Sesostris: March 8 to April 28, 2018
980 Madison Avenue, between 76th and 77th streets
New York City, gagosian.com

Drawings: March 8 to April 25, 2018
522 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, gagosian.com.

From the Iliad to Vietnam, Cy Twombly was fascinated by war. His epic, 10-part painting, Coronation of Sesostris (2000), is the singular focus of an exhibition at Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue, running concurrently with the same gallery’s landmark survey of drawings downtown. The legend of the conquering pharaoh, whose sanguine trails were recounted by Herodotus, is index linked by Twombly to the most elemental temporal cycle, the sun’s journey across the sky, as mythologized by the sun god Ra in his solar barge. Like Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, Twombly’s Coronation dashes through a landscape of emotional extremes and pounding cadences, with alternating rushes of the funereal, the rhapsodic and the majestic.

With almost puerile glee, the opening panel delivers a blazing sun in cadmium red crayon contoured in Twombly’s signature jittery nonchalance, grandly enclosing a chaotic entanglement of bouncing lines. He then installs the same solar shape onto a schematic chariot, bestowing upon it the spindly inscription “SOLAR BARGE OF SESOSTRIS.” The vessel seems to fly into an immediate barrage, in the next panel, of spermatic deluge on the now febrile effulgence of red and yellow orb. A slanted, knotty inscription, obscured and shadowed in this gravitational rage of aqueous white acrylic paint, cites Sappho in fragments: “Eros weaver (of myth)/ Eros sweet (bitter)/ Eros bringer (of pain).” Eros, son of Aphrodite and Ares, seems to be Twombly’s entry point into the tragic carnality of human violence, union as Eros is of the gods of love and war. Yet this brief orgiastic moment is urgently checked in the fourth panel, where a simmering sun retreats to a wax crayon circle amidst emaciated pencil spirals and diminutive runnels of yellow paint. This is a symphonic tactic, an interlude of momentary calm priming the viewer for the explosive event that will span the next three panels.

The barge, now sprouting stalactite-like oars, reappears in full baroque sensuality. Rapid knots of watery brushstroke, at once floral and bloody, form a gold and roseate cascade. As others have noted of Twombly, his dripping motions are simultaneously temporal and spatial. On the next panel, a Patricia Waters poem about the departure of the gods is cursively inscribed in red pencil, and shrouded in a crimson lace of arrested paint projectiles. Climax is reached in the seventh panel, where the white deluge, sublimely touched with gold, reappears and submerges the now multiplied barges, dismembering and devouring the foreground boat with flaming yellow while pushing its discarnate companions into atmospheric recession. Everything sizzles in the splendid opacity of embodied light. This moment quickly collapses in the next panel into the obscurity of frosty purple and foggy pallor, an almost comic deflation of the preceding grandeur. The barge then morphs back to its own schematic vestige. Finally, lines from Sappho reappear in renewed clarity above a dark, brooding shape.

Image and text in Twombly’s oeuvre are never subservient, one to the other, as mere flourish or illustration. But the viewer often encounters a disorienting, almost vertiginous split between modes of reading and of seeing. Verbal meaning of the script and visceral sensation of the paint—the soaring barges’ dripping flames and Sappho’s lamentations—alternate in focus, hinging upon each other as they dance their tango. Text tunnels through materiality to treasure troves of cultural evocations, while paint hints beyond what can be verbalized. Perhaps Sappho’s words themselves provide a clue. According to poet Anne Carson, Sappho’s notion of the bittersweet (glukupikron) describes the “sensational crisis” of joy and pain coexisting. It reveals the essentially paradoxical nature of eros. Lack, the space between the actual and the possible, activates eros in the way voltage activates electric charge. And like the runner in Zeno’s paradox, Eros reach for his object but never consummates it: “Perfect desire is perfect impasse,” as Carson puts it. The lover’s vision is stereoscopic: reality and potentiality, self and other, what is and what is not, are all projected upon the same mental screen.

