Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint

I want very much to finish my study of the Mediterranean.… I have infinite longing to see and feel these ancient wonders (my work thirsts for their contact).… The opportunity to continue my search will be of the most profound importance to my work.

The best witness to the Mediterranean’s age-old past is the sea itself. This has to be said and said again; and the sea has to be seen and seen again.… A moment’s concentration or daydreaming, and that past comes back to life.

IN OCTOBER 1952, funded by a fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Twombly traveled to Rome and then from Italy to Morocco. Here he rejoined Robert Rauschenberg, who had left Rome earlier to find work in the port city of Casablanca. Together they traveled by bus to Southern Morocco, Marrakesh, and the Atlas Mountains, then north to Tangier, visiting the composer and writer Paul Bowles in Spanish-Moroccan Tetuán at the end of the year.³ During his time in Morocco, Twombly visited the triumphal arches and basilica of North Africa’s best-preserved Roman site, Volubilis; worked on an archeological dig; and made drawings for what became his North African Sketchbook.⁴ A later (unsuccessful) application for a travel fellowship conveys his sense of unfinished business and his “infinite longing to see and feel these ancient wonders” again. Twombly’s reference to “the land bordering this ancient sea” implies a Braudelian view of the Mediterranean imaginary—a temporal geography at once seen and reseen, imagined and brought back to life.

Exactly what Twombly learned from “the Arabs” or how French colonial North Africa affected his work (“for the better”) he does not say. Pressure was mounting at the time for Moroccan independence, still three years off. But there is scanty evidence of Twombly’s response to the contemporary political ferment or the tensions caused by Morocco’s rapid modernization.⁶ Nor does he seem to have been aware of the nascent Moroccan Modernist movement in painting. Still, reorienting him in time and space—“a northerner in the Mediterranean, but more blood and guts”—offers another perspective on his self-proclaimed mediterranité (“I’m a Mediterranean painter”).⁷ Even before he set out on his travels, Twombly had developed an interest in “primitive” art while studying in New York at the Art Students League, and later at Black Mountain College. He was fascinated by classical and Middle Eastern antiquity, and this trip was the first of many to North Africa and the Middle East. Twombly could not have foreseen how far his thirst for the “ancient wonders” of the Mediterranean would be fulfilled by later travels to North Africa as well as Greece and Asia Minor.⁸

Bowles would have made an informative guide for Twombly and Rauschenberg when they joined him and his partner, the young magical-surrealist painter Ahmed Yacoubi, in Spanish Tetuán.⁹ The author of a recent best-selling novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949), Bowles—a veteran of the literary, music, and theater scene of New York—was attuned to the nascent independence movement.¹⁰ He was also a gifted travel-writer and ethnomusicologist, keenly interested in Morocco’s traditional musical instruments (including the elusive Riffian Zamar), as well as in its vocal music and dance. He later set out to preserve what was left of Morocco’s musical tradition during the immediately post-Independence period, often in the face of official indifference or outright hostility. His evocative descriptions of the Moroccan landscape in “The Rif, to Music” (1960) and “The Road to Tassemsit” (1963)—offshoots of a Rockefeller-sponsored project to record the indigenous folk music of Morocco’s remote villages in the Rif and Middle Atlas Mountains—provide a glimpse of Twombly’s and Rauschenberg’s travels a decade earlier. Is it a coincidence that a photograph taken by Rauschenberg of Twombly at the window in their Roman pensione shows him strumming on an African bowl lyre?—perhaps a flea-market find, or a Moroccan souvenir.11

Bowles’s travel essay, “The Road to Tassemsit,” contains a litany of Moroccan place-names, along with a vivid description of the landscape through which Twombly and Rauschenberg had traveled by bus:

After Taroudant—Tiznit, Tanout, Tirmi, Tifermit. Great hot dust-colored valleys among the naked mountains, dotted with leafless argan trees as gray as puffs of smoke. Sometimes a dry stream twists among the boulders at the bottom of the valley, and there is a peppering of locust-ravaged date palms whose branches look like the ribs of a broken umbrella. Or hanging to the flank of a mountain a thousand feet below the road is a terraced village, visible only as an abstract design of flat roofs, some the color of the earth of which they are built, and some bright yellow with the corn that is spread out to dry in the sun.

Along with the ubiquitous argan trees, Bowles goes on to describe the arid, inhospitable terrain of the High Atlas Mountains, with their massive boulders, gorges, and fortress houses:

The mountains are vast humps of solid granite, their sides strewn with gigantic boulders; at sunset the black line of their crests is deckle-edged in silhouette against the flaming sky. Seen from a height, the troughs between the heights are like long gray lakes, the only places in the landscape where there is at least a covering of what might pass for loose earth. Above the level surface of this detritus in the valleys rise the smooth expanses of solid rock.¹²

Along with the stunted gray argan trees and castellated rocks and ravines of the Atlas Mountains, Twombly and Rauschenberg would have seen the dusty earth-colored villages, locust-ravaged date-palms, and prickly cacti of lower altitudes.¹³

A visual record of the Moroccan trip survives in photographs, as well as in the paintings Twombly completed on his return to New York. Twombly portrayed Rauschenberg in Tetuán, leaning against a hat-stand with a raincoat on his shoulder, like Salvador Dali in his cape.¹⁴ He also photographed a tranquil series of meditative still lives: creased tablecloths on a restaurant table—each fold and wrinkle standing out against the mottled wall.¹⁵ (See figure 1.1.) A photograph taken by Rauschenberg poses Twombly moodily contemplating the gnarled trunk and thorny branches of a twisted tree (an argan tree, minus the goats?) with a pile of debris in the foreground.¹⁶ After his return from Morocco, Twombly completed the thirty-two drawings bound into his North African Sketchbook (dated “Rome, 1953”), a repetitive series of biomorphic shapes in conté crayon on cheap typewriter paper. During the early spring of 1953, he also worked on sketches of sub-Saharan artifacts and African fetishes and phallic objects in the Pigorini Ethnographic Museum, meticulously noting their colors, textures, and materials (nails, rope, leather, brass, tin, feathers, dried grass, and “sacred substance”).¹⁷ (See figure 1.2.)

