in the 1920’s. But what’s this ongoing fascination, what had I missed? I decided to learn, and got via Amazon “Cy Twombly - Cylces and Seasons”, ISBN 978-1-933045-88-7, U.S.$ 55. It’s a major touring retrospective (some 30 lenders), with 50 years of Twombly’s works, with many large, beautifully executed prints, and texts we can understand.

Twombly was a cosmopolite intellectual with guts to paint, draw and sculpt independent from abstract expressionism, pop, op, minimal, photo realism, neo-conceptualism, etc. He studied and understood the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, the art of the 20th century, the poetry of Keats, Rilke and others, and he travelled and lived in the USA, North Africa, Southern Europe, with extended periods in Italy (he died in Rome). As I began to understand and admire Twombly’s life and intellectual breadth, his thematic creations (Ferragosto, Quattro Stagioni, Bolsena, Fire and Rapture, etc.) gained relevance - though I'm still struggling with the scribbled blackboard. Behind the doodling and infantile drawing, there was an intelligent experience, a rich cultural life. His pictures became to me reminders of ideas, events and things larger than us, and the doodling actually allowed these to remain larger than his images. And the doodles, apparently so spontaneously thrown in, actually took time, months, years, done and redone many times. I became totally fascinated – understood that I needed to pay attention and offer patience – and the likes of Ferragosto continued to talk to me. With Twombly, my prejudicial barriers didn’t just “lower”, as with SAMO©, they disappeared, with a late but sincere apology to the artist.

More than that: Unplanned, my own painting seemed to become enriched by what I had learnt. There was subconscious thought behind the calmer, less imposing images in my latest series “Cycles and Seasons”, on exhibition in September at Galerie En Beauregard, Montreux.

Cycles and Seasons? The title of my Cy Twombly tome? A title does not plagiarism make. Just a reminder of a wonderful artist that I had discarded with prejudice before making an effort to glimpse into his soul.

Karl Maenz, Exhibition 'Cycles and Seasons', Galerie En Beauregard, Montreux, Switzerland, September 2011
www.karl-maenz.com