Comparably, in Twombly image and text can never have a proper, or literal, correspondence and can only be metaphoric translations of each other. Each medium reaches hopelessly towards what only the other has. The edge between them, like the pressurized contact of opposites in the word “bittersweet”, is pungently defined. The act of subsuming both upon the same picture plane creates a space of incongruence and paradox. Across this space, as Carson puts it, “a spark of eros moves in the lover’s mind to activate delight”. The electrified dance of allusion and sensation is an erotic one. In this light, what Clement Greenberg proposed in his 1940 Towards a Newer Laocoön, that painting should uphold its two-dimensional purity against contamination of other disciplines, reads like a call to chastity, evading the possibility that painting could be strengthened by interaction with another medium.

Strikingly, Twombly achieved the feat of using poetry to elevating painterly expressivity at a time when images were rendered secondary or diagrammatic by the stipulations of textual concepts (minimal art and pop art). This underlines the difficulty faced by Twombly’s innovative enterprise, and thus the importance of recognizing some seemingly instinctive or literary decisions as contemplated formal strategies. His choice of quotation is often painterly in nature, drawing from favored poets like Keats, Rilke, Sappho, Catullus and the haikuist Taigi. When citing these writers he often modifies or omits words. On the canvas or page, the territorial sovereignty of text is, furthermore, frequently violated by painterly marks—and undermined by his inimitable, barely legible handwriting. The Twombly scrawl is something he deliberately cultivated at the outset of his career when, during national service in the early 1950s, he took to drawing in the dark. Line probes with libidinal tremor realms of rhythm, psyche and temporality.

In abundant examples, Gagosian’s drawing exhibition demonstrates the ways in which Twombly’s very particular quality of line undergoes constant metamorphosis. The first career-spanning presentation of its kind, this show covers ground from 1951 to 2008. It is a journey that begins in the early 1950s with angst-ridden gestural line drawings heavily influenced by German Expressionism and bristling with primal forms. The 1960s witness both the somber, incessant, compulsive loops of the blackboard paintings and the first stirrings of mythopoeic imagery rich with quotations sourced from world literature. In the 1970s the sublimated landscapes, with their pastoral reminiscences and flower-lined splendor, an idiom that would come to dominate Twombly’s later years, make their first appearance.

In an untitled drawing from 1969, a swarm of looping white lines surge and plunge atop a uniformly dark-gray ground. The gentle upper-rightward drift of this cluster is typical of Twombly. In the center background, a tangle of translucent pentimenti insinuates itself into atmospheric distance. Gentle, slanting lines traverse the page, not with the calligraphic modulation of a brushstroke, but with the nervous energy of a drypoint needle: mobile rather than corporeal. Indeed, the jolts and swells evoke a disembodied psychic rhythm, one in which a smooth curve never travels far without being disrupted by an obstinate shudder. Somewhere between Surrealist automatism and Abstract Expressionist gesture, this quality of line manages to reconcile Joan Miró’s slick, smooth arabesques and Franz Kline’s muscular thrusts. An uneasy volatility recalls projectiles hitting friction that is distinct at each local point. It is intensely felt, “the sensation of its own realization” as Twombly declared in his 1957 manifesto, yet it’s a particular kind of cathexis realized through sensitized rhythm rather than carnal gesture. At moments when the frail loops close upon themselves, we catch ghostly glimpses of legibility: letters flash, “R,” “O,” “M,” “S”, illuminating a fugitive tunnel between word and drawing. Perhaps there’s another, implicit kind of literariness in Twombly’s art: poetry is about rhythm, a matter of stress and timing, just like the artist’s particular use of line.

White for Twombly is densely impregnated with symbolic meaning. He has a penchant for moments of white on off-white, or for laying white paint on evenly tinted paper. To quote his 1957 manifesto again: “Whiteness can be the classic state of the intellect, or a neo-romantic area of remembrance – or […] the symbolic whiteness of Mallarmé”. And as Mary Jacobus has observed, white also evokes the sun-lit Mediterranean for Twombly,. It also embodies memory through the act of erasure, constitutes intervals and space for painterly marks, and annuls directionality by creating a decentered narrative. In the seven-part panel Untitled, 1981, a frail crayoned arc springs into a flower before a leaping, cresting wave takes over, which then proceeds to narrow out. The center panel with the wave exhibits at its full range Twombly’s masterful use of white. It is achieved by maneuvering the complementary red and green, the main colors of the forceful crayoned undertow. The peak of the wave is a creamy commingling of thick white impasto applied in staccato daubs and red pigment rubbed out from the crayon lines, in which a pink pudgy opacity results. In the middle right, we see the same situation with green, but the emerald twines break through the white paste, creating a partial palimpsest. At the bottom of the wave, the layer of white paint, spottily grayed by the mingling of red and green, clarifies in glassy sedimentation. A stylus then scores back into this diaphanous zone, exposing the crayon beneath in flashes of lucidity. Nietzsche’s statement about dreaming comes to mind: “Even when this dream reality is most intense, we still have, glimmering through it, the sensation that it is mere appearance”.