1.1. Cy Twombly, Table, Chair and Cloth, 1952. Tetuán. Photograph. © Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio. Courtesy Archives Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio.

1.2. Cy Twombly, Untitled [North African Sketchbook], XII, detail, 1953. Rome. Pencil on typewriter paper, 8⅝ × 11 in. (22 × 28 cm). Cy Twombly Foundation. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo Giorgio Benni.

Rauschenberg, for his part, mischievously posed Twombly, with sketchbook, against the vast disembodied hand of the past (“Cy + relics,” Rome, 1952), and recorded the Capitoline Museum’s collection of antique fragments as a melancholy assemblage of abandoned body-parts.22 (See figure 1.3.) But he was drawn as much to the poverty-stricken detritus of Rome’s post-war flea markets—and perhaps to the indigenous materials in Moroccan street markets—as he was to fragments of antique statuary.²³ He had eyes for the ordinary and the overlooked, and for the latent histories of everyday things. His work thrived on “found” objects and improvised materials. For him, “All material has history. All material has its own history built into it.”²⁴ In contrast to his later trading of ideas with Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg describes his working relationship with Twombly as parallel rather than collaborative: “I did my work and he did his. Cy’s direction was always so personal that you could only discuss it after the fact.”²⁵ But for the duration of the trip, their work shows an overlapping fascination with North African materials, artifacts, and forms that included an element of surrealist magical thinking.

1.3. Robert Rauschenberg, Rome Relics, 1952. Rome. Gelatin silver print. Art © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Rauschenberg crossed first. His colorful (doubtless exaggerated) account suggests that Twombly—already a collector—was eating into their travel-funds: “Cy started collecting antiques. He still collects great antiques. He discovered a flea-market … [where] the farmers would bring in Etruscan things and occasionally a marble bust. He just went crazy.”²⁷ Hoping to find paid work with the Atlas Construction Company in Casablanca, Rauschenberg left for Morocco. Twombly followed soon after. Rauschenberg, however, made some flea-market purchases on his own account, acquiring a miscellany of small boxes, curios, and objects rendered numinous by being enclosed in “found” containers like miniature Cornell boxes.28 Rauschenberg’s March 1953 advertisement for the Roman exhibition Scatole e Feticci Personali describes their aesthetic as “photographic”: “The full inside view of a box may look like a photographic still-life before the picture had been taken.… Many of the boxes are a third dimensional poem of not more than one word: White.”²⁹ Some of these works, carefully laid out and photographed on the floor of his and Twombly’s Roman pensione, contain tiny items collected in Morocco: thorns, snail-shells, wooden beads, dirt, pebbles, insects, bird skulls. The magpie souvenirs of low-budget travel, these were also items that formed the stock-in-trade of Morocco’s indigenous magical healers.³⁰ (See figure 1.4.) Like his “shirt board” collages (recycling paperboard used for folding laundered shirts), these improvised works display Rauschenberg’s resourceful deployment of disregarded materials.³¹ But unlike the “shirt-board” collages, his boxes had magical properties.

Rauschenberg’s Scatole are a miniature cabinet of curiosities: baby dolls, spearheads, watch-parts, bones, feathers; things tied, knotted, mended, threaded, or discarded. Like the scraps of paper and print included in his collages at the time (pages of Arabic texts, worn reproductions of the Mona Lisa, decorated note paper from the Hotel Bilbao in Tetuán), the Scatole are “contemplative”—thought-boxes containing objects with no value in themselves, apart from their personal associations. A miniaturized poetry of the everyday, they were supposed to be endowed with significance by their owners, who were invited to “develop [their] own ritual about the objects.” One or two buyers acquired them as amusing curiosities.³² Rauschenberg told Barbara Rose, in throwaway mode: “I chose to ennoble the ordinary” (rather than making “monuments” like his contemporaries).³³ Surviving photographs from their joint exhibition—Rauschenberg’s rope-works were later thrown into the Arno, while the fate of Twombly’s cloth wall-hangings is unknown—suggest that what they responded to in North Africa was not so much Morocco’s Arab heritage, as the indigenous legacy of Berber crafts and materials, including the hangings, weaving, and skeins of wool suspended overhead in the Moroccan street markets photographed by Rauschenberg.³⁴ (See figure 1.5.)

1.4. Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled [Scatole Personali], 1953. Rome. Contact print, 2¼ × 2¼ in. (5.7 × 5.7 cm). Art © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

1.5. Robert Rauschenberg. Untitled [Market, Morocco (I)], 1952. Morocco. Contact print, 2¼ × 2¼ in. (5.7 × 5.7 cm). Art © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

1.6. Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled [Eight Feticci Personali, Rome], 1953. Rome. Gelatin silver print. Art © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

A precursor for Twombly’s tactfully expressed belief in the continuity between modern and “primitive” art has been seen in the solemn quest for tragedy, timelessness, and violence in the art of the so-called “Mythmakers” during the 1940s.³⁹ But it was Robert Motherwell—one of Twombly’s mentors at Black Mountain College during the summer of 1951—whose 1950 account of the New York School had insisted instead on its “affinities with the art of other cultures: Egypt and the ancient Mediterranean, Africa, the South Seas, and above all the Orient.”⁴⁰ For Motherwell, abstract art expressed “a fundamentally romantic response to modern life—rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable.”⁴¹ The modern artist (“ill at ease in the universe”) was an existential misfit who looked back, or across, to other cultures.

