IT
SHOULD NOT surprise us that the first major monographic study of the work of Cy
Twombly would come to us from
Steps
toward a serious yet belated recognition of the artist’s centrality in American
painting of the 1960s (which would finally place him on par with his peers, his
former companions and close friends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns) were
initiated only a decade ago, when Kirk Varnedoe dedicated a magisterial
catalogue with an exhaustive biographical essay to Twombly on the occasion of
the artist’s first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in
1994.
An
earlier exhibition in
Richard
Leeman’s eminent study Cy Twombly
(the book is based on the author’s 1999 doctoral dissertation) may stand on
Barthes’s shoulders, but the author draws insightfully on his own considerable
knowledge of postwar painting, both American and European. While he subscribes to the received wisdom that
Twombly’s beginnings must be seen as a dialogue with Jackson Pollock, hovering
between the game preserves of automatism and industrialized spectacle, Leeman
also recognizes the importance of Pollock’s European counterparts-from Dubuffet
to Fautrier, from Burri and Fontana to Manzoni.* *Their
fractured, painterly gestures, which reemerged in Europe in the aftermath of
World War II, not only laid the groundwork for the relatively early and
enthusiastic European reception of Twombly’s work but, more importantly, became
integral to the painter’s formation after his arrival in Italy.
Leeman
has conceived his grand monographic study in the most traditional manner. If we
believe in the feasibility and desirability of such a traditional format (as
undoubtedly the majority of Twombly’s admirers at this time do), we could not
hope for a more accomplished book. It delivers the most detailed accounts of every
tendency and facet of the artist’s poetical and painterly pursuit, of the
subtle and at times sudden transformations that continually punctuated
Twombly’s career, from the time of his extraordinary early work at
the
height of Beat culture, Twombly’s Italian road trip must have appeared a rather
eccentric project, it now seems perfectly comprehensible as an act of refusal,
a desperate attempt to escape the rise of a monolithic American postwar
consumer culture by searching out
Leeman
gives us an astonishingly scrupulous account of Twombly’s painterly and textual
maneuvers within that arena of shattered European humanism, and we benefit
immensely from the author’s ability to provide elucidations of every
mythological and philosophical allusion, of the poetry and literature of
antiquity Invoked in Twombly’s abstract neoclassicism. However, Leeman’s
learned account at times falls to resolve its Innate contradictions. One such
instance concerns Twombly’s graphisms. When Leeman argues that they originate
in the Egyptian glyph and later forms of writing and mark-making in antiquity,
he does not seem disturbed that this extrapolation situates Twombly’s
precarious Darks in a trajectory of universal human desire. This occludes the
more recent graphic Impulses of treating-if not debasing—painting as graffito
writing (from George Grosz’s celebration of the Berlin public toilets as his
“drawing academy’’ to Brassai’s and Dubuffet’s 1940s invocations of the
graffito as a mark that simultaneously signals the primitive origin and the
apocalyptic end of the primary mark-making process).
Leeman
can convincingly cite Twombly’s rejection of that Interpretive cliché Inasmuch
as the artist has Indeed become increasingly tired of the misreading of his
drawings as graffiti (ever since his first exhibition in
Having worked one’s way through the book’s wealth of detailed interpretations, one is almost convinced that the traditional art-historical monograph, with its insistence on the primacy and singularity of author and oeuvre, its fusion of biographical account and chronological development, is the most appropriate method and format after all. At times, Leeman’s approach even appears salubrious when compared to some recent work on the period-monographs ranging from Fred Orton’s Figuring Jasper Johns (1994) to Branden W. Joseph’s Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (2003), to name just two studies that seem driven by a thicket of conflicting theoretical demands (e.g., Marxist social art history, psychoanalysis, poststructuralist theory, gender theory, and queer studies).
But
Leeman’s French cure for that dilemma- attempting to form a cohesive
traditional artistic identity by integrating biography and intellectual
history—fails us when it comes to understanding Twombly’s place in the
formation of a post-Greenbergian aesthetic that sprang from the fusion of the
legacies of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (with Rauschenberg and Johns, if not
Ellsworth Kelly, as his immediate peers).
After
all, Twombly was responding as critically to Pollock’s presumed expressively as
Johns’s painted epistemological skepticism was, or as Manzoni’s deconstruction
of painting was. Yet we will never learn from Leeman’s study what, if anything,
Twombly’s mark- making shares with Johns’s molecular deposits of encaustic
paint or with Rauschenberg’s chemically induced dye-transfer imagery, let alone
with Manzoni’s Achrome paintings. Thus, when it comes to answering questions of
context and historical specificity at the moment of postfascist reconstruction
culture in
Ultimately,
what Leeman’s admirable book forces us to consider is the relative value of the
intensely diver- gent methodological approaches available to us in the field of
postwar studies. Leeman seems to argue—for the most part splendidly and
convincingly—that the significance of Twombly’s work derives from its
singularity, its extraordinary refinement, and from the extreme differentiation
of its subjectivity. And yet these very qualities are, to Leeman’s thinking,
precisely what align it in some kind of transhistorical continuity or elective
affinity with nineteenth-century concepts of artistic subjectivity originating
in Romanticism, Neoclassicism, and Symbolism.
The
price we pay for that extrapolation into the spheres of transhistorical
aesthetic experience is, of course, the loss of what was once the almost
aggressive specificity of Twombly’s work in the context of
BENJAMIN
H. D. BUCHLOH IS THE FRANKLIN D. AND
* In a peculiar gesture of ostentatious omission, the author
falls to mention, even in the bibliography, the groundbreaking, if brief,
theorization of Twombly’s work in Rosalind E. Krauss’s The Optical Unconscious (1995) nor does he mention Yve-Alain Bois’s
important essay on Twombly—”‘Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail Reading
Twombly’’—in the Daros Collection catalogue Abstractions,
Gesture, Ecriture, ed. Peter Fischer (Zurich: Alesco, 1999), 61-78