My Obsession with Cy Twombly

From 1947-48, Twombly studied in Boston at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and went on to study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a school that became famous for some of the most influential artists attributed to American Post War Expressionism, including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Josef and Anni Albers and Cy Twombly’s closest friend, Robert Rauschenberg. In November of 1951 The Seven Stairs Gallery in Chicago presented Twombly’s first solo exhibition. Robert Motherwell, another favourite artist of mine and a teacher from the College wrote, “I believe that Cy Twombly is the most accomplished young painter whose work I’ve encountered.”

Twombly was anxious to explore the world and be inspired. He applied for a grant, writing, “What I am trying to establish is that Modernist Art isn’t dislocated, but something with roots, tradition, and continuity. For myself the past is the source, for all art is vitally contemporary”. He was awarded $1800 from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts that allowed him to travel outside of the United States for the first time. He had always said, “When I grow up, I’ll go to Rome”, and so he did, with his friend Robert Rauschenberg. On August 20th, 1952, they set sail for Naples, Italy and eventually made their way to Florence, Siena, Venice, Morocco, and Northern Africa during the next eight months. The past became his source of inspiration as he studied primitive art, archaeology, and ancient artefacts during his travels.

On his arrival in Rome, Rauschenberg noted that, “Cy started collecting antiquities. He discovered a flea market where farmers would bring in Etruscan things and occasionally a marble bust. He just went crazy.” Twombly had always been drawn by the ancient past of myth and legend and immersed himself in the city’s classical culture and all its historical beauty. In September of 1952, the photograph taken of Twombly by Rauschenberg beside the enormous hand of Constantine in the Capitoline Museum was the beginning of his love affair with Rome, a place that would become his life-long home where, “the names of Greece and Italy draws me as no others.”- Cy Twombly

Eleanor Clark, in her book written in 1947, ‘Rome and a Villa’ describes the city that Twombly had fallen in love with. “The entrance to Rome is no longer a matter of geography. It is a place secret, sensuous, oblique, a poem and to be known as a poem; a vast untidiness, people with characters and symbols so profound they join the imagery of your own dreams, whose grandeur also is of dreams, never of statements or avenue; from which the hurrying determined minds takes nothering but its own agenda.”

In 1957 Twombly permanently moved to Rome, and met Italian portrait artist, Tatiana Franchetti, sister of his patron and supporter, Baron Giorgio Franchetti. She was a lot like Cy – shy, somewhat mysterious, famously reclusive, loved old cars and participating in road rallies across Europe. The Franchetti family were one of the wealthiest families in the Mediterranean, descending from a prominent Venetian Jewish family that had intermarried with the Rothschild’s. Luisa Tatiana’s grandfather owned Venice’s Ca d’Oro, an elegant palace dating back to the 15th century and is now a beautiful museum housing a collection of art belonging to Giorgio Franchetti. His marriage in 1959 to Tatiana was an introduction to the ‘international, liberal, upper-bourgeois Europe’. Their home, a 17th century Renaissance-era apartment on the Via Monserrato in the historical center of Rome was known for its intellectual life. Twombly lived and worked at Via Monserrato for decades, and although he had other studios and homes in Italy and the United States, he always referred to it as home. It’s where his son, Alessandro (whose first name Cyrus is a connection to his father’s nickname) was born in 1961 and the current owner of this famous residence.

The apartment was perfect for the Twombly family. It was divided into two parts, one where Alessandro lived with his mother, and the other where Twombly lived and worked. It is here, in the sweltering heat of August 1961, he completed a series of five Ferragosto canvases that are arguably his most pivotal series of paintings. Ferragosto is a Roman holiday that dates back centuries, originally celebrating Diana, the goddess of fertility before the Catholic Church deemed it to honour the Virgin Mary. Joshua Rivkin, in his book CHALK, writes that these paintings were “anxious and wild, layered, and dirty, a sequence that mirrors his state of mind and his home in Rome.” On one of the paintings, Twombly puts his left paint smeared hand onto the canvas, leaving ‘his mark’ in reference to prehistoric cave paintings from ancient walls that he had discovered on his travels. The Ferragosto series sets himself apart from his American contemporaries.

