Room Guide

Introduction

Cy Twombly is regarded as one of the foremost painters in the world today, part of the generation of American artists who emerged after Abstract Expressionism and paved the way for new kinds of painting.

Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928. He studied in Boston and New York at the height of Abstract Expressionism, and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Developing an interest in the automatic techniques associated with the Surrealists, he incorporated dense pencil scribbles onto the surfaces of his early paintings. These graffiti-like scrawls subverted the calligraphic gestures of artists like Jackson Pollock, while introducing elements of hesitancy and fragility into Abstract Expressionism.

In the late 1950s he moved to Italy, signalling an important change in his work, which was increasingly marked by his love of poetry, a fascination for classical mythology and an engagement with the light and landscape of the Mediterranean.

This exhibition traces Twombly’s painting and sculpture from the 1950s to the present, giving special focus to discrete cycles of work. Each series bears witness to both the time and place of its making, showing the artist’s growth and development, but also testifying to his deep commitment to the art of painting and his concerns with the natural world, the seasons and the passing of time.

Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons is curated by Nicholas Serota with Nicholas Cullinan

Room One

Twombly’s ability to bring together American and European influences was evident even in his early works. Their predominantly black and white palette was one of the defining traits of Abstract Expressionism, while what he described as their ‘weathered, corroded and aged surfaces’ already suggests an affinity with post-war European art.  The earliest painting in this room, MIN-OE, was made while he was studying at Black Mountain College. Its symmetrical composition was based on both tribal art and archaic Iranian metalwork known as Luristan bronzes.

In 1951, Twombly travelled to Italy and Morocco with Robert Rauschenberg. Tiznit and Quarzazat, with their scratched and gouged surfaces, were named by Twombly after towns they visited in Morocco, although both were painted later in New York. His early sculptures, assembled from discarded objects, similarly cast their gaze back to Europe and North Africa: Untitled (1953) resembles a pan pipe, formed from a slightly dishevelled row of wooden scraps, rusty nails and soiled bandages.

In 1954, Twombly was conscripted and trained as a cryptographer in the US Army. At night he made drawings in the dark, retracing the Surrealist technique of automatic writing. The experience fed into Criticism, Academy and The Geeks, whose multiple layers of paint and graffiti-like pencil scribbles simultaneously refer to and subvert Abstract Expressionism. The titles were ascribed arbitrarily from a list drawn up in collaboration with Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Room Two

In the spring of 1957, Twombly returned to Italy, where he has been predominantly based ever since. Olympia, painted soon afterwards in a studio overlooking the Colosseum, shows the resulting change in language, tempo and temperament, as the stuttered expletives and anxiety of his preceding New York paintings gives way to a more languid mood.

Twombly spent that summer on the island of Procida, between Capri and Ischia, painting in a studio perched high on the cliffs overlooking the sea. A blanched light seeped into his work, resurfacing in works such as Arcadia, which he painted later in Rome. ‘The Mediterranean… is always just white, white, white’, he told the critic David Sylvester many years later.

The importance of the Mediterranean is also evident in Poems to the Sea, a group of 24 drawings made in 1959. Recently married, Twombly and his wife were staying in Sperlonga, a small whitewashed fishing village between Rome and Naples. With their bleached overlays of white paint and ascetic traces of undulant pencil line, the series reflects Twombly’s interest in what he described as the ‘symbolic whiteness’ of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé.

Room Three

By the early 1960s, the languor and lightness that had followed Twombly’s arrival in Italy subsided, replaced in works such as Murder of Passion and Crimes of Passion II by anxiety, violence and an ever-more baroque aesthetic of painting. Their heightened eroticism and sensuality is marked by smatterings of orifices, breasts that double for buttocks, and phalluses adorned with scribbles of pencil that seem to describe pubic hair, but also by techniques such as smearing, an ever-increasing impasto and the use of progressively saturated colours.

References to history, myth and the great painters of the past also began to appear in Twombly’s paintings. School of Athens echoes the famous Vatican fresco by Raphael in which the great thinkers of antiquity are framed within a series of arches in an idealised classical palace. Empire of Flora refers to the Italian goddess of flowers, and the licentious festival dedicated to her. Herodiade takes its title from Mallarmé’s dramatic poem about the mother of Salomé and includes direct quotations from the poem transcribed onto the canvas.

During this time, Twombly established a studio near Campo de’ Fiori, an area populated by a lively market and petty thieves. This teeming, visceral atmosphere found its way into The Italians, a painting strewn with scribbles and signs, heart-shaped forms, flaccid phalluses and ejaculations of paint.

