‘A unique and bizarre place of his own in the story of modern art’... Blooming, 2001-2008, by Cy Twombly. 

Cy Twombly review – blood-soaked coronation for a misunderstood master

Centre Pompidou, Paris
The first retrospective since the US artist’s death in 2011 celebrates a man pushing sex and death into a gory new space for art

My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

Jonathan Jones
Wednesday 30 November 2016

C

y Twombly, an artist who was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928 and moved to Italy in the 1950s, is in many ways very French. In the Salle des Bronzes Antiques at the Louvre museum in Paris, where ancient Greek armour waits silently for wars that will never come again, the room’s vast ceiling is painted by Twombly with a bright expanse of blue, its intensity illuminated by silver and gold suns and moons as if the light of the Mediterranean were infusing the museum with desire and danger.

For Twombly, the bronze helmets preserved in this gallery would not just have been archaeological remains from which the past might be understood but instruments of passion, relics of love. Twombly’s art is about sex, death and longing. History and myth enabled him to speak of these private things on a grand scale, to project his emotions across the most grandiose of canvases.

Apollo, 1975. Photograph: © Cy Twombly Foundation

Twombly’s poetic classicism is mirrored in the Louvre by such masterpieces as Nicholas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego and Jacques-Louis David’s Leonidas at Thermopylae. And it is not just Twombly’s love of the classics that connects him with French high culture but his intellectualism and fascination with the nature of language. 20th-century French thinkers such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes analysed the structures of “signification”, and from his early works onwards Twombly too sought the very essence of human culture as he explored parallels between the marks painters make and the rudiments of written language. He is the Levi-Strauss of graffiti art, revealing profound and mysterious connections between the impulse to scrawl and the instinct to paint.

So it is fitting that France is staging the first Cy Twombly retrospective since his death. On the top floor of the Centre Pompidou, the helmeted Greek heroes have returned. Gore, love and revenge stain the walls. At the heart of this sensitive compilation of Twombly’s paintings, not to mention his sculptures and Polaroid photographs, are paintings that sink themselves into the frenzy and rage of Homer’s Iliad. This founding masterpiece of ancient Greek literature purportedly tells the story of the Trojan war but in reality concentrates on a single tragic episode when the massive sulk of the Greek warrior Achilles drives his companion Patroclus to put on Achilles’ armour and get himself killed. Achilles takes epic revenge, slaughtering the Trojan Hector.

Untitled (Grottaferrata) 1957

Here they all are – not as portraits, but as marks. Twombly’s 1962 work The Vengeance of Achilles is a three metre tall drawing that resembles a huge Ku Klux Clan hood with its spiked top drenched in bloody red. Or is the shape an aggressive phallic image? If so it’s just one of many penises furiously doodled on Twombly’s canvases along with other male and female anatomical graffiti.

For Twombly, the story of Achilles and Patroclus is a sex tragedy. Homer takes it for granted these two warriors shared a bed – that’s just what Greek heroes did. Twombly makes their love a passion that blazes through eternity. In another 1962 work, Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus, two gory flowers of pain are connected by a slender umbilical cord of blood. Achilles cannot let go of Paroclus: their bond is mightier than death. The ghostly rose that was Patroclus is tied forever to the pulsing heart that is Achilles.

Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus, 1962 

These paintings are, let’s be clear, very strange. Are they even paintings? They are very large and done on canvas, but technically they are giant drawings. That’s the least odd thing thing about them. Twombly occupies a unique and bizarre place in the story of modern art. His paintings – let’s call them that – refer in a visceral, unmistakable way to the human body, but have nothing in common with figurative art. Neither are they abstract, for their fields of organic suggestiveness break every purist abstract rule going – and that’s even before you get to the words written on them.

No wonder it took him decades to be even partially understood. The earliest paintings here are fierce, wilfully chaotic psychic meltdowns that strip art down to something not far from an obscenity on a subway wall. Twombly was close friends with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns when he scratched and stained these rough canvases in the 1950s. It was as Rauschenberg’s lover that he first visited Europe and north Africa, launching a love of travel and history that would transform his life and art.

