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When it is all dry, the pencil has another go at it. Just as images arise, they are subsumed. The line draws the layers together, and slices them apart. Everything is anxious in Cy Twombly's early paintings, always being made and unmade. Their resolution is always provisional.
In another painting, there's a sort of melted skull - though it could be a jellyfish. On the edge there's a bum, crossed out with an X. Or maybe X marks the spot. And maybe they're breasts, anyway. Here and there are gobbets of another, thicker white with a lot of oil in it, which has curdled and left a thick scab that has taken years to properly harden, if it ever has. There are traces of the body everywhere, of sweat and faeces and sperm and saliva. Some things you can only see at certain angles, up close, catching the light, or when you approach the painting from the side. Finger-pawings on the surface announce that the artist was here, too - in person. Somewhere else, Twombly has used the canvas to wipe the rest of the paint from his fingers. This is a painter who talks about Poussin, about the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and Mallarmé. But also about De Sade and Alain Robbe-Grillet, writers whose subtlety and delicacy underline their violences.
Your eyes get lost in all this, among the love hearts, the nipples and cocks and pea-pods that might be vaginas, the jagged seismic judders, the tremors that have gone off the dial. "APOLLO," one painting announces, and "I have known the NAKEDNESS of my scattered dreams" another. Words and phrases in Twombly's art grin through, indelibly: names and exhortations, snatches of poetry, numbers, diagrams, all of them written with a convincing urgency. It is as though their author were swatting away a swarm of bees gathered in his brain. The words are always with us, however much some may think art is a sort of wordless communication.
Anyone could do this sort of thing, I hear you say; it is all just a sort of flailing about. It isn't true. There is so much to Cy Twombly's paintings, especially of the 1950s and 1960s, and their orchestration is as sly as it is sophisticated. You can look and say this is just a raft of stupidities and inanities, a palimpsest of the half-begun and never-completed. But his art feels rich and urgent - if only you could work out what the secret was, or how to decipher it.
In the 1950s, Twombly's paintings evolved as a language of contrary touches, stray thoughts and inimitable gestures. There was atavism there, as well as consummate knowingness, the result of a conscious de-skilling of his innate talents. Like Willem de Kooning, Twombly forced himself to draw and write with his left hand, or with his eyes closed. (De Kooning drew while averting his eyes from the paper, and while watching TV.) Making his own touch unfamiliar, Twombly presented himself as other to himself. I think he wanted to catch himself off guard.
Twombly is now 80, and his nervous, supremely elegant and often very beautiful art is not as well known as it might be. Cycles and Seasons, Tate Modern's retrospective, is likely to change that. It is not the first major Twombly show to be held in Britain, but it is the largest and most thorough. It begins brilliantly, with work completed when Twombly was the student of Robert Motherwell and the educator, draughtsman and painter Ben Shahn. Of the same generation as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Twombly luckily escaped the fate of being a second-generation abstract expressionist. His art belongs mostly to itself, while retaining passing affinities to many different and contrary directions in art since 1945. An American who married well and moved to Rome at the beginning of his career, Twombly suffered the mistrust of his US contemporaries for many years, but this left him largely free to pursue his art as he wanted.
So the first half of this show is great. Twombly shows us that painting, drawing and writing can coexist in the same space. At times it becomes difficult to tell which is which. Everything is a gesture, but also an utterance, a sign, a touch. Twombly knows how to deal with emptiness, with pauses and blankness, the painter's silence. A painting can be an accumulation of impetuous rushes, but a painter also sits on his hands.
Twombly's friable, whited sculptures, which he has made on and off throughout his career, were perfectly pitched to begin with, though they have barely developed since. At their best, they have a wonderful humour and delicacy. He has a terrific eye for the potential of the discarded, whether it be an old box or a couple of palm leaves. These white gesso and plaster objects, sometimes cast in bronze, never lose touch with their happenstance origins. But Twombly has never really exploited sculpture as much as he might have done, often going years without making any.
One of my favourites is a small, plaster-spattered monument, on one side of which the artist has written in pencil: "In memory of Alvaro de Campos." De Campos was one of the fictitious "heteronyms", or alter egos, of the great Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. De Campos never existed, except in Pessoa's imagination.