Room Four

Twombly’s Ferragosto series of 1961 was produced during a suffocating August in Rome, a time when the city is abandoned by its inhabitants and streets are left quiet and deserted. The paintings have a heady and overripe quality, evoking the ancient origins of the festival they are named after. Ferragosto derives from the Latin Feriae Augusti, or Augustus’s holiday, and in Roman times was a celebration of fertility and maturity. It was subsequently taken up by the Catholic Church as a date to mark the Virgin Mary’s bodily assumption to Heaven.

Each painting in the series is more encrusted and saturated than the last. The first features splattered signs – here a flesh-pink, flaccid penis, there a scatological smear of brown paint – but is still dominated by the blank canvas beneath it. On the second, the pencilled incisions become a little more insistent and the hand-smeared paint more liberally applied. By the third, paint is haemorrhaging and dribbling down the canvas, with accumulations of scatological brown. The fourth contains a cacophony of disparate and conflicting techniques: rapid, urgent brush strokes, smeared paint, scribbled pencil. The final work is an orgy of impastoclods, and one of the heaviest paintings of Twombly’s career.

Room Five

In the summer and early autumn of 1969, Twombly made a series of fourteen paintings while staying at Bolsena, a lake to the north of Rome. With their cool overlays of white paint on a cream ground, tumbling forms, and calculations and numbers scribbled out like incorrect sums, the Bolsena works are quite unlike anything that preceded them. They are also a rare example of Twombly responding to contemporary events: the measurements, graphs and diagrammatic drawings reflect his preoccupation with the Apollo 11 space flight, which culminated with Neil Armstrong’s walk on the Moon on 20 July 1969.

Like much of Twombly's work, the series contains within it a struggle between diametrically opposing forces. A tension between left and right, horizontal and vertical, movement and stasis, and rising or falling is palpable in these paintings.

Room Six

The cerebral, pared-down asceticism of the two versions of Treatise on the Veil reflects Twombly’s abrupt change of course in the late 1960s. In March 1964, an exhibition of his Nine Discourses on Commodus paintings had been given a scathing reception by the New York art world. Twombly’s baroque Mediterranean paintings were then considered out of step with the hard edges, clean lines and smooth surfaces of Minimalism. By the middle of the decade, however, Twombly was making a series of paintings on a black ground that explored and adapted some of the techniques associated with Minimal art: the denial of surface ornamentation or exaggerated brushstrokes, the repetition of regular geometric forms and a fascination with the grid structure.

Each of the six panels of the first version of Treatise on the Veil features a rectangle annotated with measurements, corresponding to the actual spatial proportions of the rectilinear form. This first version is formed by six interlinked instalments or parts, while Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) is made from one long unified picture plane. The initial inspiration for the works apparently came from a photograph by Eadweard Muybridge that shows a bride in motion. Another influence may have been The Veil of Orpheus from the ballet Orpheus 53 by Pierre Henri, in which a cloth torn apart suggests lifting the veil of Eurydice but also the rending to pieces of Orpheus himself.

Room Seven

In 1971, Nini Pirandello, the wife of Twombly’s Roman gallerist Plinio De Martiis, died suddenly. In tribute, Twombly painted the elegiac Nini’s Paintings. The series seems to embody an absence impossible to articulate, with obsessive marks on the verge of recognisable words or figures that crumble and dissolve before our gaze. The calligraphic lines, frustration and failed articulation of Twombly’s paintings from the mid-1950s are combined with his restrained style of the late 1960s, to create an entirely new and distinct body of work, one that attests to the variation of patterns and series contained with Twombly’s own oeuvre.

The rippled and undulating lines, wave after wave, suggest the convulsive surface of water and recall Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches and writings on deluges, cataclysms and floods, which fascinated Twombly at the time.

Room Eight

In 1976, Twombly returned to sculpture for the first time in seventeen years. Like his earlier works, these pieces are assembled from found materials such as pieces of wood or packaging, or cast in bronze and covered in white paint and plaster. Their elegant simplicity often suggests archaeological treasures or funerary relics, belying their humble origins.

Untitled (1976) was the first of several classical columns constructed from objects such as cardboard tubes used for protecting rolled drawings, while for Untitled (1978) Twombly created an altar from a discarded box .

The title of Orpheus (Du Unendliche Spur) means ‘You endless trace’, and is taken from the Sonnets to Orpheus by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Fragments from these poems and the name of the legendary musician have been inscribed onto an altar upon which a wooden lath rises in an elegant and graceful curve suggesting a lyre.

Twombly’s first boat sculpture, Aurora, is named after a battleship that played a vital role during the Russian Revolution. Set atop a long and narrow rectangular wooden plinth, crudely punctured by nails and thinly veiled in a shroud of white paint, are a box-like hull, a thin and fragile mast and wire rigging hammered in with a nail. A plastic rose projecting from the bow provides a figurehead.