The European legacy picked up by Italian reviewers of the Feticci Personali points to the emigré Surrealists with whom Motherwell had been associated during the 1940s—and to the influence of his landmark anthology, The Dada Painters and Poets (1951), which set out to document the A (Arp) to Z (Zaume, the extra-rational language translated by Ilya Zdanevitch) of avant garde, anti-war, anti-bourgeois, anarchic theory and practice.⁴² In the preface Motherwell wrote for Twombly’s 1951 exhibition, he praised him for his “native temperamental affinity with the abandon, the brutality, the irrational in avant-garde painting of the moment.”43 Italian reviewers detected in Twombly’s and Rauschenberg’s joint exhibition traces of Dada’s calculated unsettling of the social order. Their work contained other affinities to Dada, including its twin legacies of collage and automatism, and its emphasis on chance and contingency.⁴⁴ When Twombly later experimented with drawing-sessions in the dark, during his brief national service in 1954–55, he was following a practice advocated by Motherwell, for whom psychic automatism began with “doodling” or scribbling—equivalent to André Breton’s automatic writing—pursued as a means of developing what was most personal to each artist.⁴⁵ It was Motherwell, after all, who had called automatism “one of the twentieth century’s greatest formal inventions,” and later protested that Abstract Expressionism should have been called “abstract automatism.”⁴⁶

According to Rauschenberg, Twombly had already embarked on some early blackboard paintings at Black Mountain College (too experimental to be included in his Virginia Museum funding application).⁴⁷ Although beginning to emerge in the post–North African Sketchbooks, Twombly’s distinctive scribble does not surface fully until the automatic drawings of 1954 and the stenographic shorthand of the large 1955 blackboard paintings (later destroyed) photographed in Rauschenberg’s Fulton Street studio.⁴⁸ The paintings submitted by Twombly for his fellowship application belonged to an earlier period. Rauschenberg recalls: “they were called ‘Chandeliers’ or something. And ‘Torahs.’ Sort of primitive abstract ones.”⁴⁹ The chandeliers and primitive torahs presumably date from Twombly’s time at the New York Art Students League. Rauschenberg continues: “They were great. The ‘Chandeliers’ were hot pinks and golds. The ‘Torahs’ were black-and-whites with other primitive black-and-white shapes.… They were massive accumulations of erotic paint in various primordial shapes.”⁵⁰ Whether presciently or with hindsight, Rauschenberg identifies two features of Twombly’s work also noted by his early reviewers: its predilection for “primordial shapes” and its thickly textured “accumulations of erotic paint.” Titles such as The Slaughter and Attacking Image (both painted at Black Mountain College in 1951) suggest the influence of abstract primitivism along with the black-and-white severity of Franz Kline, another Black Mountain College mentor.⁵¹

But something else starts to emerge at Black Mountain College: the unconscious. Both MIN-OE (1951) and Untitled (1951) contain strikingly hieratic doubled figures, as well as the thickly encrusted and eroded paint-surface recalled by Rauschenberg. During 1951, Rauschenberg photographed Twombly against the bold two-headed form of Untitled (1951).⁵² Motherwell’s early tribute to Twombly described his paintings as “orgastic” and pointed to their latent violence and sexuality: “the sexual character of the fetishes half-buried in his violent surface is sufficiently evident.”⁵³ These obscurely biomorphic forms, with their circles, angles, and verticals—linked tripods on legs (signs for sexual difference?)—were sometimes given titles that evoked Iranian artifacts. Twombly had become interested in Luristan bronzes that dated from the first millennium BC: pairs of decorated bits and cheek-pieces for horse bridles; figurines, chariot parts and weapons; disk-headed pins; horned rams or animals locked in combat.⁵⁴ A number of his paintings prior to the North African trip seem to derive their enlarged shapes from these symmetrical, exquisitely worked bronze ornaments. (See figure 1.7.)

1.7. Finial in the form of a ram, Iron Age, 10th–9th century BC. Near Eastern, Iranian, Luristan. Bronze, height 4⅛ in. (10.5 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Maria Antoinette Evans Fund, 30.576. Photo © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Twomby’s self-confessed attraction to “the primitive, the ritual and fetish elements” resonates with the Mayan art energetically promoted by the glyphomanic Charles Olson at Black Mountain College.55 Olson’s conversion to Mayan culture—including its clay pots, mythic violence, and sexuality—helped make him a passionate proselytizer for hieroglyphs. In “Human Universe” (1951), he writes of signs “so clearly and densely chosen that, cut in stone, they retain the power of the objects of which they are the images.”⁵⁶ And again, “I have found … that the hieroglyphs of the Maya disclose a placement of themselves toward nature of enormous contradiction to ourselves.” A passionate D. H. Lawrentian, he laments the loss of Mayan culture’s relation to nature, along with the knowledge and energy represented by Mayan art. For Olson, materiality mattered: “The process of image … cannot be understood by separation from the stuff it works on,” and in the same essay he writes, “art is the only twin life has—its only valid metaphysic. Art does not seek to describe but to enact.”⁵⁷ Olson’s hyperbolic encomium, “For Cy Twombly Faced with His First Chicago & N.Y. Shows,” hails him as “Ashurbanipal”—the warrior-scribe king of Assyria who ruled the Neo-Assyrian empire in tandem with his brother; in the great Library of Ashurbanipal, the learning of the past was inscribed on cuneiform texts.⁵⁸ Glyphs are carved on stone: Sumerian texts are incised on baked clay. Olson’s poem—comparing Twombly’s handling of paint to forged iron and the hardening of black volcanic lava—enrolls him in the Vulcanic school of glyph-makers to which Olson himself aspired.⁵⁹

