“One must act in painting as in life-directly” -Picasso
Cy Twombly is probably my favorite painter at this point in my life and my career. He has even surpassed Schiele in my book which is wild because I never thought that would happen in a million years.
I stumbled on Twombly’s paintings as a young kid at RISD spending time at the RISD library.
That library, it was a godsend for any kid studying any kind of art. It was a two story building off Benefit Street where I spent all my time upstairs on the 2nd floor. A small library but it was amazing. It had a sort of open tiered, square room that had long beautiful wooden tables for studying and reading. There were books on that floor as well as on the balcony/trestle area that looked down on the tables. They had about 4-5 insanely comfortable plush chairs situated on both levels. It was quiet; when the sun would stream in on a nice Providence afternoon the place was close to heavenly. People would go in there just crash out in those chairs and nap, they were so nice. They had a room were they kept over-sized art books on nearly everyone: Lautrec, Klimt, Raphael, Daumier, Hockney, Modrian, Yves Klein. I mean you name a well known artist and they had a book on them. They had a room of rare art books, some of which were truly incredible.
The RISD library was where I got my true art history from. A history that I really gave to myself and took upon myself to learn. They had art history lectures for the Freshman at RISD and while they were informative they had a heavy heavy slant on old dead white guys. To this day I admire a lot of them as artists, but what I’m also saying is that there wasn’t a lot of relevance in it for someone like me. The RISD library is where I gave myself the understanding about how I wanted to view art: what it meant to me, who I thought was interesting and relevant. So I just lived in that place. I’d go in for entire afternoons and look at everyone, just soak up whatever I wanted. I read about all the titans: Picasso, Pollock, Degas, Rodin. I also studied the people they weren’t teaching me about. Amazing sculptors like Mark Di Suvero, Af-Am artists like Ossawa Tanner and Romare Bearden. I’d study the great Japanese sculptor Noguchi, and the prints of Hiroshige, and Yoshitoshi. Downstairs was the periodical room so I’d grab ArtForum and Art in America and read up on who was contemporary and what they were making: Jeff Koons, Basquiat, Gilbert & George, Cindy Sherman. And I’d study the great illustrators: N.C. Wyeth, Parrish, and Winsor McKay who created Little Nemo.
Anyway, at the time I was big into the Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb. I don’t remember why, I just know that I was and that I made some truly awful paintings trying to imitate him. I’m pretty certain I came across Twombly as a result of that.
I admire Twombly for a few reasons. The first being that although he was already garnering success, he just picked up and left the US. Moved to Italy in 1959 and has lived there ever since. That’s huge. You have to know a little about American art to fully appreciate it. Just think about the American scene in 1959. 1959, America was the place for art. Look at what was going on then: You had the Abstract Expressionists, Pollock, Rothko, DeKooning, Clyfford Still all starting to hit their stride. On the West coast, the Bay Area Figurative guys were making astounding work: Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliveira, Joan Brown, Wayne Thiebaud. Holy Christ you had Leo Castelli still around on the East Coast nurturing Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Warhol, Hockney, Lichtenstein, and Alex Katz were all working on the scene and Pop Art was about to explode. I mean it was just an amazing period for painting; a period like that may never be seen again. Right in the middle of that, while reaping success, Twombly, BOOM!, heads for Italy to study the old masters and paint and live in Rome. I admire that tremendous courage and belief in his own vision, of where he was going and where he wanted to go.
I admire the man because he is now in his 80′s and has been painting steadily for 40+ years
Mostly I admire Twombly because he has lived a relatively trouble free life, and lived long enough to deservedly gain his accolades and financial rewards. The man is beyond rich. It’s nice to see a rich artist who earned his dead presidents the old school way, you know? He didn’t roll out of graduate school somewhere and blow-up, making six-figure paintings within the span of 5 years, assuming it was his god-given right like so many kids coming out of art schools now. The man was on the grind working on what he wanted to work on. He didn’t self-implode into drugs or booze or doubt, wasn’t here today gone tomorrow. He never seemed to have a life of torment and I always admired that. I still admire that this guy often flew under the radar and never seemed to stress too hard over it, moved when it would have been so tempting to rest on his laurels, kept working. He’s lived and done all of that, has shown everywhere worth showing, won every award and accolade worth winning while amassing an enormous fortune in doing so. So yeah, Cy is my main man.
A lot of people might read this and then go on to check out of some of his work. Twombly is definitely one of those painters where your first inclination is to go “Wtf? You’re not serious, I’ve got/know a 6 year old who could crank that out.” For a long time I thought the same. Like, a long time. Even though I looked at his work way back at RISD, I still was of the same mind for at least another 5-8 years. Then at one point they had a big Twombly show at the National Gallery of Art in my hometown D.C. I went down to check it out because I’d never seen any of his work in real life before and I wanted to see what was what. Included in the show was his series of 4 paintings, the Quattro Stagioni with the 4 large panels situated in their own room. I went in there and I’m dead serious when I say they were phenomenal. I was just speechless. I must have sat/stood and stared at ‘Estate’ (Italian for “Summer” ) for a good 30 minutes alone. Just that one panel. The thing you don’t get from books and reproductions is how layered and rich some of his paintings are, how textured. You look at them in a book and they don’t seem like much, but you see them in person and you can see that hours upon hours of thought, days upon days of problem solving went into that one drip, line, or scribble. It was a revelatory experience. I’ve only had that feeling a few times from other paintings. I see and have seen a lot of work that I admire, but I only come across that feeling every so often. I rarely get it from most contemporary artists these days because so much contemporary art lacks any sincerity whatsoever. The mediocrity is running rampant everywhere and as for a lot of what’s left: you can almost feel the work being churned out for the quick buck. Although as an aside, there are a few contemporary artists who have given me that feeling, who’s work was so good it boggled my mind: paintings by Chris Offili and Lecia Dole-Recio. Jenny Saville. Yoshitomo Nara’s ‘Cup Kids.’ Prints by Laura Owens.
Twombly: There’s a real sincerity in his work. That painting was so vibrant, humming on a frequency that left me gobsmacked and feeling totally inadequate as a painter. Maybe that’s what I admire about him most of all: that I still look at his work and it still makes me feel that way; it still makes me feels small, that I have so much room to grow. To be honest there are very few painters around that have the talent or career to make me still feel that way.
Image: Cy Twombly ©®