The Gagosian show is extensive enough to make clear that the apparent orgiastic chaos of Twombly’s work is buttressed by visual sophistication. In Untitled, 2001, in the culminating room of the exhibition, a furor of yellow and gold hurtles across the image. Large, blazing flowers, in lemon, sap green, purple and crimson—the paint slathered on and fingered to a velvety luster—bloom at the top of the composition. Paint dribbles down in vertical streaks forming a balustrade. Articulated local areas (the blossoms) with their vestiges of naturalism and strong geometric structures (the yellow diagonal passage and the dripping veil) rein in an otherwise sweeping anarchy.

Living for most of his life in different parts of Italy and immersing himself, furthermore, in various forms of classicism, one wonders how Twombly managed to remain conversant with American artistic culture in the second half of the 20th Century? His move to Europe and incorporation of literature into painting at a time when people were rejecting Abstract Expressionism in favor of Minimalism and Pop Art reads like an effort to revive the subjectivity and romanticism of the earlier movement while also extracting moral and emotional nuances from the literature from which he quoted. Untitled (To Sappho), 1976 shows this at play. The center of the picture is the purple stain. It lies above the last stanza of Sappho’s brief epithalathum (marriage song) Lament for a Maidenhead. The stain has itself a scent-like gauziness, and is partly obscured by a white flurry. The text is a pyramidal shape lapsing rightward like a sigh, each line written with larger and more spaced out letters. In Sappho’s poem, loss of virginity is compared to the violent crushing of a flower. Besides Sappho herself, this picture evokes another personage associated with queerness: Hyacinth, Apollo’s young lover and one of Twombly’s literary alter egos. Produced during Twombly’s pastoral period, the picture recalls Adorno’s remark that “the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism”. The first Gay Liberation March was held in New York City in 1970, but how engaged was Twombly, whose sexuality few now question, in 1970s’ sexual politics? The connection is a mere hint, but the eroticism of his allusions is more than a literary ploy.

The post Eros, Weaver of Myth: Image and Text in Cy Twombly appeared first on artcritical.

March 3 to April 23, 2016
24 W 57th Street (between 5th and 6th avenues)
New York, 212 977 7160

Tacita Dean’s “…my English breath in foreign clouds,” at Marian Goodman, is a lofty exhibition encompassing new photo works, drawings, and three films. The first room holds A Concordance of Fifty American Clouds, a suite of photographs, slate drawings, and pieces made with spray chalk, white charcoal pencil, all created in 2015 and ’16. The titles, all containing the word cloud, are taken from William Shakespeare. In Portraits (a 16-minute film made in 2016) David Hockney smokes several cigarettes in his Los Angeles studio while we watch. The smoke rises up in front of his own series of portraits, all with blue backgrounds. The film is silent save for Hockney’s exhaling and the occasional rustling of papers. He laughs once, heartily. His sweater is blue and the couch in his studio is blue. The film is surprisingly meditative, paralleling the cloud works while grounding them in a subtly humorous way.

The viewer might travel between the large room of cloud drawings and photographs and the gallery of Hockney’s smoke. Both the film and the clouds provide the viewer with a specific kind of space in which to travel — Hockney smokes while he looks, not while he paints. And Dean looks at clouds, it seems, while painting them and photographing them. What is the space between looking, thinking, and making? The works in Concordance seem to hang the way clouds do: they are paired together, dispersed, clustered, vertically and horizontally oriented. There is an abundance of space, as in Portraits, wherein Hockney sits thinking and smoking in his studio. This is perhaps a result of big sky Los Angeles — a city known for being spread out, and bluer, too, with its intense sun and Pacific Ocean. The smoke makes visible evidence of inhalation and exhalation, while the clouds present evidence of looking. The viewer watches the watcher.

