In Memoriam: Cy Twombly
A few years ago I went to MoMA and headed, as I always do, for the design galleries on the 3rd floor. As I passed through the atrium, though, I got stopped in my tracks by a painting. It was Cy Twombly’s “Summer,” part of his Four Seasons series (which is owned by MoMA):
I have no formal art education, so didn’t know that I was looking at a work by one of America’s most prominent post-war artists. All I knew was that I had been reached. I absorbed “Summer” and the rest of the seasons for a good long time, and walked away determined to find more of his work, and find out more about him.
I learned that he was then still alive, living and working in Italy. He moved there in the 1950s, just as the center of gravity for modern art was shifting away from Europe and toward America.
And he was not just in where he painted, but also what. He reached back into myth and poetry for inspiration, rather than looking at the soup cans and cartoons of contemporary culture. He was moved by the story of Leda and the Swan and the words of Catullus, Hildegard von Bingen, Rilke, and others.
This was pretty unfashionable at the time, but he didn’t seem to care. He also didn’t seem to care much about being witty with his art, or engaging in biting social commentary, or exposing hypocrisies and injustices. Instead, I get the impression that he wanted to do something almost unthinkable for a modern artist: he wanted to convey strong positive emotions: awe, rapture, love, joy.
He felt these emotions while working. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture,” he said in a rare public comment, and after finishing one “I usually have to go to bed for a couple days.”
Viewers of his work can usually recover more quickly, but are rarely unaffected. I’ve included screen grabs of a few of his paintings here, but they are utterly inadequate. Many of his works take up an entire wall, and are not eye candy — they’re eyeball heroin.
Luckily, seeking out your next Twombly fix won’t get you arrested or take you to the scuzzier parts of town. It’ll just send you museum hopping. The Dulwich Picture Gallery in London is showing his work now (along with Nicolas Poussin’s), and there are large permanent displays at the Menil Foundation in Houston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum Brandhorst in Munich.
I’ll vouch for the Brandhorst. The entire top floor of the museum is devoted to Twombly. If you spend time there and are unmoved, I’m pretty sure you are a zombie.
I tried to come up with good words for how his work affects me, but all I mustered were ones usually associated with religious ecstasy: to give oneself over, to be in the presence of something larger, to abandon oneself, to be transported, etc.
So I’m going fall back on the poet Richard Tillinghast’s description, from his poem “Rain,” of how he felt on a wondrous rainy evening:
I wanted it never to end
I wanted to deconstitute and emanate out
…
And let [it] possess me entirely - let it soak right down
Into the pores of my happiness.
Cy Twombly is no longer with us — he died on July 5 - but his paintings are. Please make it a point to go see them, and leave a comment here once you do.