“Big O.” (Olson) was a charismatic teacher and hyperactive cultural iconoclast. His reformist curriculum at Black Mountain College promoted both ancient artifacts and classical literature.⁶⁰ The writer Francine Du Plessix Gray, falling under his spell, describes his method as “like seeing an archeologist throw a tantrum in a richly endowed museum.” His “collagist approach to culture” included Leo Frobenius’s ethnography of African culture and cave-paintings alongside Pound’s uncompromising Guide to Kulchur (1938).⁶¹ Recalling Olson’s robustly eclectic teaching, Du Plessix Gray writes that “the lines of classical verse he battered us with most frequently had a haunting, reductive musicality whose repetition would make anyone into a better writer.”⁶² Olson’s emphasis on the cultural past pervaded the atmosphere at Black Mountain College and pushed students to recover the archaic roots of art. Twombly’s paintings during this period move beyond allusions to ritual objects and toward stylized forms suggestive of massed aggression, palisades, or serried ranks of spears. Their subdued palette and deeply scored paint reflect Twombly’s fascination with what his fellowship application calls, tactfully, the “eroded or ancient surfaces of time.”63

In his 1952 letter of support for Twombly’s travel fellowship, Ben Shahn mentions the “irreverence for passing art authority that is indispensible for continued good work.”⁶⁴ Twombly’s North African travels surface in the rebarbative titles drawn from Moroccan place-names given to the paintings he made on his return to New York: Quarzazat (1953) [Quarzazate], in the Atlas Mountains; Volubilus (1953), the Roman site near Meknes; Tiznit (1953), reached across the Atlas Mountains as described by Bowles. The insouciantly titled La-La (1953)—an Arabic title of respect for women (“Lady” or “Princess”)—may recollect Tiznit’s spring of Lalla (a pool commemorating the mythical conversion of a local prostitute), or simply the prefix for any number of mosques seen during the Moroccan trip.⁶⁵ Along with the associations of exotic place-names, Twombly relied on the bristling, striated forms that cover the sheets of his North African Sketchbook. His drawings may be a visceral response to Morocco’s thorny, serrated vegetation and cacti (if not to the fronds of decrepit date palms). But their bristling spikes also hint at what Shahn identified as “irreverence for passing art authority”—not just physical or psychic discomfort in an alien environment. These paintings assault the viewer along with their surfaces.

Sketches for sculptures—two-legged totems and paddles with fringed and flanged outlines—show Twombly merging the biomorphic and the “readymade.” His later sculptures evolve from the spiked fetishes of the Pigorini museum. The results can be seen in the bound, corded, and suspended wooden assemblages later photographed in Rauschenberg’s Fulton Street studio—rows of batons or sticks, anchored at one end on drilled boards, along with dangling mirrors, tied batons, wooden spoons, and standing wands. Rauschenberg’s Elemental Sculptures, exhibited in the cellar of the Stable Gallery in 1953, consisted of tethered rocks, blocks of wood, and ferociously spiked “Music Boxes.” These rough wooden boxes, whose rusty nails and pebbles were designed to produce sounds when shaken, have obvious connections with Dada (Duchamp allegedly remarked, “I think I recognize that tune”).⁶⁶ In the works exhibited alongside Rauschenberg’s at the Stable Gallery, Twombly’s mark-making takes on the aspect of a primitive act—not only through references to totemic objects (spikes, cones, and plant-shaped growths), but through their deeply scored lines and distressed surfaces. His quasi-organic shapes are the visual counterpart of the distressed wood and roped stones of Rauschenberg’s in-your-face Elemental Sculptures.

Twombly’s paintings were construed by Dore Ashton (perhaps primed by the artist) as evidence of his visceral response to the North Africa landscape: “Morocco arid, brilliant, steeped in the vague atmosphere of past glory.… Giant figures suggest archaic votive sculptures; parallel lines indicate a landscape sprawling in tiresome sunlight.”⁶⁷ A less literal reviewer claims that Twombly had used the names of Moroccan cities simply “because he likes the sounds of the words and not because they are descriptive.” His “fetish forms,” crudely drawn body parts (“strange struggling lines, like a series of carrots, or shapes like fingers or open mouths”) resembled “anonymous drawings on walls”—a comparison that stuck.68 James Fitzsimmons’s negative review went further: not only was there nothing specifically African about Twombly’s paintings (“they resemble graffiti, or the drawings of pre-kindergarten children”), but their contours “suggest rows of tottering, crudely fashioned spikes or totems. Presumably the feeling-content of this art is ugliness: shrillness, conflict, cruelty.”⁶⁹ Fitzsimmons’s hostility—“Must a statement about ugliness be fragmentary and confused?”—responds to the culminating effect of Twombly’s post-Moroccan paintings: their refusal of romantic or preconceived ideas about North Africa, their aesthetic of ugliness, and their deliberately discomfiting “feeling-content.”

Twombly’s North African paintings bristle with conflict and abrasion; they eschew both nostalgia and abstraction. Quarzazat seems to process, left to right, via a series of uncompromising verticals that morph into steep-sided cones on legs. Black outlines are scratched, smudged, daubed with paint and wax crayon, the paint deliberately roughed-up. Tiznit develops the recurring forms of the North African Sketchbooks: hirsute cones on legs; irregular uprights; bristling shapes; a thicket of crayon scribbles over layers of dripping house paint, smudged with gray or ochre.⁷⁰ The horseshoe forms of Volubilus are laced with hairy striations, enigmatic verticals and loops, against a background the texture of dusty earth.⁷¹ (See figure 1.8.) Twombly treats the surface of his canvases to punishing assaults—scratching, scuffing, smearing, and incising—while asymmetrical outlines suggest impenetrable entities and alien sensations. These inhospitable paintings represent a prickly riposte to the celebratory “candelabra” and solemn “torahs” of Twombly’s earlier abstracts. They replace New York School “mythmaking” with biomorphic shapes inspired by the Moroccan landscape and the bristling hostility of African fetishes. Twombly’s first Mediterranean passage established an archeology of forms—his own private Feticci Personali.⁷² In his later work, the past is infused by nostalgia (in the sense of a longing for nostos or return). Beautiful lines of poetry replace alien names; instead of fetish objects, a palimpsest of quotations, date-stamped with obscurely personal and cultural associations. Instead of the fetish, words.