The other works in the show provide this same sense of looking at something that has been looked at in detail by Dean and others. Buon Fresco (2014) is an intimate view of Giotto di Bondone’s frescos of The Life of St. Francis (1297–1300). This allows the viewer to see into the processes of the painter — his techniques and style. The projection is small — not much larger than a sheet of paper — and unlike the other two films, does not have a separate and darkened viewing area. The projection appears as a humble surprise in the hallway between the two larger galleries. The scale of the projection, coupled with the intensely intimate up-close view of the Upper Basilica of St Francis of Assisi, makes for a visceral micro-macro looking experience. In the same way that Dean grants viewers a particular kind of access to Hockney’s process, we see Giotto’s painting anew.

After walking down the narrow hallway, GAETA, 2015 — Fifty photographs, plus one appears. These photographs are installed similarly to A Concordance of Fifty American Clouds, on the opposite end of the gallery. Dean photographed Cy Twombly’s house and studio in Gaeta, Italy in 2008. They contain intimate details of his life and work — small scribblings on Post-Its, stacked photographs, surfaces and floors. Also of varying sizes, these works provide clips of information about Twombly. Though perhaps not directly about his work, it feels natural to make connections between the chalk drawings for which Twombly is known and Dean’s chalk and slate cloud works in the adjacent room. The show makes art historical and intuitive leaps. These leaps hold poetic resonance and keys to Dean’s ways of working.

Lastly, on the third floor of the gallery, Event for a Stage (2015) is shown every 90 minutes. A 50-minute, 16mm color film, it’s completely captivating as a standalone film and also hangs contextually with the rest of the works in the show. Filmed in a theater in Sydney, Australia in 2014, Event for a Stage is not exactly a work of theater. British actor Stephen Dillane is, as he says in the film, “an actor playing the role of the ‘actor.’” The set-up is immediately recognizable as one of a small theater, with a wide white circle drawn on the stage. The first few moments present a hypnotic, swirling introduction to the piece, with the camera following Dillane as he walks the perimeter. The audience is facing the camera. We are watching the audience watch the actor. Throughout the 50 minutes, Dillane grabs pieces of paper from Dean, who is sitting in the front row, and reads/performs them. At other times, he seems to be improvising. At still other times, he seems to be rejecting whatever text Dean has handed him. He appears frustrated at times and it becomes unclear if he is “acting” or if this is a performance of the difficult methods of communication and collaboration between Dean and Dillane, between film and theater, between an artist’s vision and an actor’s carrying-out. Dillane talks to the audience about the piece, about exchanges between himself and Dean, and about self-consciousness in acting. Filmed over the course of four performances, the camera is usually visible or we are aware of it via other means (Dillane giving camera direction, for instance). Part of brilliance of this film lies in the fact that it’s difficult to distinguish whether the actor is acting or not. It’s also difficult to distinguish whether the tension between Dean and Dillane is “real.” What is written on the papers that the actor keeps grabbing from the artist and then tossing on the ground? At the end, we are left with several papers strewn about the stage. Dillane bows and the audience applauds.

At some point, near the end of the film, Dillane reads (from Dean’s text): “Art is what makes life more interesting than art.” And so, Dillane is reading from Dean who is quoting fluxus artist Robert Filliou. That quote is an apt description of Dean’s body of work, and specifically this most lofty and intricate show. Dean is adept at speaking to the viewer. She complicates the relationship between artist and viewer by placing other artists and figures in the line of communication. In this case, she places, quite directly, Shakespeare, Giotto Di Bondone, Hockney, Twombly, and Dillane. “…my English breath in foreign clouds” is crowded with works, art historical figures and lives, while still spacious — leaving room for the viewer to make her own connections.

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September 26, 2014 to January 25, 2015
225 Madison Avenue, between 35th and 36th streets
New York City, 212-685-0008

The testing of limitations is a recurring characteristic of modernist painting, notwithstanding the distracting idea of “medium specificity.” How, then, to express duration in a single still image, which sight and sense readily accept as manifesting simultaneity? Systems of musical notation have been developed to indicate (aural) events in time, and to the extent that a musical score is also a drawing, it suggests a solution to that problem.

