Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint

A scholarly undertaking with big long words and very long sentences. At first, I thought that this would be more than I wanted to know. The introduction is tedious and plots, making you work. In my opinion, the author needs to read Elements of Style; it might have been enjoyable as opposed to an endurance. I initially gave this three stars, and I was wrong. Once you get past the introduction and preface, it takes off. I found myself slowing down to savor the insightful glimpses of Twombly creative mind. I apologize for my initial reaction, and now bestow four stars. It is fascinating stuff. I'll still gripe about the style, but not so much.

Manfred de la Motte wrote ( del Roscio: Writings on Cy Twombly :19) in 1963 : “Cy Twomby by means of his pictures postulates an optically perceivable, legible literature that is quite without parallel. Independent of the known cannon of individual elements, he crosses the border into literature, which originally thought it could not survive without letters. So Twombly uses a kind of script? Certainly, but one that hardly has anything in common with it other than the name. There is no prior consensus on 26 letters, there is none of the fatal calligraphy, the “poème-object”, that almost always imperfect permeation of painting and literature; there is no decorative ornamentation of the usual abstract drawings. Yet it is a script, a transcription nevertheless, if not a mere psychogram spelling the command: READ! But there is NOTHING (sic) meaningful to read there; it is the self-presentation of reading and the call to do so. Twombly’s theme is reading, not legibility.“Here, reading is less deciphering and more allowing the eye to be captivated by sequences and passages rhythmically teasing out the reports. [but the certain order of reading] is avoided here as the sequence becomes [merely] adjacency..what ensues …is so insignificant as to ensure that you probably NEVER GET TO MULL IT OVER INTELLECTUALLY.” [caps added]This is where Jacobus takes the needle off the record. With the assistance of the Cy Twombly Foundation’s collection of his books in Gaeta, she takes her pursuit in detail: explicating text, examining Twombly’s notes of what he did to the texts, dis-assembling lines, recombining, re-writing, above all interpreting for himself and the viewer what his take-away context might have been.The subtitle “Poetry in Paint” is only an encomium to work that exists so vitally in the visual. And more like reading “with” Twombly, because he was a reader, and reading was a flame to his imagination. This reading activity combined with his ever present painting physique sums up his artistic process.Mary Jacobus is an academic insider of literature, not art. This is a teaching book. As such it includes points of view by necessity about literature which are outside the goals of the artist, and an argument intrudes: specifically- the status of the arts in society as seen by current literary critique - a 23 page dirge on lyric poetry history and epigrams of the now dead Theodor Adorno, the sum of which supposes Twombly to be a ventriloquist of a corrupt literature…as Jacobus calls it- A Pastoral Stain.I can understand Kant’s desire in his time to encourage the German people to think beyond the Bible by using Philosophy, and in part Adorno’s desire to rid post WWII Germans of the Nazi infatuation [Fascisti realismo] with classicism. But his critique is as stale as the Italian art scene itself (Marxist realism) when Twombly arrived in Rome.Adorno appears to me now, in his tirade about the cultural machine inhibiting real change, to be the ACTUAL ventriloquist — of an ideal society— which will never achieve a democratic polis— the foundation of a free society, free speech, and full recognition of difference. There is no common good politically speaking, and the polis is not going to withdraw. Neither is lyric poetry, unless it continuously gets mutilated by low cost “accessible” translations (Kindle Metamorphosis).Jacobus admits Adorno has nothing to do with Twombly’s sphere. So why include him?Varnedoe was obliged to write history —by assembling details, not necessarily interpreting content. His Introduction and summary, like two book-ends, are both a profiling of a public expectation and its lack of that comprehension of Twombly one expects in painting, because the public lacked the means to think about his work without profiling it.Jacobus’ approach is pre-dated by Marcelin Pleynet ( in del Roscio Writings on Cy Twombly, 23:Designs in Letters, Numbers, and Words or Painting by Ear, 1976). His treatment of Twombly’s “Ode to Psyche 1960” from Keats is posited as a global approach to Twombly’s intent and pursuit of the subject, and of the meaning of painting and the aesthetic object. Jacobus takes this approach as well —forward though Twombly’s history in detailed examination of multiple texts.Her treatment of Twombly’s early days with Rauschenberg in Morocco and their subsequent shows in Italy is particularly interesting as it reveals how fundamental and complementary their materials sensibilities were. And Jacobus reveals how the text of Goethe’s trip to Italy became important to young painter as a character model. (Braudel returns to my consciousness as well to after many years.)Best of all is Twombly’s renovation of the Narcissus story with the assistance of Rilke. This is a wonderful revelation by both Jacobus & Twombly— as brilliant in kind as Spivak’s essay “Echo.” Spivak renovates Echo on her own behalf for all women, from scenes which seem to restrain her in perpetuity without explanation, in the endless pictorial reproduction. (Ovid’s praise of his wife in Tristia is some proof of his high estimation of women. As he called his Metamorphoses a skeletal unfinished work, maybe for him Echo was merely a “shade,” as Blake would have said, not a class, as in Spivak.)Twombly, on the other hand, takes a more immediate path— forsaking Ovid’s picture altogether, and all repetitions of it. (This is big for the history of the visual arts.) He replaces it with a moment by moment existence of the character of Narcissus as a person always and forever without footing. Twombly paints not Ovid’s picture, but a more complete, 20th C. view of narcissism (André Green). If only the rest of Ovid would yield to this kind of quest.If you are already inclined towards Twombly’s authors from high school Latin or other academic exposure to poetry (Plato, Homer, Theocritus, Virgil, Ovid, Spenser, Marlowe, Keats, Shelley, Mallarmé, Cavafy, and especially Rilke) Jacobus’ texts will open the painting up. After Jacobus, as far as the texts go, you won’t feel as though you have been thrown into a swimming pool against your will. Jacobus [who is the reader of the reader] will lead you to where many things come from in Twombly-- a repetitive recollection of the past in the present time in each work .. [women are always the readers.]BUT— you will still have the main problem —the visual— you may still be fidgeting about the presence of the scrawl, the word “graffiti.” This won’t immediately disappear from your mental vocabulary—until you can see: most viewers negative reactions to the paintings are themselves a form of empty profiling. Jacobus helps with this.Jacobus’ Postscript is a little windy, given the back-door approach throughout her book to the paintings— not really an accurate view of Twombly as a whole. Forget Octavio Paz on this.Varnedoe’s closing (n. 182) is more to the point : “The image cannot / be dis possessed of a / primordial / freshness / which IDEAS / CAN NEVER CLAIM.”

great study on this uniquely talented artist.

Absolutely fabulous. A definite treasure

Le sujet, le rapport entre Twombly et la poésie, est bien traité par contre les photos sont top petites et de mauvaise qualité.