In a conventional recitation of the history of postwar American art, Cy Twombly’s long career is often contextualized, along with the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, at the inflection point between the flowering of Abstract Expressionism and the advent of Pop art. Both are considered quintessentially American cultural phenomena, and Twombly himself a quintessentially American artist.
But what of the fact that Twombly spent much of his artistic life in Europe, from his first visit in 1952 until his return to the United States at the end of his life almost sixty years later? Twombly’s gestural vocabulary of pencil marks, line drawing, and ecstatic scribbles clearly has affinities with the painterly expostulations of Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline, but another equally valid lineage situates Twombly’s work in the milieu of European artists and poets who, at war’s end, were exploring the possibilities of synthesis between artistic mark making and language.
The synesthetic dream of combining visual recognition and reading, art and language, began with ancient pictographs but became a modern preoccupation with poets like Stéphane Mallarmé, whose work Twombly read with great interest beginning in the late 1950s. Mallarmé’s 1897 poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (A Roll of the Dice Will Never Annul Chance), in which he arranged words and typefaces to resemble images like rolling dice, is considered among the first examples of concrete poetry.
Immediately after World War II, groups of artists and poets in South America and Europe published magazines and sponsored exhibitions on the subject of combining the visual and the literary. Their interests in finding truth in pure structure dovetailed with research by critics and semioticians like Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, who argued for a kind of concrete, non-metaphorical literature and art born of a world bombed back to its essence. For some artists, in this new world yanked back from the brink of nothingness, the straightforward question what is it? replaced the prewar metaphysical one of what does it mean?
Untitled is a painting from 1959, a period in which Twombly worked in Rome and produced a major series of drawings called Poems to the Sea, inspired by Mallarmé. The 1959 Roman sojourn was a culmination of many visits to the city by Twombly after his studies at Black Mountain College in 1952, as he and Rauschenberg traveled around Italy and North Africa. The trip ignited Twombly’s interest in Greek and Roman archaeology and mythology, and by 1957 he had established a home and studio in and around Rome. He also began a relationship with the storied Roman gallery La Tartaruga, exhibiting there a total of eighteen times from 1958 to 1970.
When Twombly was at Black Mountain, he was exposed to the work of poet Charles Olson, a friend of John Cage and a professor at the college whose open-syntax poetry at the time was composed using his own breath to create the meter. In Rome he met members of Gruppo 63, Italian poets interested in similar avant-garde experiments. Twombly, who once described an empty canvas as “an extended vacant wall” just waiting to be written upon, developed his scrawling, orthographic style of motif making, and by 1959, his larger, more gestural scribbles were being superseded by more delicate writerly marks that included readable symbols like numbers and, in rare occurrences, words.
Untitled includes numbers—a group of nines on the lower right, the number fifty in the lower left, and fours, twos, and maybe a three floating alone in its upper quadrant, which join abstract shapes and series of staccato lines to make up the composition. Each motif dances in the atmosphere created by the matte white paint in a manner akin to the way individual words relate to one another spatially in a concrete poem. As Twombly explained to the curator David Sylvester at the time, echoing the concretist point of view, “Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate.”1 Like the drawings in Poems to the Sea, in Untitled Twombly deploys pictographic shapes, numbers, and letters in a manner that is closer to juxtaposition than integration. This each by each kind of composition encourages the viewer to read the signs on the canvas as much as to look at them as parts of a whole. Color in Untitled is used sparingly, with bright red lines emerging from the canvas’s skin like scratches, joining three gestural smudges of bluish gray at the work’s center.
It has been argued that some of Twombly’s paintings and drawings from 1959 are seascapes, with motifs arranged along an invisible horizon line denoting sky, sea, and sand. There is no discernible horizon line in Untitled; its links to seascape reside in its thick, pasty underpainting tinted the pinkish color of sand, and the manner in which its numbers, shapes, scratches, and ticks float almost aquatically across the canvas. But if Untitled does not conform to the conventional notion of a painting as a window, despite its clear connection to writing, it is also not a text meant to be read. This painting, and those like it that Twombly produced during the second half of the 1950s in a European milieu and under the influence of experimental poetics, introduces a new kind of painterly language that exists between narrative painting and literature, gesture and mark, illusion and actuality.
Note
Claire Daigle, “Lingering at the Threshold between Word and Image,” Tate Etc., May 1, 2008, 5.