In conversation with David Sylvester, Twombly emphasized the multilayered associations of his sea-crossings: “For sure, it is a passage.”⁷⁴ He has in mind his first momentous journey from America to Italy (“when I went I was in paradise”); the symbolism of Egyptian boat-crossings (the Nile boats of his sculpture Winter’s Passage, 1985); the boats of his childhood summers by the sea at Gloucester, Massachusetts; his perennial fascination with boat-shapes; and, more recently, the endlessly changing colors and ship-traffic of the Tyrrhenian sea beside which he now lived. He specifically invokes the backward and nostalgic look of what Sylvester calls “this thing of passage” in reference to the untitled painting that became Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor: “It’s a passage through everything.”⁷⁵ Twombly’s immense, sixteen-meter long, four-meter high, multilayered, multitemporal painting—begun in 1972 in Rome, and continued in 1982—had crossed the sea, unfinished, on the occasion of the 1994 MoMA retrospective. Consisting of first one and then a second panel, it was finally completed when a third panel was added in a Lexington warehouse in time for its exhibition in September 1994. The tripartite painting was shown at the Gagosian Gallery in New York as An Untitled Painting, timed to coincide with the MoMA retrospective.⁷⁶ The retitled painting now forms the centerpiece of Renzo Piano’s airy, light-filled Twombly Pavilion at the Menil Museum in Houston. The right-hand panel explodes in color reminiscent of Quattro Stagioni’s Autunno (1993–94); the lush palette of the central panel fades to white; the far-left panel dissolves into enigmatic northern pallor.⁷⁷ (See figure 1.9.)

1.8. Cy Twombly, Volubilus, 1953. New York. White lead, oil-based house paint, wax crayon on canvas, 55 × 76 in. (139.7 × 193 cm). Menil Collection, Houston, Cy Twombly Gallery. Extended loan of Cy Twombly. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo Hickey-Robertson, Houston.

1.9. Cy Twombly, Untitled Painting [Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor], 1994. Rome/Lexington, VA. Oil, acrylic, oil stick, crayon, and graphite pencil on three canvases, 157½ × 624 in. (400.1 × 1585 cm). Menil Collection, Houston, Cy Twombly Gallery. Gift of the Artist. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo Takaaki Matsumoto, New York.

The energy of Twombly’s primal scribble, with its smudge of white, finger-flurry of sea-blue, and its pink heart, evokes the Catullan traveler’s pleasure, as if with the “rush” of emotion that Twombly associated with the phrase “Asia Minor” (“Now sweet-smelling Spring has come …”). But to the left, spectral boat-like tallies struck through with horizontal lines suggest yet another day spent working the oars or becalmed in an empty sea. The history of the painting’s making was itself one of inertia: as Twombly recalls, “work went on so long and never got anywhere too much,” while the passage of time and travel left their own marks on the canvas.⁹¹ His dialogue with Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)—“that beautiful treatise on melancholy”—gives its title to the central panel, faintly visible at mid-left.⁹² As Burton observes, “I write of melancholy, by being busie to avoid Melancholy. There is no greater cause of Melancholy than idleness.”⁹³ Citation and quotation form part of Burton’s busy pedantic accumulation: “I have laboriously collected this Cento out of divers Writers … the method onely is myne owne … we can say nothing but what hath beene said.”⁹⁴ For Burton, melancholy is synonymous with the human condition: “And from these Melancholy Dispositions, no man living is free.… Melancholy in this sense is the Character of Mortalitie.”⁹⁵ The Renaissance discourse of introspection reinforces a tradition that associates melancholy with poets and scholars (the “misery” of scholars gets an entire section of its own).⁹⁶

Writing is one way to transform melancholia into an art form—a perennially alluring aesthetic that links Burton to Proust and Nerval. Burton’s “beautiful treatise” advocates travel as a cure for melancholy: “For peregrination charmes our senses with such unspeakable and sweet variety, that some count him unhappy that never traveled, a kinde of prisoner, and pitty his case that from his cradle to his old age beholds the same still; still, still the same, the same.”97 The stasis that becalmed Twombly’s painting is identified by its alternate title. The phrase “On Mists in Idleness” comes from a sonnet included in Keats’s letter of 13 March 1818 to Benjamin Bailey, in which Keats speculates that “every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer—being itself a nothing.”⁹⁸ There are, he tells Bailey, three different orders of things—“Things real—things semireal—and no things.” Keats’s “Things real” include the planets and poetry; “things semireal” include “Love, the Clouds &c which require a greeting of the spirit”; while the third category—“Nothings which are made Great and dignified by an ardent pursuit”—requires consecration by the mind. Keats’s transcription of his sonnet follows, with its sequence of mental growth, consummation, and decline: “Four Seasons fill the Measure of the Year; / Four seasons are there in the mind of Man …” (ll. 1–2).⁹⁹