On loan to The Morgan Library from the Menil Collection through January 25, Cy Twombly’s Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) offers a different solution—one that is immersive, sensuous and pictorial. Roughly ten by 33 feet, it was painted in Rome in 1970 and features the reductive gray-and-white palette Twombly had by that time been working with for several years. Photographs of these paintings often accentuate the gray’s bluish undertone, making it appear denser than it is; the Menil canvas’s enormous expanse of translucent, brushy paint evokes not a chalkboard but thick smoke or deep shadow.

In white wax crayon, a loosely rectilinear diagram and accompanying semi-legible notations span the length of the canvas near its bottom edge. These convey a sense of intervals—of thresholds, shifts or transitions—along a left-to-right reading of the work.

The painting refers, we are told, to Le Voile d’Orphée (The Veil of Orpheus), a 1953 work by Pierre Henry,a pioneer of musique concrète. Composed for Pierre Schaeffer’s ballet Orphee 53, the cantata contains as a central motif the sound of tearing fabric, which apparently refers to the moment (found in some versions of the myth) when Orpheus, having led Eurydice from Hades, breaks the taboo imposed by Persephone by turning back to lift his bride’s veil of graveclothes, and gazing upon her. Considering that he is known as “the father of songs,” Orpheus’s timing here is pretty bad: the action would rend them forever asunder, as Hermes (who’s been tagging along)pulls Eurydice back into the Underworld, this time forever.

The first version of Treatise on the Veil dates from 1968, and hangs in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. A photographic reproduction of it is collaged into one of twelve untitled drawings in the Morgan exhibition, which appear to be studies and are presented, with great success, as fully resolved works. Laced even more abundantly than the painting with Twombly’s distinctive, ad-hoc calligraphic scrawl, they incorporate scribbles, smudges, erasures and rubber-stampings, as well as multi-panel collage structures.

Seven drawings feature six panels; four have five. Clearly, Twombly was engaged with the ideas of seriality, modularity, and progression that so enchanted many artists of the 1960s (and not only the Minimalists). The cellophane and masking tapes affixing these vertical, parallel swatches of paper to the larger sheets are showing their age, but that discoloration contributes to the sense of orchestrated scrappiness.

A slightly later drawing, from 1972, pares the structure down to four modules or “stages,” as they are labeled. It reprises the four-panel structure of Twombly’s 1968 canvas Veil of Orpheus (not in this show). Twombly, of course, was hugely influenced by Classical antiquity, and references to Orpheus can be found elsewhere in his oeuvre. The 1972 drawing contributes to the project’s tissue of references a black-and-white photograph of a woman, seen full-figure in profile, resplendent in an elaborate, flowing bridal gown. A flurry of graphite markings nearly obscures her.

In “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes,” Rainer Maria Rilke describes the journey these three figures made from the Underworld, through

…that immense, gray, unreflecting pool
that hung above its so far distant bed
like a gray rainy sky above a landscape.
And between meadows, soft and full of patience,
appeared the pale strip of the single pathway,
like a long line of linen laid to bleach.

I don’t know if Twombly read these lines. But Rilke’s pathway is perhaps a kind of time line, which ends with the lifting of Eurydice’s veil; then time is reversed, as her rescue and thus the newlyweds’ fortunes are reversed.

The exhibition literature states that another source for the painting is by Eadweard Muybridge: a study of “the movements of a veiled bride walking in front of a train.” Though not visually supported in the exhibition, this tantalizing detail implies a photographic component to Twombly’s investigation of duration and the still image. Pictorial space can be elastic, of course, and the same might be true of pictorial time.

The post “Soft and Full of Patience”: Cy Twombly at the Morgan appeared first on artcritical.

September 5 to October 5, 2013
568 West 25th Street at 11th Avenue
New York City, 212-249-7695