Other sculptures recall the tree Giacometti made for the first production of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, or Etruscan or Egyptian artefacts. I think one of the things Twombly has wanted to do has been to make an art that belongs to a place and time not quite our own, and in which the present and the past can coexist. One sculpture, fashioned from nothing more than two cardboard tubes, made me laugh out loud.
Yet there is much longing and melancholy in his art, ably unpicked in the Tate catalogue by Nicholas Cullinan, whose writings on the artist deserve to be expanded to a book-length study. (The colour illustrations in the catalogue are, however, often badly proofed and sometimes out of focus. For a volume costing almost £25, this is lamentable.)
Twombly's sculptures mark time and keep the faith, while his paintings, in my view, have become lost over the years. His last great paintings were the all-over pencil-on-canvas works of the 1970s, racing scribbles dedicated to a friend who died. They are like insistent letters to the dead, endlessly mourning for one who can no longer read. The finger-painted panels of the late 1980s - all painted in straight-from-the-can Hooker's Green, their mannered rococo shapes recalling Tiepolo - are, to my mind, vapid. They might also recall late Monet, in a glutinous kind of way, but their indeterminate lyricism leaves me cold. Gerhard Richter does this sort of thing to much greater effect. In fact, recent Twomblys just look indulgent to me. The last room in this show, with its vermilion scrawls to Bacchus, adds nothing to what went before. One is only amazed he still has the energy.
Twombly's best art is all about touch and acutely judged materiality. He has never been much of a colourist. There are great Twomblys and terrible Twomblys, and the two are often the same. At his best, what inspires him - often a poem, a myth, a story or a place - is at one with what he makes of it. A painting such as The Italians (1961) has so much life in it: the interior thoughts that pass us by, the comings and goings of the lowlife in the Campo de' Fiori, words and signs stalking each other across the square. But I cannot bring myself to believe in the later paintings, or to care very much about them, except to wish that they were other than they are.
The best thing is to applaud that he has done what he wants and followed his own path. That is magnificent. One wishes for him a great, late style, and to transcend himself as an artist, as the art historian Erwin Panofsky believed the late Titian had done. But this is more rare than one might hope.
· Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons is at Tate Modern, London SE1, from Thursday until September 14. Details: 020-7887 8888 or tate.org.uk
In another painting, there's a sort of melted skull - though it could be a jellyfish. On the edge there's a bum, crossed out with an X. Or maybe X marks the spot. And maybe they're breasts, anyway. Here and there are gobbets of another, thicker white with a lot of oil in it, which has curdled and left a thick scab that has taken years to properly harden, if it ever has. There are traces of the body everywhere, of sweat and faeces and sperm and saliva. Some things you can only see at certain angles, up close, catching the light, or when you approach the painting from the side. Finger-pawings on the surface announce that the artist was here, too - in person. Somewhere else, Twombly has used the canvas to wipe the rest of the paint from his fingers. This is a painter who talks about Poussin, about the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and Mallarmé. But also about De Sade and Alain Robbe-Grillet, writers whose subtlety and delicacy underline their violences.
Your eyes get lost in all this, among the love hearts, the nipples and cocks and pea-pods that might be vaginas, the jagged seismic judders, the tremors that have gone off the dial. "APOLLO," one painting announces, and "I have known the NAKEDNESS of my scattered dreams" another. Words and phrases in Twombly's art grin through, indelibly: names and exhortations, snatches of poetry, numbers, diagrams, all of them written with a convincing urgency. It is as though their author were swatting away a swarm of bees gathered in his brain. The words are always with us, however much some may think art is a sort of wordless communication.
Anyone could do this sort of thing, I hear you say; it is all just a sort of flailing about. It isn't true. There is so much to Cy Twombly's paintings, especially of the 1950s and 1960s, and their orchestration is as sly as it is sophisticated. You can look and say this is just a raft of stupidities and inanities, a palimpsest of the half-begun and never-completed. But his art feels rich and urgent - if only you could work out what the secret was, or how to decipher it.
In the 1950s, Twombly's paintings evolved as a language of contrary touches, stray thoughts and inimitable gestures. There was atavism there, as well as consummate knowingness, the result of a conscious de-skilling of his innate talents. Like Willem de Kooning, Twombly forced himself to draw and write with his left hand, or with his eyes closed. (De Kooning drew while averting his eyes from the paper, and while watching TV.) Making his own touch unfamiliar, Twombly presented himself as other to himself. I think he wanted to catch himself off guard.
