20 Minutes With Cy Twombly
Looking at art is treated as a contemplative medium. Doing so properly, we’re told, takes hours, not minutes. Reaching true art connoisseurship means training one’s focus on a work for minutes at a time. In order to truly get art, allegedly, we must stare deep into the work, probing with our eyes for hidden meanings and complexities that may or may not exist. Anything less affronts the artist and high-minded propriety.
One, however, doesn’t always have hours for viewing art. The naysayers may say mere minutes don’t suffice, but 20 minutes with art is better than no time with art at all. While first impressions can’t tease out every latent nuance in a work, approaching art through instantaneous responses is an underrated way of viewing. Rather than twisting your brain through countless possible interpretations, you can appreciate art for art’s sake, diving into the beauty of each work and what your response is, theoreticians be damned.
20 minutes with Gagosian Gallery’s phenomenal Cy Twombly exhibit, In Beauty it is finished, is more than enough time for an epiphany. The exhibit, which ended today, featured 94 drawings from the artist, done between 1951 and 2008. Done with the same verve as his paintings, Twombly’s drawings might enrapture, or they might revolt, if you find his childlike renderings lacking in technique. Technique snobbery, however, is an unfortunate reason to write him off—countless artists have his drawings to thank for their careers.
Cy Twombly, "Untitled," 1969. Photo courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.
Take Elliott Puckette, for instance. Do I enjoy her work? Absolutely. Do I think her paintings copy Twombly’s early pencil drawings (circa 1954-56) and white wax crayon drawings? Undoubtedly. Background colors and line shapes be damned, the ideas are the same—overlapping, looping lines with nebulous beginnings and ends, spiraling in chaos and looking gorgeous in their entropy. In a recent interview with T Magazine, Puckette stood in front of a large painting entitled “Love Letter,” part of her current show at Manhattan’s Paul Kasmin Gallery. The question “Love letter to whom?” is answered with “Cy Twombly;” the work is a gigantic, supersized derivative of Twombly’s smaller pencil works. Puckette’s means of achieving her lines are far more complex than Twombly’s were—she outlines her work in chalk, then etches the line with a razor blade—though the end appearance is familiar enough to warrant a double take.
Ditto Christopher Wool, whose saturnine gray paintings find their origins in Twombly’s drawings from the 1970s. Two of Twombly’s works from 1975—early drafts of “Mars and the Artist” and “Apollo and the Artist”—are rendered with oil, wax crayon, charcoal and pencil, for an immersion in gray. Furthermore, Wool’s black and gray blob paintings are desaturated takes on Twombly’s effervescent flower paintings from the 1980s onward. Changing the color changes the mood, though keeping the shape the same links the artists’ works inextricably.
Twombly’s influence on Jean-Michel Basquiat also can’t be ignored. Basquiat was reportedly a serious Twombly fan, and his use of language in paintings derives from Twombly’s work. Twombly began playing with language in the late 1950s, in a series of untitled color pencil drawings. His “See Naples + Die” series from 1960 is an evolution of these early works—more colors and longer phrases and numerical sequences are added—and a predecessor to Basquiat’s grand graffiti pieces and oil works. Conceived after Twombly’s move to Italy, these tongue-in-cheek works found themselves transmuted into revolutionary aphorisms when Basquiat began playing with language two decades later. While the two artists’ works look different as can be, they’re linked by the shared vocabulary of simplistic shapes and lines and seemingly nonsensical words that are clear as day.
All this I gleaned in 20 minutes. Granted, I’m an art junkie, but that amount of time is more than enough to be moved by Twombly and not just contextualize his place in the 20th Century artistic canon. Seeing Twombly’s drawings is nothing short of mesmerizing. On first glance, a five-year old could draw similar works, yet they could not conceive of the ideas Twombly did in his oeuvre and link the disparate, chaotic elements together in a way that makes viewers think “This is art.” Upon seeing Twombly’s “Toilet of Venere” drawings, my mouth gaped open in amazement. Here were simple, bold flowers in shades of pink and purple, done in large brushstrokes, not functioning as a critique on some societal matter but beguiling visitors for a longer gaze. These drawings are meant to be looked at, to get lost in, to cause fainting spells from their beauty and novelty. These are drawings that make you exclaim “wow” before entering a breathless stupor where you can’t take your eye off them.
Two of Twombly’s drawings—both entitled “Untitled (To Sappho)”—feature a short poem from the ancient Greek poetess: “Like a hyacinth in the mountains, trampled by shepherds until only a purple stain remains on the ground.” These lines capture the essence of Twombly’s drawings, drawings that illuminate the beauty within their chaos. For their creation, technique had to be destroyed. Of that destruction, only the most basic elements—lines, blobs, letters and numbers—remain on paper, appearing at surface level, inviting awe rather than some deep search for meaning. For that we are thankful and, frankly, not worthy.