Saturday, December 11, 2010

My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal


My hero Cy Twombly 

by Edmund de Waal

'Twombly's sense of the erased, the partial, the lost and the fragmentary makes complete sense to me'
Cy Twombly
Cy Twombly, the 'great survivor of the heroic age of American painting'.
Photograph: David Lees/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
Cy Twombly is a painter of thinking aloud, of thoughts checked and then resumed, hesitancies and the rush of ideas. Twombly, now 82, is the great survivor of the heroic age of American painting, the generation of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Jackson Pollock, who upended what was expected in contemporary art. Somehow he has managed to continue to create profoundly affecting work without histrionics or hubris.
Twombly is known for his scribbles, great looping calligraphies of white on black, of white on white – or, in the more recent Bacchus series, swoops of carmine three metres high. His paintings are a mass of marks, erasures and words. Phrases come and go, lines are repeated until they become incantatory. Sometimes you read a fragmentary part of a poem, or an allusion to a classical text, only for it to be crossed out. There are puns and odd misspellings: erudition giving way to doodling at the back of the class. And this is what I love: the way that there is slippage between an intended epic expression and a failure to finish.In his work he has both the shopping list and the great list of ships sent to attack Troy.

Untitled, 1970
by Cy Twombly
Twombly's sense of the erased, the partial, the lost and the fragmentary makes complete sense to me. In the recent Tate retrospective there was a room that showed the series Nini's Paintings, made after the sudden death of the wife of his Italian gallerist. Landscapes of writing: a glacial blue and white version next to another of an umbrous brown. And standing in front of them they seemed one of the most moving reactions to loss possible: the way that in mourning we go back again and again to a memory, that we cannot close down the need to return.
He has just completed a ceiling for the Louvre. Above a gallery of classical statues hangs a fierce Mediterranean blue sky in which the planets glow and the names of Greek sculptors are inscribed. It is beautiful and it is surprising. That is enough.




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016




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