The Wobbly Humanity of Cy Twombly

Upon encountering Cy Twombly’s monumental nine-part polyptych “Untitled” (1971), I thought about the dark, domineering monolith that appears early on in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The object is of such unprecedented sublimity that it jump-starts the human species. Many in Twombly’s cohort of canonical American artists might have welcomed the comparison: Pollock, with his hurtling machismo; Rothko, who wanted viewers to stand before his paintings and sob. But I revised that impression pretty quickly. Charcoal gray and almost eight-and-a-half feet tall, each panel shares with the monolith only its scale and its shade. These works are distinctly earthly endeavors, showcasing the human hand in all its striving, with its trembly, curvilinear strokes of what appear to be chalk marks slanted diagonally like a hailstorm caught in a gust. Ghostly, streaky penumbras of hazy white hum beneath the strokes and occasionally overtake them — one can imagine Twombly blotting out previous failed attempts with the fleshy side of his hand, mumbling to himself, It’s not quite right, it’s not quite right. It’s a fitting centerpiece to an exhibition of paintings, works on paper, and a sculpture by the giant of postwar American painting. Also on view are pivotal bodies of work from 1968 through ’90, some of which were loaned from the Twombly family and have never been shown publicly. 

The “blackboard” paintings in this first room — all untitled and composed of oil-based paint and wax on paper or canvas, and dating from 1968 to ’71 — verge on but never quite become English script: the sinuous loops of “S”s; a mark that resembles the word “start”; the italic, unclosed infinity symbols of cursive, lowercase “f”s. Trying to figure out how Twombly made these works is vexing: I devoted minutes attempting to determine if one passage was blank canvas or another layer of near-white he’d rubbed atop other markings before re-marking it. Indeed, this happy linguistic slippage between the denotations of the words “mark” and “remark” seems to be just the kind of not-symbol/symbol slide that interested Twombly: These works seem poised at the precipice of when a symbol becomes itself. They feel like obsessive, ruminative works, the mental-visual instantiation of pacing across a room — in fact, Twombly made these by sitting on the shoulders of a friend who walked back and forth before the canvas — and they induce a similar effect sensation in a viewer. If you tracked the movement of a viewer’s eyes across these works, I suspect the result would look a lot like one of them. 

Given his preoccupation with the transition between a mark and its linguistic meaning, I’m surprised Twombly didn’t take on the Chinese character as so many Euro-American artists interested in either form or language have done before him, including Vincent van Gogh and Ezra Pound, particularly in parts of the exhibition dedicated to his peregrinations. The first of these is a gallery related to Italy, where the artist spent most of his life. “Condottiero Testa di Cozzo” (1987) (an astute viewer can deduce the title because it’s scrawled in huge, uncertain letters across the top third of the painting) is a highlight. It refers to Titian’s circa 1570 portrait of the Grand Duke of Alba, and you can almost make out a mirror image of the titular subject in a smeared flurry of thick marks, including a bright vermillion that just about punches you in the face. “Paesaggio” (1986), one in a suite of paintings made between 1981 and ’86 in Bassano in Teverina, Italy, is another; it almost looks like he gazed into the murky surface of one of Monet’s water lilies paintings and found the roiling depths of a Turner. 

Not all of these Bassano paintings are equally compelling — at least, they didn’t keep me enthralled, my gaze looping around and around like the loping marks of his chalkboard paintings. A friend who accompanied me remarked that a trio of untitled paintings in a quatrefoil shape felt a bit naked, and I’m inclined to agree. A suite of paper works he made about his travels through Russia, Afghanistan, and Central Asia first exhibited at the 1980 Venice Biennial, and reunited for the first time in 40 years, also felt uneven. Of the 14 ordered parts, I liked both works entitled “Opium Poppy” (1980) and one called “Harem” (1980) (though I didn’t necessarily love these titles …). I particularly appreciated the surprising result of the latter’s bright red melded into both white paint and its scrawled-out titular word. But the title card, “Five Day Wait at Jiayuguan” (1980), in which those words are written out in watercolor, the “five” subbed in with a Roman numeral, fell flat for me. These feel like experiments, and those don’t always succeed. But I love them for precisely that reason — for their emphasis on the wobbly human hand, literally and metaphorically, and as evidence that someone like the great Cy Twombly was also someone like me. 

Cy Twombly continues at Gagosian Gallery (980 Madison Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through March 22. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.