The associations with life’s seasons must have recurred to Twombly during his work on Quattro Stagioni in 1993–94, which overlapped with the completion of Say Goodbye.¹⁰⁰ Keats’s sonnet resonates with the idea of the inevitable fading of pleasure with life’s seasons. Except that Twombly in his own autumnal years—his midsixties—had recently completed both the Tate and the MoMA versions of Quattro Stagioni, including Autunno’s vigorous representation of Bacchic fecundity, wine-making, and spurting sexual energy. The gorgeous colors on the right-hand panel of Say Goodbye drip darkly with the reds, purples, and gold of triumphant maturation. There is no intimation of “mists of idleness,” let alone wintry decline. But perhaps artistic maturity and a sense of life’s passing are interwoven. Twombly says that Say Goodbye concerns “life’s fleetingness. It’s a passage.”¹⁰¹ Dating to 1994, this remark has inevitable hindsight, sealing the painting’s meaning in retrospect. It echoes Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation—a pale inscription descending vertically down the left-hand edge of the painting’s central panel, as if answering the vivid efflorescence of rose-red, yellow, and blue on the right: “This fleeting / World in some way / Keeps calling us / Us the most / Fleeting of all / Once for each thing / Just once no more /And we too just / Once / And never again ….” (See figure 1.10.) Emphasizing the O’s of the repeated and enlarged “Once”, Twombly’s transcription concludes: “But to have / been / this Once / Completely / even if only / Once ….”¹⁰²

Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy charts a being-in-the-world that is unique, yet finite. Poetry tries to “say” the world—not just to name it, but to celebrate it, even more intensely than it is. A love of Rilke had been with Twombly since his Black Mountain College days, renewed during the period of works inspired by Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus in the 1970s and 1980s.¹⁰³ Readers often respond to Rilke (in the words of Paul de Man) “as if he addressed the most secluded parts of their selves.”¹⁰⁴ The last four lines of Rilke’s Tenth Duino Elegy appears in Twombly’s work during the 1980s (providing the epigraph for his broken-branched Untitled sculpture of 1984).¹⁰⁵ The same lines reappear at the lower left of the Tate version of Primavera and at the right-hand edge of the central panel of Say Goodbye, surrounded by traces of blooming color above a scribbled ship: “And you who have / always thought of / happiness rising / would feel the / emotion / that almost over /whelms / us whenever happiness / falls.”¹⁰⁶ (See figure 1.11.) In Rilke’s poetry, the happiness of falling things acts as a shorthand for the Romantic nature lyric (and even for his own metrical line): hanging catkins, spring raindrops, seasonal renewal in the face of grief and mortality.¹⁰⁷ In the immediately preceding Ninth Elegy, rather than resting on a poet’s laurels (“slightly darker than all / other green”), Rilke had opted instead for a life of looking, suffering, loving, and the poet’s perennial attempt to say and celebrate what belongs to “this fleeting world,” including human experience (“Us, the most fleeting of all”). Each thing is experienced in all its intensity: “just once. And never again.”¹⁰⁸ Once-ness is the human condition.

1.10. Cy Twombly, Untitled Painting [Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor], detail, center panel, 1994. Rome/Lexington, VA. Oil, acrylic, oil stick, crayon, and graphite pencil on three canvases, 157½ × 390 in. (400.1 × 990.6 cm). Menil Collection, Houston, Cy Twombly Gallery. Gift of the Artist. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo Adam Baker.

Through language, the world becomes “sayable”—not in a transcendent realm, but emphatically “here,” in its native home (“Hier ist des Säglichen Ziet, hier siene Heimat”).¹¹⁰ Countering the evanescence of human experience, lament is remade as an affirmation of “Things” transformed by the poet’s saying. Even grief, taking poetic form, “serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing.” Things like this may “live by perishing,” but in their perishable transience, “they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.” Rilke’s “intimate companion, Death” fuels his vivid sense of life: “Look, I am living.”¹¹¹ As if in response to Rilke, Twombly’s yellow and blue gentian bloom like fireworks on the central panel of Say Goodbye.

1.11. Cy Twombly, Untitled Painting [Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor], detail, center panel, 1994. Rome/Lexington, VA. Oil, acrylic, oil stick, crayon, and graphite pencil on three canvases, 157½ × 390 in. (400.1 × 990.6 cm). Menil Collection, Houston, Cy Twombly Gallery. Gift of the Artist. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo Adam Baker.

“Because of the boats”: Twombly told Nicholas Serota that the scribbled, many-oared Celtic boats beetling in a leftward (westerly) direction were his solution to the problem of finishing Say Goodbye.112 The boat ideograph in Twombly’s painting is a form of self-quotation, as well as a figure for voyaging and nostos. One can infer from Twombly’s reference to Catullus’s Poem 46 that his boats were both homeward-bound and funereal—a flotilla borne back by their mythic elements (tides, winds, and seasons). Pincus-Witten goes so far as to populate the central panel with “a vast sea drama,” a spectacle “rife with oceanic signifiers: sea-battles, ancient ships, Egyptian soul boats … and perhaps even an allusion to Viking galleys”—Twombly’s entire maritime imaginary.¹¹³ But boats come bearing “quotes.” In Say Goodbye, they are freighted (even synonymous) with passages of poetry. Because of the quotes? Quotation offers a technique for pulling together the long-unfinished painting. According to W. G. Sebald, “Remembrance, after all, in essence is nothing other than a quotation.” Quotation enables the coming together of what he calls “time recounted and the time of culture.”¹¹⁴ At once a mode of memory and a form of recounting, quotation allows Say Goodbye to enter the time of culture as well as time past.

