Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, Tate Modern
A very mixed exhibition, this; very mixed. The earliest paintings on show, Tiznit and Quarzazat, promised interesting things, with their thick monochrome lines, though with the exception of The Geeks, which prefigured Nini's Paintings in a later room, the early automatic writing pieces - Criticism and Academy - were really no more than random scribblings on walls. And the whole exhibition would prove to be like this: rooms containing terrifically energetic paintings full of colour and style would alternate with much thinner works which relied on what seemed to me a misjudged reliance on handwritten words. I quickly got fed up of what I'll call Twombly's scrawls.
Room 2 was full of them. The painting Olympia, for instance, was remarkable only because the word "Olympia" was scrawled on it in I think crayon; and the other works, especially the empty Poems to the Sea, were simply unintelligble pencil scribblings consisting of horizons, numbers and lines vaguely reminiscent of the look of poetry overlaid with ugly splodges of white paint. Truly missable, these. Murder of Passion and The Italians were really just larger-scale versions of the same thing.
Yet when Twombly stops obsessing about words, or references to words, and focuses on colour and shape, his work comes marvellously to life. The Ferragosto series of paintings, the product of a hot Roman August in 1961, were much more expressive works, thick smears of paint claiming your attention and holding it. The fourth work in the series really does suggest the sultry oppressiveness of the Roman sun and the final work with its bloody mass of scarlet and red-brown paint goes beyond that, creating a passionate, even violent feeling. Looking at these, I wondered how this artist could have produced such shallow works as the scrawls I've already mentioned. And things continued in much the same way. While the large panels making up the two versions of Treatise on the Veil - the first version a black painted board bearing a few minimalist lines and measurements in white wax crayon, the second a lighter, greyer, less sharp counterpart - attract the eye and make you think, but by this stage I'd lost trust in Twombly and my mind wandered from them, frankly.
Then come the best works of the lot. Nini's Paintings are a series of four large panels covered in crayon lines, arranged loosely in waves, suggesting some sort of mythic notation or calligraphy: finally, a brilliant justification of Twombly's interest in the purely visual aspect of writing, the interest that seemed so sterile in Paintings to the Sea. I especially liked the first of the panels, with the rich mix of brown, orange and blue lines weaving through each other and most of all the final panel at the back of the room. This was much more sombre, a grey background filled with black, grey and Prussian blue waves of crayon. These works, for me, achieved a loosely geometric and satisfying effect that reminded me of Bridget Riley's work in the 1990s. Terrific.
Passing quickly through a room of unprepossessing sculptures (one was simply a cardboard tube painted white), pausing only long enough to wonder where the fragments of Rilke were that the Tate's blurb reckoned covered Orpheus (Du Unendliche Spur) - they didn't as far as I could see - I arrived in front of works which made sense of combining painting and poetry. Hero and Leandro is a work consisting of four panels: the first captures the force and energy of a wine-dark classical sea while also reminding us of those Japanese wave-paintings, I thought, while the second and third panels settle into a calmer vision of resignation as Leander's life is lost in the water. Finally comes a small frame citing some lines from Keats, rounding the work off as a wholly successful reference from one art to another. Painting in Two Parts I thought also captured this tumbling sea, this time wine and dark green.
And if they weren't enough, Untitled (A Painting in Nine Parts) is a stunning piece. First shown in Venice, it consists of nine panels, each a study in green and white, each conveying a feeling of immersion, of standing water full of algae and plant life, and adding up together to an insistent exploration of the possible combinations of two colours. Again, here, the incorporation of poetry (Rilke again) works brilliantly, supporting and intensifying through words the visual world produced by the colours:
in the ponds broken off from the sky
my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.
Twombly quoting from Robert Bly's translation of Fortschritt.
The Bacchus paintings in the final room were less absorbing, though their bold sweeps of red paint suggested the potential for a meditational, Rothko-like vibe that had just been missed somehow.
Some of these works will fade very quickly from the mind, then; most of the scrawls and sculptures are intensely forgettable. But there are works here - Nini's Paintings, the Painting in Nine Parts, Hero and Leandro, the Ferragosto works - that fully make the case for Twombly as an abstract artist of real substance.
PS: I wish I could have illustrated this review with a photograph from the exhibition rather than one from New York: but Tate won't allow photography and is taking its time to work out whether to allow me to use its press images.
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