Wilder Shores of Love, 1985 

Twombly’s early art has less in common with his later erudite sources such as Homer or the historian Edward Gibbon than it does with Allen Ginsberg’s Beat poem Howl. The young Twombly is a gay man howling at 1950s America in these angry daubs. He delights in reducing the lofty seriousness of the abstract expressionist painters who dominated New York art at the time to something scabrous, base, dirty and depraved.

This exhibition reveals the raw violence at the heart of Twombly’s imagination. He is the most civilised and civilising of recent artists, a man who read endlessly and expects the same of his beholders. What? his paintings ask, you mean you’ve never read Catullus or CP Cavafy? What have you been doing with your life? Yet his belief in culture is anything but staid, and anything but confident. A tension between the civilised and the barbaric runs right through his art. It is the very essence of it. Both the savage and the scholarly – or as Lévi-Strauss might have put it, the raw and the cooked – are part of what makes Twombly a genius for our time.

Fifty Days at Iliam: Shield of Achilles, 1978 Photograph: © Cy Twombly Foundation

It is no coincidence that he keeps returning to the Trojan war. In his imposing and eerie 1978 cycle of paintings Fifty Days at Iliam (he deliberately misspelt Ilium to include the initial of Achilles) he mourns again the ancient killers and lovers. The Iliad is not just the founding text of ancient Greek culture but – by extension – of western civilisation itself and it is a violent, bloody, birth. Civilisation started with swords and fire. It started too with Bacchus, god of wine and ecstasy, whose mythology of unreason is another Twombly favourite, and Pan, the primitive, horned and horny god whose power he celebrates in his 1975 drawing Pan.

So while he is erudite enough to illustrate Edmund Spenser’s 1579 work The Shepheardes Calender and to have painted, in 1961, his own version of Raphael’s The School of Athens, he is also crude enough to scrawl his trademark cock and balls on many of the sublime paintings here. The movement that Rauschenberg, Johns and Twombly started in the 1950s is often called neo-dada, and while their biggest influence is usually said to be Marcel Duchamp, the fierce, coarse marks Twombly makes have a strong dash of the anger and brutalism of German dadaists such as Georg Grosz or Otto Dix.

Twombly’s rawness never left him. It keeps his art from turning into lyrical irrelevance. He is truly, and unforgivingly, our contemporary. After the assassination of John F Kennedy, several American artists, including Twombly’s great friend Rauschenberg, mourned him in their art. Yet Twombly’s commemoration was much less comfortable. In 1964, the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York showed his series Nine Discourses on Commodus, painted the previous year: it was critically reviled, these gory images of torn flesh in grey empty space ridiculed for their messy melodrama at a time when minimalism was the latest thing. Yet surely they were politically confusing, too. Was Twombly mourning Kennedy or celebrating the death of a tyrant? Commodus was the maddest of ancient Rome’s emperors, a compulsive killer who in the end had to be killed himself.

To understand these paintings you have to go the library. In Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the reign of Commodus is the bloody red line line that divides the golden age of Rome from its long, unstoppable decline. Twombly’s paintings are not about Kennedy. They are about America crossing the line from its golden age into a bleaker historical epoch. This artist could always see the bigger picture.

Nine Discourses on Commodus, 1963.

I’d like to have seen even more of that bigger picture at the Pompidou. This is a lovely exhibition, but not quite as epic as Twombly deserves. He really needs a huge show – and although its sheer size makes it very hard to transport, we won’t see the ultimate Twombly retrospective until his masterpiece Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor is included in all its 52 feet of sensual melancholy, or his great paintings about the Battle of Lepanto.

Instead, the passion of Twombly, that can paint the Trojan war and make it sexily of our time, touchingly climaxes here in his garden. Some of his gorgeous and perfect late paintings of flowers are included. They rank with Warhol and Monet as modern pastorals. On a fragile wooden sculpture, I read these scribbled words: “In time the wind will come and destroy my lemons.” Some of his last photos show the rugged, undomesticated, bulbous lemons he grew in his Italian garden. They are good lemons because they have not been tamed. Cy Twombly saw the primitive roots of the civilised, and sowed the seeds for art’s rebirth as a thing of blood and love.

THE GUARDIA