Using pencil, instead of a brush, Twombly introduced language into his paintings, often quoting impressions of poetry that he deeply loved. He was more familiar with ancient poetry and text than any other painter. “Twombly”, writes Rivkin, “erases away the surface by building it up, a process of accretion and layering and crossing out, pencil or paint, not unlike how a city wall accumulates – like graffiti over posters over brick, over and over, or for that matter, a life.” Philip Larratt-Smith, a Canadian art curator and writer believes that “Antiquity is a source of inspiration for Twombly because it is only accessible in fragments, and therefore can never lose its mystery and alienness.”
 

Twombly’s beautiful paintings reveal his relationship with the passage of time through scratches and scribbles; painterly blotches and endless loops; fragments of poetry and graphic scrawls; and words that leave us with faint, fleeting traces of meaning to decipher a narrative between layers and layers of paint, pencil, and crayon. While Twombly referenced the past, he constantly brought it into the present to be rediscovered and honored. He presented the past in a contemporary context, a modern abstraction rooted in ancient history. His paintings are sophisticated, emotional, spell-bounding, obsessively beautiful and poetic. Twombly once remarked, “I like poets because I can find a condensed phrase … the essence of something.” His paintings are a lot like poetry – the void, the hesitancy, the silence, and reflection that gives a poem a rhythm and life.

In 1966 Vogue magazine published an article, “Roman Classic Surprise”, written by Valentine “Nick” Lawford with photographs taken by the legendary Horst P. Horst. Editor-in-chief, Diana Vreeland wanted to showcase an unconventional interior with “taste and talent and originality to create a rare ambiance”. Horst had met Twombly and his wife Tatiana at one of Gore Vidal’s famous parties at his extravagant estate, La Rondinaia, in Ravello on the Amalfi coast of Italy. He convinced the intensely private and notoriously shy Twombly to be part of a photo shoot that would be highly stylized, portraying him as a man of leisure living in the old-world grandeur of a Roman Palazzo. Horst photographs were to show an artist with sophisticated taste and an extravagant, bourgeoise lifestyle. The photos highlighted Twombly’s habit of living with ancient sculptures, antique furniture, and artwork, arranged in an avant-garde style for the time. It was true that his home was in a continuous process of rearrangement. Dominique de Menil, after visiting Twombly at his palazzo commented, “Room after room of sculptures. Paintings stacked against the wall, one or two visible; and antiquities: sculptures of Marcus Aurelius, Hadrian, and a bust of Venus”.

When the article was published in the November issue of Vogue, Twombly was not comfortable with the photographs, and neither were his American friends and artists. He was criticized as being a ‘decorator’ and worse, labeled ‘Europeanized’. He was an artist that had turned his back on his American roots and had become a decadent exile living a life that was too cultured, too glamourous, too chic. While the photographs were elegantly beautiful, and proved to be very highly prized, they added to the disapproval of Twombly’s work. Twombly had exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City in 1964. The nine-part series of paintings completed after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy were not well received. He had taken inspiration from Commodus, Emperor of the Roman Empire, and son of Marcus Aurelius, who was later assassinated. The paintings were a critical disaster and received vicious reviews. Donald Judd, writer, and art critic before becoming an artist himself wrote in his piece for ARTnews, “Twombly has not shown for some time, and this adds to this fiasco. In each of these paintings there are a couple of swirls of red paint mixed in with a little yellow and white and placed high on a medium-gray surface. There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line. There isn’t anything to the paintings. The poster for the show is easily the best thing present.” In February 1966, Twombly held another show at Leo Castelli’s Gallery and even with prices as low as $300, which included a $70 frame, none sold. Twombly was broke and had to borrow money for his return trip home to Italy.

While the American art world was praising pop artists, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Cy returned to Rome. His reclusiveness distanced him from his American contemporaries and gave him the independence to explore and express art on his own terms. Undeterred, Twombly soon started a new series, completely different and arguably, his most recognizable and most valued pieces, the Chalkboard paintings. He had begun them in the spring of 1966 and would continue until 1972. Twombly had said that Leonardo da Vinci’s early notebook drawings inspired his loopy white chalk lines on gray and blue backgrounds. “Layered white, erased, and written over again and again and again or a single strand. They seem to be the pulse of something greater than ourselves. Our very pulse made visible. Their power comes from this tension between control and release, restraint, and abandon. They pulse. They vibrate”, writes Joshua Rivkin in his book CHALK. Twombly said, “It’s like there’s no beginning and no end”.

