Cy Twombly’s work can elicit extreme responses. At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Avignon, a young woman once left a lipstick kiss on one of his all-white paintings. She described it as “an act of love.” Restorers tried thirty different products to remove the mark, unsuccessfully. At the Menil Collection, a French woman undressed and stood naked in front of his Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, for the shores of Asia Minor). She wrote in the guidebook, “The painting wants me to run naked.” Apparently, Twombly was delighted by her response: “No one can top that.” Who knows what kinds of things are happening with his paintings in private homes.
The appeal of Twombly’s work, its scattered fragments filled with energy and joyous abandon, is infectious. This is the magic, a universal expression, made for anyone and everyone, regardless of culture, era or political climate. Standing in front of a Twombly sculpture or painting is to become absorbed in freedom of expression, of play. There’s something so charming in his work that is not precious or self-conscious. His work feels like a Picasso in the relentless life-exploration of experimentation, “stealing” from anything encountered. With Twombly, it was a peapod, Moroccan tombstones, a fragment of Sappho’s poetry, Greek myth, seashells, Roman statuary and shards, a cloudy day, junk, the Baroque spaces in Rome. He uses everything and plays with reality with a light touch and glee. He gives us worlds on a flat canvas or in a simple plaster of Paris and plywood sculpture. You might think you could have done that, but you didn’t and he did, time and time again.
You can stand in front of a Twombly for a long time, spellbound, imagining all kinds of things. His work appeals to many, and certainly to his dealer, Larry Gagosian, who has been exhibiting the artist for more than 35 years. The current exhibition at his 980 Madison Avenue gallery, titled simply “Cy Twombly,” encompasses two floors and features several works never before exhibited. Three groups of paintings are on view: his late 1960s blackboard paintings, the 1980s Italian paintings of the light in Gaeta, where he lived, and works on paper exploring Twombly’s fascination with the East and Asia Minor.
Twombly explosions are unruly, chaotic and surprising spontaneous combustions. In his “blackboard” paintings, there is a semblance of order as they wend and meander. Chalk on slate, like when the school teacher told the student, as punishment, to write the sentence, I WILL NOT THROW SPITBALLS IN CLASS, fifty times. In the first room of the exhibit are Twombly’s blackboard paintings from 1968-71. Composed with house paint and crayon, these paintings are loud and boisterous, like the unruly student. The curl and sweep, drawn by a body in motion; snow falling, strands of hair or ciphers of sound. I can hear the chalk scratching across the blackboard. Untitled from 1968, composed of nine eight-and-a-half-foot-tall panels, spreads across the space like ancient tablets nearly wiped clean from time. Then a kid comes along and scrawls over them all in one swoop, rushing so as not to be caught. Twombly himself said, “Painting a picture is a very short thing if it goes well.”
In the 1980s Italian works, there is one knock-out painting: Condottiero Testa di Cozzo, 1987. With oil, acrylic and pencil on wood panel, Twombly brings in his love for classical references and smacking words onto the painting in an awkward, endearing scrawl. The Vermilion slash across the bottom refers to the red sash in Titian’s portrait of the Grand Duke of Alba.
So much of Twombly’s work over his six-decade career involves words that he lifted from Latin poets, Greek heroes, Keats whom he especially loved, Virgil, Homer and myths like Leda and the Swan. He mixed in the heroic with street graffiti. His handwriting on the paintings came from practicing with his left hand (he was right-handed) and drawing in the dark at night so he wouldn’t have regular lines. These practices disrupted unconscious mark-making, instilling into the work a feeling of chance and spontaneity, resulting in its rakish magic.
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The green Bassano paintings from 1981-86 made in Teverina, Italy—some with spray paint, oil and acrylic—again give a rushed, one-off feel. Twombly said, “I sit for two or three hours looking, and in fifteen minutes, I can do a painting.” The landscape sweeps in Hooker’s Green with hints of a moody sky are a suite of swift brush strokes evoking the fast changes of light in nature. Three of these paintings are on a quatrefoil-shaped wood panel, a Medieval symbol used later in the Gothic and Renaissance eras, again keeping with Twombly’s love of historical references.
The last series of paintings, from 1980, is all on paper. Titled Five Day Wait at Jiayuguan, the series is made up of quick sketches with capricious titles like Uygur Taking Tea on Arrival, Longing of Fire, Harem, Opium Poppy and Wine Taking. In that five-day wait, it sounds like he had a lot of fun. One caper is titled Afternoon in a Garden with Poetry. Frank O’Hara, the poet and art critic, wrote in 1955 about Twombly’s work that, “A bird seems to have passed through the impasto with cream-colored screams and bitter claw marks. His admirably esoteric information, every wash or line struggling for survival, particularizes the sentiment. If drawing is as vital to painting as color, Twombly has an ever-ready resource for his remarkable feelings.”
His sculptures are pure delight, like something a child would piece together, slopping plaster of Paris over plywood, not bothering to smooth or shape. Taking junk and making a work of art. There is one sculpture in the Gagosian show, Untitled, 1983, a painted bronze. This one; who knows what it’s meant to be, but its shape evokes ancient ships. It looks like one of Giacometti’s sculptures reworked so many times, the plaster has disintegrated into thinner and thinner lines.
“Quirky pleasure and chic humor. Graffiti. Hard to categorize…poetic power,” wrote art critic Jed Perl. “The antic graphism. No loyalty to unified compositions,” wrote the late Peter Schjeldahl. And photographer and long-time friend and neighbor Sally Mann put it thusly: “He was very precise, but his work often looks like an explosion.”
Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928. In 1957, he moved to Gaeta, Italy, where he sucked up classical culture and siphoned it into his art. At 83, he died in Rome. “I’m a Mediterranean painter, I like that idea of a northerner in the Mediterranean, but more blood and guts.” It took a lot of guts to do what he did for sixty years. Gagosian said, “My first encounter with Cy’s work astonished me—it was unlike anything I had ever seen, both ancient and fresh, formally rigorous and yet entirely idiosyncratic… I am honored to have been Cy’s dealer for more than four decades.”
“Cy Twombly” is on view at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, through March 22, 2025.
