Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons

Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons
Tate Modern
19 June - 14 September 2008
Admission Charge

Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons is one of those exhibitions that I trembled before writing about, not because the paintings filled me with excitement but because they absolutely did not.

I simply could not see through the obscure nature of the material, let alone write in any fluent way about the slabs and dashes of colour that compose many of them. I am not possessed of the vision of Tate Director and curator of the exhibition, Nicholas Serota. And unlike Serota, I have not had the privilege of being ‘in close discussion’ with the artist. Instead, I attempted to uncover a little of his past so that I might find the key to his work.

Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928. His studies took him to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Washington and Lee University in Lexington and the Art Students League in New York. At Black Mountain College in North Carolina he studied under Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell.

Motherwell inspired Twombly’s interest in calligraphy and the automatic drawing technique of the surrealists. Twombly combined this inspiration with the expressive gestures of Jackson Pollock to create his, Twombly’s, own style. And in 1953, he served in the army as a cryptologist. Ah!

When wrote of finding the key to Twombly’s work, I was not descending into hyperbole. Wikipedia describes cryptography as the practice and study of hiding information. Until recently, cryptography referred almost exclusively to encryption, that is, the process of converting ordinary information into unintelligible ciphertext. And decryption is the reverse, changing unintelligible ciphertext into plain, readable text. I am not going to waste space, speculating on what use the US military would have had for encoded text, in the 1950s. Instead, I wondered about the information hidden in Twombly’s words and numbers, names of places and dates, scribbled seemingly hastily, then half hidden behind blocks and dashes of paint.

Wilder shores of love is written in scrawling script on the painting of the same name. In much smaller script above these letters, is written
21 August 29, 1984. Beneath the script is a turbulent mass of pale grey, turning from light to dark grey, to shades of wine and black. What happened on that date, you wonder, to rouse the emotion represented by the colour?

You know that the secret is hidden underneath the darker mass, that the knowledge is not for our eyes and ears, but that the emotion is expressed there, on canvas, for us to see. You can’t help but being tantalised by the feeling that Twombly has written a message on canvas, then sought to conceal it again.

And so it is with many of his paintings, which become even more intriguing when you read that his works, post 1957, have been inspired by poetry, mythology, the classics, European history and literature. (Press copy) As I wander through the roll-call of paintings with names like Quattro Staggioni: Autunno (1993-5), I am almost tempted to study cryptography to discover why ‘Autunno’ is painted in a vapid manner onto the canvas but obscured by splotches of wine, purple and yellow paint that, like the other words, are dripping towards the earth. Markings like birds’ feet add to the strangeness of the effect. And you will wonder, too. Do not miss this definitive exhibition of the artist’s work.

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