Twombly is now 80, and his nervous, supremely elegant and often very beautiful art is not as well known as it might be. Cycles and Seasons, Tate Modern's retrospective, is likely to change that. It is not the first major Twombly show to be held in Britain, but it is the largest and most thorough. It begins brilliantly, with work completed when Twombly was the student of Robert Motherwell and the educator, draughtsman and painter Ben Shahn. Of the same generation as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Twombly luckily escaped the fate of being a second-generation abstract expressionist. His art belongs mostly to itself, while retaining passing affinities to many different and contrary directions in art since 1945. An American who married well and moved to Rome at the beginning of his career, Twombly suffered the mistrust of his US contemporaries for many years, but this left him largely free to pursue his art as he wanted.
So the first half of this show is great. Twombly shows us that painting, drawing and writing can coexist in the same space. At times it becomes difficult to tell which is which. Everything is a gesture, but also an utterance, a sign, a touch. Twombly knows how to deal with emptiness, with pauses and blankness, the painter's silence. A painting can be an accumulation of impetuous rushes, but a painter also sits on his hands.
Twombly's friable, whited sculptures, which he has made on and off throughout his career, were perfectly pitched to begin with, though they have barely developed since. At their best, they have a wonderful humour and delicacy. He has a terrific eye for the potential of the discarded, whether it be an old box or a couple of palm leaves. These white gesso and plaster objects, sometimes cast in bronze, never lose touch with their happenstance origins. But Twombly has never really exploited sculpture as much as he might have done, often going years without making any.
One of my favourites is a small, plaster-spattered monument, on one side of which the artist has written in pencil: "In memory of Alvaro de Campos." De Campos was one of the fictitious "heteronyms", or alter egos, of the great Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. De Campos never existed, except in Pessoa's imagination.
Other sculptures recall the tree Giacometti made for the first production of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, or Etruscan or Egyptian artefacts. I think one of the things Twombly has wanted to do has been to make an art that belongs to a place and time not quite our own, and in which the present and the past can coexist. One sculpture, fashioned from nothing more than two cardboard tubes, made me laugh out loud.
Yet there is much longing and melancholy in his art, ably unpicked in the Tate catalogue by Nicholas Cullinan, whose writings on the artist deserve to be expanded to a book-length study. (The colour illustrations in the catalogue are, however, often badly proofed and sometimes out of focus. For a volume costing almost £25, this is lamentable.)
Twombly's sculptures mark time and keep the faith, while his paintings, in my view, have become lost over the years. His last great paintings were the all-over pencil-on-canvas works of the 1970s, racing scribbles dedicated to a friend who died. They are like insistent letters to the dead, endlessly mourning for one who can no longer read. The finger-painted panels of the late 1980s - all painted in straight-from-the-can Hooker's Green, their mannered rococo shapes recalling Tiepolo - are, to my mind, vapid. They might also recall late Monet, in a glutinous kind of way, but their indeterminate lyricism leaves me cold. Gerhard Richter does this sort of thing to much greater effect. In fact, recent Twomblys just look indulgent to me. The last room in this show, with its vermilion scrawls to Bacchus, adds nothing to what went before. One is only amazed he still has the energy.
Twombly's best art is all about touch and acutely judged materiality. He has never been much of a colourist. There are great Twomblys and terrible Twomblys, and the two are often the same. At his best, what inspires him - often a poem, a myth, a story or a place - is at one with what he makes of it. A painting such as The Italians (1961) has so much life in it: the interior thoughts that pass us by, the comings and goings of the lowlife in the Campo de' Fiori, words and signs stalking each other across the square. But I cannot bring myself to believe in the later paintings, or to care very much about them, except to wish that they were other than they are.
The best thing is to applaud that he has done what he wants and followed his own path. That is magnificent. One wishes for him a great, late style, and to transcend himself as an artist, as the art historian Erwin Panofsky believed the late Titian had done. But this is more rare than one might hope.
· Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons is at Tate Modern, London SE1, from Thursday until September 14. Details: 020-7887 8888 or tate.org.uk
