In the 1950s, Cy Twombly was ascending to his status as a leader in the burgeoning New York art scene. This was the age when the art world’s axis of power was shifting from the old world to the new. But at that moment, Twombly made a surprising move: he packed up and moved to southern Italy. Just as the spotlight fell on the emerging art scene in which he was a central figure, he chose obscurity and spent the rest of his life secluded in Italy.
There, he honed his style and found a voice of his own. One discipline he practiced was drawing in the dark, working for hours each night. He picked up the idea from the Surrealists, who practiced what they called “automatic writing.” Twombly’s intention was somewhat different—he was trying to undermine his confidence in his abilities, surrendering what he knew of drawing to the blindness of night. He wanted his lines to be softer, less certain, like a child’s but without being childish. This was so he could better express his ideas when it came time to put them on canvas.
His work is not easy on the eye. He is one of those artists of whom some might say, “My kid could do that.” Of course, a child could never—children don’t have much awareness or substance beneath what they draw, but Twombly had it in spades.
Influenced by the old art world of Italy, Twombly’s work responded to the ancient Greek and Roman art and architecture that surrounded him. The disparate history of graffiti on ancient walls also inspired his canvases. Twombly’s paintings are rough, encrusted with layers of thin, sometimes barely decipherable, words scratched into the paint. He was layering time, collapsing the history of the art world into all his pieces. He blurred the lines between the old world and the new world, a line art critics loved to cultivate.
Critics, like the rest of us, love to draw dividing lines between ideas. Twombly, living in his own chosen exile, trampled over that line as if it never existed. He was fascinated with writing and language, and he was one of the first to incorporate text and graffiti-like writing into his paintings. This laid the foundation for generations to come, a heritage picked up particularly by Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose work echoes Twombly’s wordplay as a means of toying with the viewer’s interpretation. “I cross out words so you will see them more,” Basquiat once said. Doodles, splotches, scrawls, and scratchy text all combine in their art to create immense works that are at once ethereal and heavy, erotic and ephemeral. They are paintings a child could do, if they had centuries of art history beating in their heart.
To make lines less certain to practice vulnerability.
To incorporate the past and the present to give shape to the future.
To create childlike but not childish works.
To play with words to create new meanings.