In a conventional recitation of the history of postwar American art, Cy Twombly’s long career is often contextualized, along with the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, at the inflection point between the flowering of Abstract Expressionism and the advent of Pop art. Both are considered quintessentially American cultural phenomena, and Twombly himself a quintessentially American artist.
But what of the fact that Twombly spent much of his artistic life in Europe, from his first visit in 1952 until his return to the United States at the end of his life almost sixty years later? Twombly’s gestural vocabulary of pencil marks, line drawing, and ecstatic scribbles clearly has affinities with the painterly expostulations of Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline, but another equally valid lineage situates Twombly’s work in the milieu of European artists and poets who, at war’s end, were exploring the possibilities of synthesis between artistic mark making and language.
The synesthetic dream of combining visual recognition and reading, art and language, began with ancient pictographs but became a modern preoccupation with poets like Stéphane Mallarmé, whose work Twombly read with great interest beginning in the late 1950s. Mallarmé’s 1897 poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (A Roll of the Dice Will Never Annul Chance), in which he arranged words and typefaces to resemble images like rolling dice, is considered among the first examples of concrete poetry.
Immediately after World War II, groups of artists and poets in South America and Europe published magazines and sponsored exhibitions on the subject of combining the visual and the literary. Their interests in finding truth in pure structure dovetailed with research by critics and semioticians like Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, who argued for a kind of concrete, non-metaphorical literature and art born of a world bombed back to its essence. For some artists, in this new world yanked back from the brink of nothingness, the straightforward question what is it? replaced the prewar metaphysical one of what does it mean?
Untitled is a painting from 1959, a period in which Twombly worked in Rome and produced a major series of drawings called Poems to the Sea, inspired by Mallarmé. The 1959 Roman sojourn was a culmination of many visits to the city by Twombly after his studies at Black Mountain College in 1952, as he and Rauschenberg traveled around Italy and North Africa. The trip ignited Twombly’s interest in Greek and Roman archaeology and mythology, and by 1957 he had established a home and studio in and around Rome. He also began a relationship with the storied Roman gallery La Tartaruga, exhibiting there a total of eighteen times from 1958 to 1970.
When Twombly was at Black Mountain, he was exposed to the work of poet Charles Olson, a friend of John Cage and a professor at the college whose open-syntax poetry at the time was composed using his own breath to create the meter. In Rome he met members of Gruppo 63, Italian poets interested in similar avant-garde experiments. Twombly, who once described an empty canvas as “an extended vacant wall” just waiting to be written upon, developed his scrawling, orthographic style of motif making, and by 1959, his larger, more gestural scribbles were being superseded by more delicate writerly marks that included readable symbols like numbers and, in rare occurrences, words.
Untitled includes numbers—a group of nines on the lower right, the number fifty in the lower left, and fours, twos, and maybe a three floating alone in its upper quadrant, which join abstract shapes and series of staccato lines to make up the composition. Each motif dances in the atmosphere created by the matte white paint in a manner akin to the way individual words relate to one another spatially in a concrete poem. As Twombly explained to the curator David Sylvester at the time, echoing the concretist point of view, “Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate.”1 Like the drawings in Poems to the Sea, in Untitled Twombly deploys pictographic shapes, numbers, and letters in a manner that is closer to juxtaposition than integration. This each by each kind of composition encourages the viewer to read the signs on the canvas as much as to look at them as parts of a whole. Color in Untitled is used sparingly, with bright red lines emerging from the canvas’s skin like scratches, joining three gestural smudges of bluish gray at the work’s center.
It has been argued that some of Twombly’s paintings and drawings from 1959 are seascapes, with motifs arranged along an invisible horizon line denoting sky, sea, and sand. There is no discernible horizon line in Untitled; its links to seascape reside in its thick, pasty underpainting tinted the pinkish color of sand, and the manner in which its numbers, shapes, scratches, and ticks float almost aquatically across the canvas. But if Untitled does not conform to the conventional notion of a painting as a window, despite its clear connection to writing, it is also not a text meant to be read. This painting, and those like it that Twombly produced during the second half of the 1950s in a European milieu and under the influence of experimental poetics, introduces a new kind of painterly language that exists between narrative painting and literature, gesture and mark, illusion and actuality.
Note