In old master art and sometimes also in early modernism, words often are the sources for visual images. This, after all, is why there is an academic journal called Word & Image – and a book by Norman Bryson titled Word and Image. Once you have identified the key text, then you are prepared to interpret a painting. This exhibition demonstrates how in Islamic calligraphy, in New York graffiti, and in some American and European gestural painting the relationship between word and image is totally different. In Tunisian/French artist eL Seed’s acrylic painting, This is just a phrase in Arabic (2013), in the present exhibition, words form a magnificent black-on-red image.  Mehdi Qotbi’s lithographs, analogously, are playful decorations using words. And Rob Wynne’s Appear!  (2013) is poured paint spelling “Appear!” These artists transform Arabic or English-language words into visual compositions. Graffiti artists do something different—they invent languages. Keith Haring is represented here by large chalk on paper drawings; Rammellzee’s spray collage, Decision of Sigma War (1984) is a four-panel composition; and LA2 (Angel Ortiz)’s Fire 911 (2013) has oil markings on a fireman’s alarm. And the Abstract Expressionists and their French peers adopt yet another procedure—they make completely abstract calligraphic paintings.  Franz Kline’s Untitled (1953) is in exhibition along with Bill Jensen’s Raised Bristles III (2010-11) and Pat Steir’s Untitled (2004); so too are Pierre Soulages’s Untitled (1956) and Hans Hartung’s T1971-R24  (1971).

In 1984 Jeffrey Deitch argued that the calligraphic tradition is a crucial component of modernism. He proposed that Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly be set alongside New York graffiti artists and the Persian masters of calligraphy. The new graffiti, Deitch noted, “was everywhere except the art world itself.” Then two years later the title and cover image of Frank Stella’s manifesto Working Space were derived from graffiti. Stella built upon tradition—for a long time museum art has gained energy from street life. We find this happening already, I believe in Camille Pissarro’s paintings, the product of his anarchism, as Joachim Pissarro has written, “a radical aesthetic whereby art would be stripped of all its canons and literary ambitions.” And yet, even now the art world mostly maintains a distinction in kind between graffiti and gestural painting, between street art and art in the museum.

In his A. W. Mellon lectures of 1989 Oleg Grabar, the doyen of Islamic art historians, noted how in that culture: “Writing is a specific moment in a series of closed processes of interpreting the world, a set of formulas through which life or the surrounding worlds are expressed . . . Writing contains a potentially technical perfection that can only be explained by comparing it to horses, nature, or love.”

For Muslims, he notes, “God has sent His message through writing and yet no writing will ever express the plenitude of the divine message.” You don’t need to be a believer or take this claim literally to admire the calligraphic art, sacred and secular, assembled in this revelatory exhibition. Many Chelsea shows effectively present upscale contemporary art. This one does something more difficult and rare- it offers a visually convincing sketch of a revisionist art history.
Sources: Joachim Pissarro, Camille Pissarro (New York, 1993), 161; Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton, 1992), 85, 64.

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CY TWOMBLY: Cycles and Seasons

Tate Modern, London until September 14 (Bankside, London, 020 7887 8888).

The magnificent retrospective of veteran American artist Cy Twombly at London’s Tate Modern is a bracing reminder that, before all else, painting is smearing and drawing is scribble. In his handling, informality can border on the infantile in its extremes of slightness and scatter.

This show, which is curated by Tate’s director Sir Nicholas Serota, travels to the Bilbao Guggenheim in the fall and then Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, and is the first major survey since the artist’s retrospective 15 years ago at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Mr. Twombly, who turned 80 this year, makes big, intellectually ambitious paintings and elemental sculptures that are complex in their interaction with other art and artforms. But he never lets us lose sight of art’s simplest instincts and manuvers, almost taunting the viewer with the base, raw impulses he lets loose.

His art embraces contradiction. In room after room, this survey offers spare yet dynamic canvases, or cruddy yet evocative sculpture. However nonchalant his painterly marks may seem, they are somehow taut and expressive nonetheless. Almost scatological in their oozing and dribbling, his paintings are unfailingly elegant.

There is also a dichotomy in Mr. Twombly’s work between the verbal and the non-verbal: Writing is key to his work — often there is text scribbled into his canvases, and titles manifest connections with poetry — but equally vital is a sense that splodges and gestures form an arcane system of pre-verbal expression.

This juggling act, sustained over half a century, is essential to Mr. Twombly’s achievement. But it also accounts for his rocky ride in terms of esteem. Because he taps reserves of brutalism and classicism in equal measure, he is apt to appear too effete to one camp, too grubby to the other. And the combination of rough textures and smooth literary reference may well account for his greater success in Europe than America.