Twombly’s memorial ship-painting for Lucio Amelio, Untitled (1993), provides a poetic nexus for two major works brought to completion during 1993–94: Quattro Stagioni and Say Goodbye.¹¹⁵ Returning to Seferis’s intensely private Three Secret Poems (1966), Twombly reused one of the same quotations—drastically abridged from M. Byron Raizis’s translation—for the right-hand canvas of Say Goodbye: “and yet there on / the other shore / under the dark gaze….¹¹⁶ Seferis’s allusiveness (made still more allusive by Twombly’s cuts) now seems to “speak” secretly for Twombly himself as he looks back across the vast expanse of time.117 The MoMA version of Inverno appropriates other, more phantasmogoric fragments from “Summer Solstice,” the third and most tormented of Seferis’s Three Secret Poems (“But in this Sleep / a dream / into a nightmare / Like a fish / plunged under the wave …”).¹¹⁸ Twombly seems to have found particular difficulty in completing Estate—the last of Quattro Stagioni and the one most closely linked to the completion of Say Goodbye. He complained: “All I’m doing is seeing yellow. I wake up in the morning, and the white walls look yellow.”¹¹⁹ He turned to Seferis, inserting the lines “High on light / how the dizziness / slipped away / like a fish / in the Sea” on the upper right of the Tate version of Estate. (See figure 1.12.) But this time, the lines come from an early poem by Seferis, “Automobile,” recalling a clandestine love affair as two lovers on the highway draw apart in indifference or division: “… On a bed, the pillow / high and light, / how the dizziness slipped away / like a fish in the sea.”¹²⁰ The same lines reappear at the left edge of the central panel of Say Goodbye, where the lovers’ pillow (“high & light”) is spliced casually onto Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy, beneath Twombly’s oversized “Once” and above the name “Khonsu” (“traveller”). Time-travel jostles dizzily with Rilkean fleetingness. (See figure 1.13.)

The Seferis of Three Secret Poems is the quintessential poet of secrecy, encrypting references to hidden circumstances, images, and even to his own poetry in ways that often made them inaccessible to his readers.¹²¹ But he was also a public and political poet, acutely aware of his Mediterranean heritage: exile and displacement. Like Seferis’s literary and diplomatic career, his poetry is bound up with Mediterranean history (past and present), including the struggle in and over Cyprus during the 1950s in which he was himself involved.¹²² Displaced from the Asia Minor of his childhood—irrevocably lost after the 1922 destruction of the Greek community in Smyrna—Seferis became an exile a second time when Germany occupied Greece during World War II, and the Greek government-in-exile relocated to Egypt.¹²³ Voyaging in his poetry recapitulates Homeric wanderings that end in disillusion, shipwreck, and loss; nostos in his poetry is never simply a trope of return. The sea is Seferis’s defining “mythistorema” (his mythic history), connecting past and present in the fluid spaces of diasporic memory.¹²⁴ Seferis’s Homeric wanderers are timelessly at sea in a world where history keeps on repeating itself. The myth stands in for many sea-borne migrations, both forced and voluntary.

Seferis began Three Secret Poems after editing his own collected poems in his midsixties, Twombly’s age when he finished Say Goodbye. He regarded it both as a summing up of everything he had previously written, and as a kind of personal reckoning. The three sections move from a wintry ray of light, via the desolation of the modern world, to the merciless sun and cleansing bonfires of the summer solstice. The Seferis of Three Secret Poems is in dialogue with T. S. Eliot (a comparison that dogged his Anglophone reception). But his fires are Heraclitan fires of destruction and rebirth, not those of Christian resurrection. In 1969, Seferis—the habitually reticent ex-diplomat and Nobel laureate—made a public “Statement” against the literary censorship imposed by the Greek Colonels that became a rallying point for other Greek writers.125 For Seferis, poetry was a cruel mirror that returned its uncompromising verdict: “Your life is what you’ve given / this void is what you’ve given, / the blank page.”¹²⁶ The passage is emphatically marked in Twombly’s copy of Raizis’s translation. But if you trust the void, Seferis suggests (in words that might also be applied to Twombly’s artistic retrospect), “You may find there what you’d thought lost; / the budding of youth, the just submersion of old age.”¹²⁷ Seferis’s poetry speaks for the convergence of personal reckoning, regional politics, and longue durée in the Mediterranean imaginary of Say Goodbye.

1.12. Cy Twombly, Quattro Stagioni [A Painting in Four Parts], Part II: Estate (Tate Version), detail, 1994. Bassano in Teverina/Gaeta. Acrylic, lead pencil, colored pencil on canvas, 123⅝ × 84⅝ in. (314.1 × 215.2 cm). Tate Modern. © Cy Twombly. Courtesy Tate Gallery. Photo © Tate, London, 2014.

1.13. Cy Twombly, Untitled Painting [Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor], detail, center panel, 1994. Rome/Lexington, VA. Oil, acrylic, oil stick, crayon, and graphite pencil on three canvases, 157½ × 390 in. (400.1 × 990.6 cm). Menil Collection, Houston, Cy Twombly Gallery. Gift of the Artist. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo Adam Baker.

A disconcerting perspective on Twombly’s working habits emerges from a Vogue profile originally published in 1994 at the time of the MoMA retrospective. The artist in his Gaeta studio is struggling with what became the Tate version of Quattro Stagioni’s Estate. Beside him is “a book of modern Greek poems in translation, turned to George Seferis’s ‘Three Secret Poems’” (as we now know, Raizis’s Greek Poetry Translations):

Several lines of one stanza have been altered by Twombly, with some words inked out. A section of the edited and spliced poem (with a few new words added by Twombly) is written on the canvas of Summer, in Twombly’s inimitable, childish scrawl:

The paint stains and markings in Twombly’s copy of Greek Poetry Translations confirm this tantalizing glimpse of the artist at work.¹³¹ But only the phrases “distant in memory” and “between … [the] deluge of life” come from Seferis (the opening lines of “Summer Solstice”). Other lines transcribed and cannibalized here include the poetry of C.P. Cavafy, Richard Howard, and—mediated by Howard—phrases from the prose of Baron Corvo. It is easy to assume that Twombly’s memory for poetry was approximate: that, like many people, he recalled a rhythm, a phrase, or a few lines, with different emphases at different times and in varying moods. Yet here we see him (book open) inking out, editing, and splicing—creating a hybrid passage of his own.