Room Nine

From the early 1980s onwards, Twombly spent increasing amounts of time in Gaeta, a medieval port town between Naples and Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea. His work from that decade displays an ever-deepening fascination with water.

Hero and Leandro is based on a classical legend of doomed love. Leandro (Leander in English) drowned while swimming across the Hellespont to meet his lover Hero, who then threw herself into the sea. Twombly evokes the tragic tale through waves of brushstrokes, which cascade across the canvases. The drowning of Leandro is at the beginning of the sequence, followed by the wake, which unfolds from left to right. The final part includes a quotation from Keats’s sonnet On a Leander Gem.

The two Wilder Shores of Love paintings are named after a book by Lesley Blanch about the travels of four nineteenth-century women in North Africa and the Near East. Here, a division between water, land and sky is implied, with the title scrolling across the canvas in red paint stick and floating above cascading green paint.

This room also includes three of Twombly’s ‘boat’ sculptures from the mid-1980s, notably Winter’s Passage: Luxor, which resembles an Egyptian funerary relic intended to transport the souls of the dead.

Room Ten

Untitled (A Painting in Nine Parts), was first shown in 1988 in the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. It was created specifically for its Venetian setting, both in the watery imagery and the use of elaborately shaped canvases, which recall the Rococo Venetian painters of the eighteenth century such as Giambattista Tiepolo.

Twombly’s work from the 1980s onwards seeks to capture life at its most fleeting and ephemeral. This sense of urgency is echoed in the paintings’ execution and medium. Made in quick-drying and fluid acrylic paint, which flood the wooden panels on which it is applied and smeared by Twombly’s hands and fingers, these paintings are some of the most spontaneous of his career.

Part I leaves most of the wooden panel bare, apart from some finger-daubed smudges of green. The main part of the picture plane is filled by a wash of cream paint, which drips down and stains the white panel beneath. The inscription is from Rilke’s poem Moving Forward (‘Fortschritt’), in which the poet’s immersion in nature represents a deepening of imaginative consciousness. Part II is still lighter in coloration, but the layers of paint have become heavier. Part III is filled by smears and smudges, suggesting waves. By the final panel, Twombly alternates between bold areas of broad brush strokes, and a deluge of fingerpainting.

Room Eleven

This room brings together Twombly’s two versions of the Quattro Stagioni, or Four Seasons, which were painted when he was approaching his mid-sixties. They loosely follow a tradition in which each season also represents a different stage in life: spring is young and vital, summer sensual, autumn idle, while winter sees death encroaching.

Primavera (spring) embodies a resurgence of energy with luminous splashes of yellow and red curved boat forms. The prevailing tone of Estate (summer) is of pleasure but also the transience of youth, including lines from the Greek poet George Seferis. The theme of harvesting in Autunno (autumn) relates specifically to the wine festival of Bassano, with thick daubs of red and the phrase ‘Your blood’, perhaps an invocation to Bacchus. Inverno (winter) is the most sparse of all Twombly’s seasons, with words disappearing beneath a mist of translucent white paint, and the gathering darkness relieved only by flares of yellow and green.

The versions of the Four Seasons and the Bacchus paintings in the following roomare accompanied by sculptures. The Thicket tree sculpture, emerging from an ‘earthen’ base of poured concrete, includes pencil inscriptions on the wooden tags or buds that list place names from ancient Mesopotamia. Untitled (2001) is startlingly set apart from his other sculptures, incorporating coloured tissues that had been used to clean paint. The most recent sculpture in the exhibition, Untitled (In Memory of Alvaro de Campos) is a monument dedicated to one of the fictional personae adopted by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.

Room Twelve

‘To paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of sensation or release,’ Twombly wrote in 1957, ‘and by crisis it should by no means be limited to a morbid state, but could just as well be one ecstatic impulse.’ This ‘ecstatic impulse’ has made regular appearances in his work, often personified by Bacchus (also known as Dionysus) – the god of wine, whose rites were celebrated with orgies and animals being torn to pieces and their raw flesh consumed.

In the summer of 2005, with America at war in Iraq, Twombly found inspiration in Homer’s Iliad to create a cycle of eight paintings executed in vermilion on the subject of Bacchus. The title of the series – Bacchus, Psilax, Mainomenos– refers to the dual and almost schizophrenic nature of the god, oscillating between pleasure and sensual release (psilax), and debauchery bordering on the nihilistic (mainomenos). This schism is echoed in the paintings’ ricochet between euphoric loops that soar upwards and sanguine floods of paint that seep, ooze and cascade down the canvas. Red is the colour of wine, but also of blood and these works are some of the most liquid that Twombly has painted, engorged and overflowing with paint. However, their calligraphic quality also recalls the scratched works and incisions of the early works in the first room of this exhibition.