And yet, the Americanness of Mr. Twombly’s influences and ambition are as striking as his European refinement. Art historically speaking, he was the kid brother of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns — he was Rauschenberg’s classmate at Black Mountain College, the legendary North Carolina experimental art college, and later his traveling companion and studio mate — offering a similar kind of cool, deconstructive coda to Abstract Expressionism. Early canvases in this show, such as “Criticism” (1955) with its graffiti-like scratching on white house paint were named at random in studio games with Johns and Rauschenberg.

In contrast to these peers, however, Mr. Twombly is more an extender than an ender of the AbEx tradition: He literalized the metaphor of handwriting in the free flowing drips of Jackson Pollock. His work also bears a striking affinity with the late work of Arshile Gorky in the way it joins drawing and painting, each at its most elemental, on the canvas.

From the outset, Mr. Twombly’s touch is unmistakable, and the way he sustains informality on a large scale is prodigious. What is very striking about this show, however, is the diversity of his oeuvre. He anticipates or responds to major stylistic shifts of the last half-century while also retaining his personal idiom.

This is another of his contradictions. He is clearly a fearless individualist, and yet at crucial junctures he seems to have been open to criticism and willing to be swayed. When his opulent, indulgent painterly works from the early 1960s, described as “baroque” and made in borrowed studios in Italy, were dismissed by the Minimal artists who held sway at that time in New York, Mr. Twombly capitulated to the criticism and returned to the austerity and monochrome of his 1950s abstraction. The pair of massive, multi-paneled canvases titled “Treatise on the Veil” (1968 and 1970) resemble schoolroom chalkboards — the earlier version has a painterly, all-over black ground in oil based house paint, with markings in white wax crayon sketching out rectangular forms with what look like hastily written calculations and instructions charting a horizontal line towards the bottom of the composition. These minimal works, described in the catalog as an ellipse within the exhibition, could equally be said to hinge the expressive abundance of the works that preceded and followed.

For soon Mr. Twombly was back on form, indulging his penchant for combining writing and primordial marks in compositions of bombastic lyricism. “Hero and Leandro” (1981–84), a painting in three separate panels, evokes the tragic tale of the drowned lovers in a downward rush of brushmarks that alternate between washed out and globular, fluent and agitated. The name “Leandro” is scrawled with a defiant pity that follows the flow. There is a strong acknowledgement of JMW Turner in the palette and application.

Exalted citations of poetry and classical myth were to prove a compelling influence on the emerging new expressionists of the 1980s such as Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, and Anselm Kiefer. It is around this time that Mr. Twombly secured his modern master status in the art world.

A sumptuous work, “Untitled (A Painting in 9 Parts)” (1988), represents the artist at his most traditional looking, bordering on the Rococo. Shown in the Italy Pavillion of the 1988 Venice Biennale, these paintings, on wood panels, inscribe verses of Rilke in Monet-like feathery and washy applications of oil paint and watercolor in watery greens and whites. Two of the panels are elaborately shaped in a way that recalls 18th century Venetian artists such as Tiepolo.

But in the 1990s the artist pulled back from this decadent-seeming extreme to reconnect with a more modernist impulse. His “Four Season” cycle (1993–94) explores a lexicon of shapes appropriate to each season, with barely legible tracings of Keat’s Poem, the Human Seasons (1818) as textual and textural counterpart to these bright colors and expressive gestures.

Mr. Twombly’s sculpture has been a significant part of his output from the beginning of his career, with a break in production between 1959 and 1976. Made from found objects, which are sometimes cast in bronze, they are typically coated in roughly applied white paint, and they, too, often have writing scribbled into the surfaces. They find the artist in his most archaic mode, and emphasize the brutal, primitive aspect of classicism, as opposed to its refinement. Tomb-like forms like “Untitled (In Memory of Alvaro De Campos)” (2002) are at once elegiac and elemental.

The show ends with a riot of color and a lyricism with the “Bacchus” (2005) series. These mammoth canvases reconnect with the pre-scriptural scratched abstractions of the 1950s while distilling the artist’s lifelong engagement with poetry and myth. In a rich red that hovers between wine and blood, evoking Homer’s “wine dark sea,” these great all-over dripping loops of thick, bold line are marvelously poised between tension and fluency, a final coming together of the artist’s competing impulses to inscribe and describe, to record and to let go.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 17, 2008, under the heading “Smears, Scribbles and Scratches: Twombly at the Tate Modern”

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