Twombly’s montage includes lines from Cavafy’s early Symbolist poem of erotic nostalgia, “Our dearest white youth,” grafted onto other lines that reappear on the third, left-hand panel of Say Goodbye, above a procession of scribbled boats, in a patch of white paint tinged with faint lavender: “shining white air trembling / white light / reflected in the white / flat sea.” (See figure 1.14.) Cavafy’s poem is absent from the visual field of Say Goodbye. But its sighing after the evanescence of white youth is inscribed on the yellow-streaked lower right-hand margin of the Tate version of Estate, culminating in the lines “Ah, it goes, is lost / in white horizons / goes / forever.”¹³² The mood of Cavafy’s poem could hardly have been more apposite to the empty grisage and horizonless expanse on the left-hand panel of Say Goodbye:

1.14. Cy Twombly, Untitled Painting [Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor], detail, left panel, 1994. Rome/Lexington, VA. Oil, acrylic, oil stick, crayon, and graphite pencil on three canvases, 157½ × 117 in. (400.1 × 297.2 cm). Menil Collection, Houston, Cy Twombly Gallery. Gift of the Artist. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo Adam Baker.

Given that Twombly used these lines almost verbatim while at work in 1994 on the Tate Estate, it is hard to believe that they could have been far from his mind as he completed Say Goodbye. As well as E. M. Forster’s writings on Cavafy, Twombly would have known Auden’s preface to Rae Dalven’s translation of Cavafy, the source for his quotation: “Cavafy was a homosexual, and his erotic poems make no attempt to conceal the fact.… One duty of a poem, among others, is to bear witness to the truth.”134 The name MA’AT (goddess of truth) hovers over the central panel of Say Goodbye.

Twombly knew and loved E. M. Forster’s essays on Cavafy.¹³⁵ In 1951, reviewing a recent translation of Cavafy’s Complete Poems, Forster emphasized Cavafy’s complex identity as both a historical poet and a poet of erotic introspection. Paraphrasing Cavafy, he writes: “The amours of youth, even when disreputable, are delightful … but the point of them is not that: the point is that they create the future, and may give to an aging man … perceptions he would never have known.” Cavafy is also, in his own way, a poet of retrospect. The poem Forster quotes is Cavafy’s “Understanding”: “The years of my young manhood, / my sensual life—how plainly I see their meaning now.… / But I did not grasp their meaning then.” Yet, it was then that “the designs of my poetry took shape, / the scope of my art was being plotted.”¹³⁶ Again summarizing Cavafy, Forster concludes: “His material as a poet, then, begins with his own experiences and sensations.… He begins from within.” But at the same time, “he is being beckoned to and being called to by history.”¹³⁷ What better description could there be than Forster’s for Twombly’s backward look at the experiences and sensations of his youth, and his beckoning by Mediterranean history?

For Auden, the quality that survived translation in Cavafy’s poetry was “a tone of voice, a personal speech.… nobody else could possibly have written it.” Calling it “a speech of self-disclosure,” he adds: “Reading any poem of his, I feel: ‘This reveals a person with a unique perspective on the world.’”¹³⁸ First-hand accounts of conversations with Twombly sometimes refer to his hesitant delivery, almost amounting to a stammer, and to his habit of letting sentences trail off, or completing them with his mouth half-covered, as if to guard against inadvertent self-disclosure.¹³⁹ A manner of speaking does not necessarily translate into a manner of painting, to be sure, although it may translate visually into hard-to-read handwriting. But hesitation, stammering, and reticence are also aspects of poetic expressivity. Hesitation may suddenly become a “rush” when rhythm takes over, one phrase interrupts another, or a line speeds up. As a painter, Twombly too seems to hesitate, reflect, and then mark in a flurry of activity, sometimes obliterating earlier marks with his second thoughts. Even when carefully planned and premeditated, his paintings appear swiftly executed, their previous layers at once half-hidden and half-exposed.

In the white expanses of Say Goodbye, Cavafy’s lost horizons disappear, like an inexpressible sigh, his “Ah” answering Rilke’s “O” (“Ah, it goes, is lost / in white horizons …”). Describing the color of the Mediterranean (“white, white, white”), Twombly must have been aware of others who had found it perennially fascinaating.¹⁴⁰ In his Venice Letters, Baron Corvo (the failed painter Frederick Rolfe) describes the morning whiteness of the Venetian lagoon with its naked swimmers (“at white dawn, when the whole world gleams with the candid iridescence of mother of pearl, glowing white flesh with green-blue eyes and shining hair poised in white air trembling like song in white light reflected in white smooth sea”).141 But Twombly is not directly recalling Corvo’s description. The lines he quotes in Say Goodbye have been filtered through the verbal imagination of the American poet and translator Richard Howard, whose “1889: Alassio,” from Untitled Subjects (1969)—his Pulitzer Prize–winning volume of dramatic monologues—ventriloquizes a figure based loosely on Corvo. In a 2004 interview in the Paris Review, Howard said that, among the poems in Untitled Subjects that he most cherished, this one “concentrates (if any poem of six pages can be said to be concentrated) all the attitudes and awfulness of homosexual life that I most deplored and feared in my future.”¹⁴² Twombly may have been struck simply by Howard’s reference to the white light of the Mediterranean. But did he notice more?

The survival of Twombly’s transcription on a piece of paper—spotted with white paint and bearing a faint lilac smudge (compare the left-hand panel of Say Goodbye)—solves a crux at the heart of the painting’s whitened seascape: (See figure 1.15.)

The immediate context of Twombly’s transcription are lines that anticipate the betrayal of Howard’s speaker by his young lover, Pippo. Howard’s language deliberately recollects the “glowing white flesh with green-blue eyes and shining hair” of Corvo’s Venetian boy bathers:

Howard’s mingling of tragedy, poetry, farce, and Mediterranean ennui—“La bella noia!” suggests (if nothing else) the multivalence of Twombly’s collage of quotations, as he too looked back on a life “reflected in the white flat sea.”