He executed these works sitting on the shoulders of a friend who moved from side to side in front of his canvas while he used a wax crayon of compressed pigment pressed into wet paint that allowed him to work quickly and produce the translucency that resembled chalk. He often used house paint, and thick oils diluted with bleach, sometimes letting the drips become part of the art. After achieving a state of mind, both emotionally and intellectually, he worked quickly, often without stopping, to keep up with the idea before it was gone. Twombly had always been driven ‘to find the movement of an unconscious mind’ – the artistic ability to make art look effortless, the illusion of ease. I read an article that asked the question if Twombly’s father, a professional baseball pitcher, had taught his son the importance of muscle memory to move your wrist instinctively to throw a perfect pitch. Anne Carson, a Canadian biographer, writes in the book, ‘Twombly – Past and Present’, that “He found his way to a hand that is no one’s, or everyone’s, or mythic, or just a stain left behind by something written there before. Lines arise and pass away. They are mostly fragile, at times, ghostly, sometimes barely at all. What you hear is a product of empty space … a silent duration of time.” His work reminds us how powerfully the ancient world continues to speak to us. He was conscious of his indebtedness to ancient philosophers and often paid homage by naming them in his art - Apollo, Venus, Orpheus, Bacchus, and Dionysus amongst many others.

One year after the Louvre was completed, Cy Twombly died after battling cancer for a number of years on July 5th, 2011, in his favourite city, Rome. At the end of his life, in a hospital bed, he asked to see for the last time a Picasso that he owned. It was an inked head that can be seen in in a photograph from Via Monserrato. It was brought to his bedside. Nearing the end, Twombly said, “I made art that regenerates itself – the strength of memory that is left behind”. Larry Gagosian, preeminent American art dealer spoke about his friend, “He was unlike any artist I ever met. He never drove a car, never owned a television. He didn’t really care about money – he was no fool, but he certainly wasn’t driven by money. He just lived his own life and was totally an artist – all in, all the time.” He was dry witted, charming, private, funny, irreverent, and always had a sparkle in his eye. Those in his presence felt his greatness. After spending decades in Italy, Twombly never lost his southern drawl- his ‘slow and careful phrases, followed by and sometimes interrupted by long pauses.’

While Twombly was once ostracized by the American art world, he became one of the most sought-after post-war American artists. In 1972 you could purchase a Twombly for $15,000-$30,000. A Chalkboard painting that sold for $250,000 in the early 1980’s sold for $5.5 million in May 1990. In November, 2015 one sold for $70.5 million. Twombly’s legacy changed the art world. Painted canvases, works on paper and small scaled sculptures created an amazing body of work. Over his lifetime he had 249 solo exhibitions and has his work in 71 public collections around the world. He inspired a new generation of artists, most famously that of Jean-Michele Basquiat. As a 19-year-old high school dropout and struggling artist, Jean-Michel went to The Whitney Museum of Modern Art to see an exhibit of Twombly’s work. He said that Twombly taught him that he could scratch things off a canvas with names and numbers, in a child-like simplicity that would ultimately become his art form. It transformed his imagination and his connection to poetry that had been a major influence in Twombly’s work as well. Twombly’s barbed lotus that appears in many of his works is echoed in Basquiat’s now famous motif, a three-pointed crown. Jerry Saltz, New York’s famous art critic wrote, “In this genesis moment, he took Twombly’s speed of history and amped it up to the speed of life.”

This November, while in Rome attending a Design Leadership Network Conference, I had an unexpected chance meeting with Cy Twombly’s niece who graciously took me to his home and studio on the Via Monserrato. As I walked up the steps to Cy’s second-floor Palazzo, I felt that I was in the presence of greatness. I was at the Palazzo where my own Horst P. Horst photograph was shot, the studio where some of my favourite art pieces were painted by Cy Twombly, my favourite artist. The universe gives us opportunities in our lives that we could never imagine, and this was one of them. The past became present, and I will always be incredibly grateful, thankful, and honoured.

Sources:

CY TWOMBLY GALLERY, Cy Twombly Foundation and The Menil Collection

CY TWOMBLY, Edited by Jonas Storsve, Published by Sieveking Verlag

CY TWOMBLY HOMES + STUDIOS, Published by Schirmer|Mosel

CHALK – The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly, by Joshua Rivkin, Published by Melville House

CY TWOMBLY | Making Past Present | MFA Publications | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston