8	TWOMBLY’S LAPSE

If I write “red,” why isn’t it red? Should it be? Or should it be written in green? In purple? In black? I say “a flower,” and here is the absent one arising red or white, or red and white and just as smooth and soft, flourishing or faded. But I write “a flower,” and here is the word that is traced by marking the paper with a colorless smear.

—JEAN-LUC NANCY, “Distinct Oscillation”¹

IN AN ESSAY on Twombly’s 2007 Blossoms series, Éric Mézil, curator of the Avignon exhibition where it was first shown, refers to a conversation with Twombly while he worked on the paintings. Prowling in the book-filled rooms of Twombly’s working environment at Gaeta, Mézil came upon a small book by the curator of the Musée Matisse in Nice, propped open at La Porte Noire (The Black Door) (1942)—part of a series that shows Matisse developing variations of the same design. (See figure 8.1.) In La Porte Noire, his model is posed against an open window in a flame-colored striped kaftan, on a red and yellow striped chair, tipped forward against the marron-glacé parquet floor of the Hôtel Régina. On the facing page is another version, looser and more abstract. A third version, La Robe Violette (The Purple Robe) poses the pensive model wearing a Persian kaftan, boxed in with stripes and cross-hatching against the partially shuttered window; facing it is a rough sketch keyed to Matisse’s detailed notes about color.² Twombly explains his own passage from room to room and from painting to painting as follows: “You see, from one canvas to another, you could say that the subject will fall.”³

Does this cryptic remark refer to the precarious balance in different versions of Matisse’s painting, tilting forward diagonally out of their frame toward the viewer? Or does it refer to the larger effect that Twombly calls “that breakdown [effondrement] of painting with Matisse,” whereby purely decorative and compositional elements displace representation as the painting’s subject?⁴ Mézil comments perceptively on the subtle ways in which “the weight of paint,” color, framing, and tilt “play on imbalances and the collapses [chavirements] of composition,” hinting in Gallic fashion at a double sense in which the sitter in her armchair might “fall” outside the frame (“la chute de la dame hors du cadre”)—whether with the precariousness of the painting’s composition or in the grip of other emotions.⁵ The implication of Mézil’s curatorial mini-narrative is that the light (or shadow) of one painting seems to have fallen on another, creating what one might call a transference-effect between the two artists, Matisse and Twombly. Similarly, when quoting, one person takes on elements of the subjectivity of another in the act of repeating their words. These double forms of quotation—Twombly’s visual quotation of Matisse, and his use of literary quotation—occupy a central place in the Blossoms series, along with the pervasive trope of a lapse or fall.

8.1. Henri Matisse, La Porte Noire (The Black Door), 1942. Nice. Color reproduction, Verve, Vol. IV, No. 13 (1945), [18–19]. Photo courtesy Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

A lapse implies both a compositional fall or effondremont and the elapse of time, as well as a movement defined by gravity. Twombly comments to Mézil that the half-moon peony-shapes near the upper edge of his paintings “suggest the verticality of the painting on these horizontal formats. In this way the peonies give even more an impression of collapsing [crouler] ….”6 The point about peonies is not only their beauty, but also their imminent collapse as the beautiful, heavy-headed blossoms shed their petals and fall under their own weight. Floral motifs in Twombly’s painting may sometimes be ideographic, and at other times sculptural—artificial flowers incorporated to create an effect of fragility.⁷ But here they are painterly, and unabashedly pleasurable. Flowers are associated in Twombly’s work with pigment and staining, and hence with both painting and writing. The stain of nature has associations with both erotic spillage and poetry in the beautiful Untitled (Sappho) (1976), with its allusion to the metamorphosis of Hyacinthus’s blood into an anenome.8 Twombly’s subjective markings contain their own emotional history, whether erotic, melancholy, or sheer intoxicated. The furious scratching and smearing of his earlier work is replaced in this late series by the luxuriant fullness of a loaded brush—daubing, dripping, and fluidly over-painting. These flowers, too, come freighted with poetry. The peony blossoms paintings are inscribed with fragments of Edo-period and nineteenth-century Japanese haiku. June, the month when the series was first shown, is also the month of peonies (Japanese botan).

This chapter sets Twombly’s peony blossom paintings alongside his other late flower series, The Rose (2008). Both sequences treat their motifs in ways that lavishly reinvent decoration. As early as 1912, Matisse had written: “A picture should, for me, always be decorative.”⁹ In this sense, Twombly’s late work reengages the long twentieth-century debate about the relation of decorative art to abstraction. As he neared eighty, Twombly painted big, finding new ways to manage paint by using long-handled brushes, just as Matisse had found new ways of making large-scale decorative art from his bed with the cut-outs.¹⁰ This scaling-up, using large canvases and brushes, has come to define Twombly’s late style. His spacious horizontal surfaces bear the weight of larger-than-life-size images whose paint-runs and swirls of color create a countervailing downward movement. Here as elsewhere, he deliberately incorporated the viscosity of paint into his work. Like a collapsing flower, paint—a medium subject to gravity—falls, along with Rilke’s “happy thing.”¹¹ Twombly’s art is lapsarian, not in the sense of a fall from innocence, but rather in deploying the physical tendency of paint to flow down as a material condition for painterly subjectivity: “the subject will fall.” These paintings drip with liquid movement, as if the fullness of the artist’s brush is their subject. They record the pull of gravity and the passage of time, just as Twombly had studied time and motion in earlier paintings and sculptures.¹² Their weight is that of both pleasure and loss.

The history of American art since Abstract Expressionism is often represented as a narrative of subjectivity’s traces as recorded by the materiality of the medium on a flat surface—whether horizontal or vertical. For the generation who came after Jackson Pollock, gestural painting (paint falling from the brush, using one’s hands, incising with a palette knife) formed a point of departure. The subjective mark remains the founding condition for Twombly’s distinctive post-modernity.¹³ At the end of his career, his art utilizes the behavior of paint as an aspect of its expressivity, along with the scribbles, scrawls, and quotations that form part of his personal lexicon and graphic system. Writing functions as a mnemonic (proper names, resonant titles, snatches of poetry), yet also as a secret calligraphy; it invokes shared literary or cultural meanings while conveying an element of inwardness and private emotion. The medium, too, contains a message: not only the action of time and memory, but the action of paint. Hence “Twombly’s Lapse”—the path tracked by paint as it drips, or by scribbles of semi-legible writing that allude indirectly to the artist’s own subjectivity. Drawing on the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, I will return in closing to one of the central conundrums of Twombly’s artistic practice: the relation between image and text, understood here as the way language “sticks” to painting, or color adheres to language.14

I. FALLING THINGS

Japanese art, in its most tense and transparent moments, reveals to us those instants—because each is only that, an instant—of perfect equilibrium between life and death. Vivacity: mortality.

—OCTAVIO PAZ, “The Tradition of the Haiku” (1970)¹⁵

Twombly’s signature-use of a dense circular scribble to convey emotion or creative energy characterizes earlier paintings and drawings.¹⁶ Twenty-five years later, in the peony paintings, his primal scribble has become looser and mellower—even contemplative. Bulbous shapes like dripping clouds shed their liquid acrylic contents onto wooden panels, as if shaken. (See figure 8.2.) In the haiku on the farthest right, the warrior relaxes and takes off his armor, capitulating to pleasure and emotion,: “AH! the Peonies / for which / Kusunoki took off his / ARMOUR (KIKAKU).”¹⁷ Whether by chance or design, the second “K” might be mistaken for an “R” in Twombly’s parenthetical attribution: the word kiraku (as opposed to the haiku poet’s name, Kikaku) means “easy-going.” Ironically, Takarai Kikaku (1661–1707), the disciple of the seventeenth-century master of haiku, Matsuo Basho (1644–94), famously dissented from Basho’s philosophy of karumi or “lightness.” Kikaku’s haiku recalls the legendary occasion when the young fourteenth-century samurai warrior Kusunoki Masashige lowered his guard when faced with the beauty of peony blossoms, just before the momentous battle in which he died.¹⁸

Twombly comments that “the haiku were added as a kind of nuance or touching piece to the paintings, but they weren’t about peonies; they’re just about blooming.” The blossom paintings were inspired by an image of a flower in bloom, much as a haiku focuses on a single natural image (“just a single image more or less”).¹⁹ Traditional haiku—a form with a strict syllabic rhythm (5-7-5)—were loosely organized in seasonal cycles, crystalizing the pure present of “the haiku moment.” At once a moment in time and a trace of the poet’s emotional encounter with the image, haiku are a vehicle for unstated, half-articulated emotion. Toward the end of his life, however, Basho—by then a successful and recognized poet—adopted his new technique of “lightness.” Ease and detachment were expressed by elegantly linked verses combined as renga (“linked elegance”) whose flow, he wrote, “gives the impression of looking at a shallow river with a sandy bed.”²⁰ Lacking narrative time-sequence or emotional development, these sequences depended on the links between images within a single stanza, and on the larger movement implied by the gaps between them. Twombly refers pleasurably to the series as having “passages” rather than connections: “I got all kinds of wonderful effects that I never achieved before. They all have beautiful passages, such large passages … I don’t know what excited me with the Blossoms.”²¹

8.2. Cy Twombly, Untitled, 2007. Gaeta. Acrylic, wax crayon, lead pencil on wooden panel, 99¼ × 217¼ in. (252 × 552 cm). Collection Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron, New York. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo courtesy Gallery Heiner Bastian.

The Blossoms series “were made with big brushes and have lots of paint all over them.”22 Brush may be “boring,” as Twombly complained, but his broad-brush painting produces a sense of fluid expansiveness, punctuated by paint-stick epigraphs: while being “thought out,” the paintings were executed in rapid bursts of concentrated activity, using thin, quick-drying acrylic. Each is linked to the others, or—as Twombly himself remarks apropos of his tendency to paint sets and sequences—“maybe they’re pages in a book.”²³ Counter-intuitive though it may be in view of their wall-sized scale, his speculation provides a clue to their formal relationship. Elsewhere, Twombly’s Japonisme also takes a leaf out of Japanese books, using what he calls “pseudo-writing” to produce “a kind of garbled form of Japanese writing” for the vertical calligraphy of the brown rain-runnels in the Winter Paintings (2004).24 James Rondeau suggests that the six-panel format of the peony paintings recollects the six-panel form of traditional Japanese screens, which were often decorated with peonies and other blossoms.²⁵ The smaller scale of the artist’s book, or the folded pages of a Japanese renga cycle, may also have inspired these large-scale works. Twombly’s own handmade “books” (folded sheets of paper) offer precursors for the four-petal floral rosettes of Blossoms.²⁶ (See figure 8.3.) Using the same crimson acrylic, his loosely knotted flowers reappear, scaled up, on the panels of abstract flower-shapes that punctuate the peony paintings.

Intensifying the link between the Blossoms paintings and the pages of a book, the same petal shape—again related to calligraphy—can be found in Matisse’s 1946 illustration to a poem by Roger Bernadi. A rudimentary poppy shape enlarges as it drops lightly down the page, accompanied by the phrase: “Pavot d’or, / je t’aime / pour me délivrer / du / poids / de / mon / coeur.”²⁷ (See figure 8.4.) During the 1940s, Matisse was in the habit of decorating his envelopes with four-or five-petal blossom shapes—a light-hearted, miniaturized, but none the less serious form of decorative art that enclosed his correspondence with his intellectual confidante at the time (the writer and artist André Rouveyre).²⁸ (See figure 8.5.) Intimately connected with Matisse’s work on illustrated books during the immediate post-war period, these little envelopes point to his interest in the relation between calligraphy and decoration. As Matisse wrote to Rouveyre in 1947, it was through contemplating the space of the page that he had come to possess “le sentiment de l’horizontale et de la verticale.”²⁹ Twombly’s use of mixed horizontal and vertical panels in his own 2007 series of paintings suggests a similar sentiment. A reminiscence of Matisse’s blossoms may also account for Twombly’s insistence that the subject of his own series is “blossoming” rather than peonies. His pervasive allusions to Matisse extend to the palette he used for the series. Some of the Blossoms paintings adopt the distinctive combination of flame-red and yellow, darkening to maroon and gold, found in Matisse’s La Porte Noire. Unlike the cool celadon and mint green of the haiku-inscribed “peony” panel—associated with Asian ceramics and the moon-like blooms of white peonies—these color-drenched panels are reminiscent of Matisse paintings whose compositional significance Mézil had acutely noticed.³⁰ (See figure 8.6.) Twombly may even recollect the decorative cross-hatching of La Porte Noire in two vertical panels that bookended the Blossoms installation—their purple zigzags slanting down the canvas like brief but illegible explanations.³¹

8.3. Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1984–2002. Handmade book, crayon, water color, acrylic on paper, 15⅝ × 22¾ in. Collection Cy Twombly Foundation. © Cy Twomby Foundation. Photo courtesy Cy Twombly Foundation.

8.4. Henri Matisse, illustration to poem by Roger Bernard. Letter of 10 January 1946 (L. 602). The Royal Library, Copenhagen, Ms. Tilg. 330. © Succession H. Matisse/DACS 2015. Photo Photographic Studio, KB.

8.5. Henri Matisse, Recto of envelope. Letter of 9 February 1943 (L. 304). The Royal Library, Copenhagen, Ms. Tilg. 330. © Succession H. Matisse/DACS 2015. Photo Photographic Studio, KB.

Mézil’s curatorial approach to the Blossoms series involves citing Twombly’s copious precursors in both Eastern and Western traditions: depictions of peonies and flowering trees by Hokosai, Manet, Matisse, Warhol, and others, as well as decorative designs. While peonies are deeply entwined with both Eastern and Western aesthetics, Twombly himself gave the title “Blooming” to his sequence of paintings. The handwritten title also uses the word “scattering”—“a scatering of Blosoms and other things [sic].” What is being scattered apart from blossoms, in Twombly’s casually inclusive phrase? The original exhibition included sculptures as well as related drawings and paintings alongside the Blossoms paintings. But there is an element of “scattering” in the paintings themselves. One recalls Roland Barthes’s characterization of space in Twombly’s paintings as the principle of “spacing out” (“that which has gaps or interstices, sparse, porous, scattered”). Barthes draws attention to the importance of spacing in Japanese aesthetics, “which does not know the Kantian categories of space and time, but only the more subtle one of interval (in Japanese: Ma).”32 Twombly’s use of the flower motif, whether in repeated blossom-shapes or stylized rosettes, emphasizes their intervals, or what he later called “passages.” The random scattering of formalized lozenges, circles, and zigzags across an expansive visual sequence moves in the opposite direction from the miniaturization of Matisse’s envelopes, with their playful postal address (“à la Joye de Vivre, Vence”). It is as if Twombly had imaginatively unpacked the tightly knit designs of La Porte Noire, then combined them with the inspiration of Matisse’s decorated envelopes, before returning them to the South of France whence they had come. Planned to fill “a particular architectural space” in Avignon, an eighteenth-century hôtel particulier, the Blossoms series first bloomed in the uncluttered interior that Barthes had identified with the “Mediterranean space” of Twombly’s earlier paintings—the space captured by the shuttered windows and reposeful sitter of Matisse’s 1942 paintings at the Hôtel Régina.³³

Twombly—noting that “the haiku were added as a kind of nuance”—is also on record as saying that he doesn’t use color “with any nuance.” He said: “It’s the object; the form of the thing is more interesting to me than colour.” The peony paintings, he comments, “are just ramifications, in different shades,” variations on “just a single image more or less.”³⁴ The connotations of “nuance”—a word derived from the Middle French “shades of color” (from nuer, to make shades of color) and from “cloud” (nue)—include both subtle gradations of meaning and cloudiness or indistinctness. As Mézil notes felicitously, Twombly’s peony blossoms are “heavy like clouds” (“lourdes comme des nuages”).³⁵ Twombly’s photographic practice frequently involves slow exposure, focused in close-up on an object or detail (sometimes rendered almost unrecognizable), organized as light or shadow in relation to a blurred or empty background. In his exquisite 1980 photographs, peonies blossom luminously against the surrounding shadow, their petals light as crumpled silk.³⁶ (See figure 8.7.) The crepuscular images become part of the photograph’s atmosphere, its penumbra. The cloud is also a shadow, light reversed or diffused: “nuanced.”

8.6. Cy Twombly, Untitled, 2007. Gaeta. Acrylic, wax crayon, lead pencil on wooden panel, 99¼ × 217⅜ in. (252.1 × 552.13 cm). Broad Art Foundation. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo courtesy Broad Art Foundation.

8.7. Cy Twombly, Peonies, 1980. Bassano in Teverina. Photograph. Edition 6. © Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio. Photo courtesy Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio.

Haiku by Basho and his heirs represent similarly refined and allusive meditations on the object in isolation or close-up, made meaningful by its penumbra of feeling. The affective charge of the haiku consists in the way it sheds meaning like moisture, bleeding from image to image, resistant to paraphrase. In the celadon-green peony painting, each peony is inscribed with its own scrawled haiku. The first, a fin de siècle haiku by Masaoka Tsunenori Shiki (1867–1902)—“The white Peony / at the Moon / one evening / Crumbled / and / Fell”—contains the faintest trace of Aesthetic decadence; Reginald Blyth’s four-volume post-war compilation calls it “a romantic verse” expressing “the noiseless inevitability of the fall of the flower, the supreme indifference of the moon, the abjectness of the fallen petals.” 37 The second, smudged haiku by the late eighteenth-century Yataro Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827)—“the Peony falls / Spilling out / Yesterday’s / Rain”—repeats the motif of fall and liquid overflow.³⁸ The fragmentary third haiku by Basho—“From the heart / of the Peony / a drunken / bee”—was not, as it sounds, intended as a celebration of glorious intoxication, but as a poem of reluctant and sorrowful parting.³⁹ The penultimate fragment—“The Peony / Quivers”—forms part of another eighteenth-century haiku by Yosa Buson (1716–83): “The heavy wagon / Rumbles by; / The peony quivers.”⁴⁰ The image of the peony condenses motion and emotion, transferred from a source of external disturbance to an internal state, rendered here as an opaque and unknowable cloud. Last comes Kusonoki’s sigh of surrender as the samurai falls, vanquished by his feelings.

One classification of subject-matter for renga (haiku cycles) is furimono, or “falling things.” Things that fall—rain, snow, leaves, dew, and presumably, petals—are related and contrasted to what rises up, or sobikimono—mist, smoke, or clouds.⁴¹ By accident or design, Twombly (using his own lineation) places the last words of each haiku so as to make them prominent: “fell,” “rain,” “bee,” “quivers.” The “drunken bee” occupies the heart of the third bloom, the quivering peony shakes its words precipitously sideways, while the sigh of “AH!” concludes the sequence of falling, spilling, quivering, and surrender. The defining theme of Twombly’s peony paintings is “falling things”—not only the fall of peonies, spilling their moisture like clouds, but the paint that spills from each peony in liquid runnels of green overlaid with white. In the other flaming peony panel, where red and gold define each blossom as the flower of summer sunlight, the liquid gush is sexualized with a haiku by the eighteenth-century Tan Taigi (1709–71): “The pistil / of the Peony / Gushes / out / into the noonday/ Sunlight.”42 (See figure 8.8.) Drunk as a bee or a painter-poet, the blossom displays its lavish arousal by the sun.

Basho—a traveler as well as a poet—had put his distinctive vision of nature at the center of his spiritual quest. Nature in this sense included the disciplining of the individual; cultivation is necessary for authentic expression and aware, the haiku’s capacity to touch the reader’s emotions into responsiveness.⁴³ A paradoxical self-surrender accompanies this cultivation of poetic naturalness, for which the bee’s intoxicated and reluctant parting from the peony provides an image. Kikaku’s direct expression of emotion at the “AH-ness” of things is rare, yet telling, given the haiku’s suppression of the self (as distinct from the object on which it focuses). Human poetic expression joins other natural traces and marks, like birdsong, or the tracks of birds.⁴⁴ The theme of transience that shadows the tradition of nature writing represented by Basho and his school is implied in the crumbling peony, the fall of petals, and the passage of time. But instead of transience, we find “REMANENCE”—the nonce-word enigmatically displayed on a post-it note in Twombly’s studio, finely caught by the artist Tacita Dean in her photographic essay on Twombly’s working environment.⁴⁵ The haiku’s relation to the fleetingness of natural things is uniquely fitted to the expression of post-Romantic “remanence.” The Blossoms paintings are not just about blossoming, They record the aftermath of affective experience, the residue that remains in art.

Declared the national flower of China by the Qing dynasty, the peony traditionally signifies selflessness and the reconciliation of an aesthetic of nature with formal sophistication. Its long and ancient history in Chinese decorative art migrated to Japan only comparatively recently, along with its Western identification with Japonisme. But the peony also has classical roots. Native to Greece as well as Asia, it takes its name from Pæon, physician to the gods, who was given the plant by Apollo’s mother. The traditional properties of the peony include medicinal uses. “Paeon” became an epithet for Apollo in his healing function, as well as a term for hymns addressed to Apollo, or songs before and after victory. The peony takes its place in Twombly’s Apollonian pantheon alongside other flowers to which his paintings and drawings refer (lotus, iris, and narcissus—plants associated with moisture). But could there also be a Dionysian motif? The Blossoms series included exuberant scrolling panels that recollect the intoxicated Bacchus series of 2004 onward (a Dionysian reprise of Twombly’s “blackboard” paintings).⁴⁶ As Nietzsche puts it extravagantly, apropos of Apollonian man, “the artistic power of all nature here reveals itself in the tremors of drunkenness.”⁴⁷ In the language of flowers, the Apollonian subject—dreamer, shaper, artist—falls under the influence, like the drunken bee of Twombly’s liquid paint-world.

8.8. Cy Twombly, Untitled, 2007. Gaeta. Acrylic, wax crayon, colored pencil on wooden panel, 99¼ × 217¼ in. (252 × 552 cm). Collection Udo and Annette Brandhorst. © Cy Twombly Foundation. © BPK, Berlin.

II. LIVRE-MAGE

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being No-one’s sleep under so many lids.

—RAINER MARIA RILKE, “Epitaph” (1925)48

Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Epitaph” puts pure contrariety at the heart of the rose, along with the invocatory “O” of lyric utterance: “Oh Orpheus sings!” (“O Orpheus singt!”).⁴⁹ The penultimate painting of Twombly’s five-part Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair (1985) has Rilke’s epitaph as its head-inscription, reappearing in the Rose series in the Brandhorst Museum.⁵⁰ In Analysis of the Rose, house paint drenches the wooden panels with milky pallor, while smudges of oil, oilstick, and crayon create passages of roseate color. Its pale evocations and protean forms—mood-painting rather than flower-painting—bear a fleeting relation to the imagistic flower-form of the previous year’s Proteus (1984).51 More than two decades later, Twombly’s five-part series, The Rose (2008), returns to Rilke with the series of French poems written at the end of his life during his Paris stay of 1925–26. Blazing, emblazoned, and hieratic against their flat, pale turquoise ground, these huge yellow, red, and dark purple roses sustain the trajectory of the Blossoms series, dripping with boldly overlaid acrylic brushwork, startling colors, and loose, untidy arabesques.

The 2008 Rose paintings dwarf human scale with their oversized trios of brilliantly colored acrylic flowers; each luscious explosion of paint is titled “Rose” or “The Rose.”⁵² Despite their scale, the five-part series repays the reader’s close attention: stanzas by Rilke are prominently inscribed on each part. Twombly’s enlarged, shaky, two-colored scrawl doubles and shadows the yellow and red of the progressively darkening panels—except for the last, where a somber purple takes over, and the red writing of “Rose” is greened as if by the effects of semidarkness. In line with Twombly’s interest in temporality rather than narrative, the series moves nonsequentially from the brilliant colors of noonday and the flaming of dawn to the deepening darkness of night. Color suggests different moods or times of day, each panel accumulating depth and richness from its neighbors. Twombly’s Rose paintings can be read as a meditation on Rilke’s lyric sequence, and particularly on its underlying trope: seeing with one’s eyes closed. In The Ground of the Image, Jean-Luc Nancy asks: “Does the text make an image of the text it interprets? Does the image become a text on the text that it, too, interprets?”53 Faced with the “blinding brilliance” of the image, he submits: “One believes the image with one’s eyes closed.” And yet, an accompanying sense of disquietude and even melancholy persists: “eyes wide open, one sees it sink into the night, into which one would like to follow it.”⁵⁴

The sixth sonnet in Part II of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, “Rose, you majesty” (“Rose, du thronende”), calls the Rose “the full, the numberless flower, / the inexhaustible countenance” (“die volle zahllose Blume, / der unerschöpfliche Gegenstand”).⁵⁵ Rilke’s rose is freighted with metaphysical questions that include the coexistence of presence and absence.⁵⁶ Written at Muzot, the sonnet anticipates his later series of French lyrics, Les Roses, in its imagery of light, nakedness, and fragrance. Rilke had been struck by the haiku of which he found French translations in Paul-Louis Couchoud’s Sages et Poètes d’Asie (1919), and it has been suggested that they influenced his later French poems.⁵⁷ In a 1925 letter to Sophy Giauque, he writes of the exquisite achievement of placing an imaginary object in interior space so that it can be fully realized, citing the example of ancient haiku (“ces minuscules unités poétiques”).⁵⁸ Rilke’s 1925 epitaph imitates this miniaturized poetic unity in its appropriation of an imaginary object for its (and the poet’s) elusive interiority. The double quatrain form of his lyric cycle, Les Roses (1927)—linked by Rilke’s symbolic equation of rose and poem—aims at the same compression. Writing of Rilke’s Modernism, Judith Ryan describes Rilke’s lyrics as containing “two contradictory gestures.” On one hand, they “summon the reader to feel directly addressed,” while on the other “they deny access to what they imply is an impenetrable secret at their heart.”⁵⁹ What she calls the “appellative structure” of Rilke’s lyrics combines apostrophe with an invitation to read them as expressions of the poet’s hidden inner life. Although filled with the reader’s projected associations, Rilke’s abstraction forms part of a language we have not yet mastered; a rose-poem simultaneously invites and bars entry into its interior. Uttering the same contradictory call, Twombly’s language of roses confronts the viewer with a self-enclosed image: that of the artist-poet.

The multiple meanings of Rilke’s 1925 epitaph include plays on homonyms such as Lidern/Lieder (“eyelids”/“songs”) and his own name, Rainer/reiner (“pure”). Ryan’s account lists the clutch of Modernist associations that are also present in Les Roses: “the mystic rose as a symbol for poetry, the poem as essentially contradictory, the invisible author beneath a decorative surface, absence as more significant than presence, privileging of the mind’s eye over the bodily eye.”⁶⁰ These themes are signaled by the inscriptions that occupy the right-hand margins of Twombly’s Rose paintings, gesturing toward what can’t be seen or easily unpacked, including the invisible painter and the paradoxically privileged inner eye. The poem that addresses the rose resembles it because it too can’t be completely translated; each requires immersion in darkness and possesses a secret language. In the lyric quatrains of Rilke’s French cycle, the rose has many appearances and performs many roles. In the end it has to be let go of—with the passing season and with life itself. But each rose achieves immortality in the plurality of the roses to which it gives rise. To the theme of absence one might add that of unity in multiplicity: Twombly’s roses are trios.

The five parts of Twombly’s The Rose are linked by a silent dialogue with Rilke’s lyrics. Drawing on one of the unpublished draft overflows from Rilke’s original cycle, the brilliant opening panel announces the familiar rose, “so cherished by our customs” (“à nos habitudes si chère”), as an imaginary rose of memories and dreams (Part I). (See figure 8.9.)

Rose

so cherished by our

customs

dedicated to our memories

become almost imaginary

for being so linked

to our

dreams

Rilke ⁶¹

Twombly’s flaming roses invoke the ancient eglantine of Rilke’s note on “Rose, you majesty” (“red and yellow, in the colors that appear in flame”).⁶² His written text, doubling red and yellow, brings the two colors closest together on the word “dreams.” Dreaming and seeing coincide. But this first panel also contains a subliminal, interlinear text in yellow: “Rose / Flower of all flowers / Petal over petal / do you feel / our own palpable / pleasures.” The double text opens a question about the noncoincidence of seeing and reading.

Roughly adapted from Rilke’s original, these shadow-lines reappear on the fourth part of The Rose. The replication of “petal over petal” (“pétale contre pétale”) creates a composite rose, at once darkened eye and eyelid (Part IV). (See figure 8.10.) The rose’s capacity for self-reproduction and pleasure—pleasure that is “palpable,” self-caressing and sensed—allows it to replicate both its own pleasure and ours:

flower of all flowers

Petal over petal

do you feel our own

palpable

pleasure

Rilke ⁶³

8.9. Cy Twombly, The Rose (Part I), 2008. Gaeta. Acrylic on four wooden panels, 99¼ × 291⅜ in. (252 × 740 cm). Gagosian Gallery. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Image courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

8.10. Cy Twombly, The Rose (Part IV), 2008. Gaeta. Acrylic on four wooden panels, 99¼ × 291⅜ in. (252 × 740 cm). Gagosian Gallery. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Image courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

The rose’s “palpable pleasure” (“nos palpables bonheurs”) is that of touch—the autoerotic touch of petal against petal, as the fourth panel darkens to luxuriant purple. The textual emphasis on synaesthesia (haptic and visual pleasure combined) suggests some of the ways in which text and image coincide and then draw apart: touch and seeing, as Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible reminds us, never entirely coincide.64 If Twombly’s rose-paintings invoke multiple, synaesthetic forms of pleasure—color, fragrance, touch—they also evoke the ways in which such pleasures necessarily miss each other; they are contre in the sense of overlapping, touching on one another without being merged. The gorgeous purple heart of each rose opens to the viewer’s gaze only to reveal the velvety heart of darkness. Twombly photographed the image in a series of mysterious close-ups of The Rose (Part IV).⁶⁵

How do image and text (together and differently) touch both themselves and the viewer? The noncoincidence of image and text—adequate to themselves but not to each other—is played out across the Rose paintings. The text of the brilliant second part, its yellow roses overlaid dripping with flame, transforms the self-reproducing heart of vision into a passionately self-mirroring flower, in love with its own scent. Rilke’s rose is a dazzling solo performer—abundant, self-mirroring, swirling, and teeming (Part II). (See figure 8.11.)

All alone

O abundant flower

You create your own Space

You stare at yourself in a mirror

of odor

Your fragrance swirls

more petals

around your teeming

Calyx

Rilke ⁶⁶

The doubling of Rilke’s text in the yellow and crimson of the quotation is incomplete: key words in yellow produce a telegraphic, subliminal message, creating a concentrated version of the crimson poem edited down to its bare essentials: “odor,” “swirls,” “petals.” The self-generating rose—petals swirling around the cup of its “calyx” (emphasized by Twombly’s dripping scarlet autograph, as if the calyx were the panel’s true subject)—suggests an image continually giving birth to replicas of itself (“more petals”).

The mingling of day and darkness in Twombly’s Rose series measures the passing of time. It seems to imply that even greater intensity lies in what can’t actually be seen (the rose of memory and dream) than in the illuminated mid-day or afternoon rose. The rose is not just a symbol, but also a flower that gathers and concentrates light, yet at the same time it shuts out light, creating a center hidden from view. The lineation of the third and pivotal panel—whose roses combine the purple of night with a single brilliant rose of dawn—sets out Rilke’s quatrain so as to emphasize the words “dream” and “dawn” (Part IIII):

8.11. Cy Twombly, The Rose (Part II), detail, 2008. Gaeta. Acrylic on four wooden panels, 99¼ × 291⅜ in. (252 × 740 cm). Gagosian Gallery. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Image courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Overflowing with your

dream

Flower with so many

others deep inside

Wet as one who weeps—

You lean against the

dawn

Rilke 67

(Again there is a subliminal yellow version: “Overflowing / dream / flower with so many / deep inside … dawn / dawn”). Rilke’s opening line—“Overflowing with your dream” (“De ton rêve trop plein”)—suggests a rose brimming over, unable to contain the night’s residue of dew and tears. The moist and weeping image of the dream-rose generates other roses, other dreams, leaning with dewdrenched weight against the incandescent rose of dawn. (See figure 8.12.) Rilke’s epitaph associates the rose with the closed eyelids of the sleeper—“No-one’s sleep under so many / lids” (“Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel / Lidern”)—as if the petals of the rose were identical with, or doubled by, the eyelid that encloses its dream-seeing.

In a tour de force of interpretation, William Gass has shown how the rose of Rilke’s epitaph is anticipated by an earlier poem, “The Bowl of Roses” (1909), where the rose “open[s] like an eye, / to show more lids beneath, each closed … to quench / an inner fire of visionary power.”⁶⁸ Draining the sky of “each drop of darkness,” rose-petals emit a “concentrated glow.”⁶⁹ Could there be a better image for the artist’s eye? The somber richness of the final panel of The Rose (Part V), with its dark green and velvety purple flowers, marks the culmination of the series. (See figure 8.13.) The first roses is overpainted, as if by darkness; the third blooms with a strange green glow and a chocolate scrawl. In the text, green and monochromatic purple convey the absence of light:

Infinitely at ease

despite so many risks

with no variation

of her usual routine

the blooming Rose

is the omen of her

immeasurable

endurance

Rilke⁷⁰

8.12. Cy Twombly, The Rose (Part III), detail, 2008, Gaeta. Acrylic on plywood, 99¼ × 291⅜ in. (252 × 740 cm). Gagosian Gallery. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Image courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

8.13. Cy Twombly, The Rose (Part V), 2008, Gaeta. Acrylic on four wooden panels, 99¼ × 291⅜ in. (252 × 740 cm). Gagosian Gallery. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Image courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Rilke’s lines ask “Do we know how she survives?” (“Sait-on combien elle vit?”—how many times she lives). Self-multiplication is the secret of the rose’s survival, a single day the measure of infinity: “one of her days / is all the earth and all / of our infinity” (“Un de ses jours … c’est toute la terre, toute / l’infinité d’ici”).71 The serial rose both marks time and survives it by embracing time: “her immeasurable / endurance” (“son innombrable durée”). Rilke’s word, durée, makes duration last the length of an endless night.

Rilke’s sequence carries within it a sustained metaphor that links the image of the rose-poem not only to sight and unseeing, but also to the lines of poems and to the pages of a multi-foliate, half-open book.⁷² This is the Magus-book, or Livre-mage—the book-enchanter or enchanted book—that can only be read with one’s eyes shut: the image of the book as (i)mage, or “mage” (enchanter), without either an “i” or “I.” Rilke’s Livre-mage forms the subtext (one might call it the dream-text) of Twombly’s visual poem: thousands of eyelids superimposed on one’s own (VIII), a sung phrase (XVI), music for the eyes (XVII), and—a delicious conceit—a book that requires a hundred butterfly readers: “We’d have to be a hundred butterflies / to read all those pages of yours” (“Il faudrait être cent papillons / pour lire toutes tes pages,” XVIII).⁷³ Rilke’s multilayered rose is a private dictionary whose pages one longs to reread, or an epistolary rose-poem to a lover (“Moi, j’aime les roses epistolaires,” XVIII). It is also the late or belated rose, symbol of life at the point of division (“partages,” XXVII). Elsewhere, in Vergers (“Orchard”) (1924–25), Rilke makes the rose an image for the incommensurability of word and thing—the conundrum of poetry itself: “We arrange and we compose / words in so many ways, / but when will we find ways / to be equal to the rose?” (“comment arriverait-on / à égaler une rose?”).74

The inability of language to be equal to the rose is the riddle at the heart of Twombly’s Rose paintings. Text and image form pages of the same book, at once facing each other and facing away. Twombly’s loosely outlined multifoliate roses, with their tangles of color laid on color, evoke not so much petal lying over or against (contre) petal, as the rich churning of memory and desire—habitudes that are linked not only to memory and imagination, but to living: the habitus of a life-form, or way of life; at once a way of wielding the brush and the habits of love and work that shape daily life. The interleaving of word, color, and image—Rilke’s unseeing roseate eye—makes text and image near neighbors, yet never quite touching, like rose and dawn; the same yet nonidentical. In the words of Jean-Luc Nancy, “every image and every text is potentially, and respectively, text and image for itself … I read a text and here is an image, or indeed, here is yet more text.” Like the self-replicating swirl of the rose, textual imaging teems with potentiality and impropriety: “no text has its proper image, no image its proper text.”⁷⁵ The (reading and seeing) subject’s willing surrender to this improper relation of image and text is the tribute exacted by the profusion of Twombly’s roses.

CODA: “I SAY: A FLOWER!”

Twombly’s visual poetry of peony and rose invokes formal and conceptual grammars that allude to both reading and writing. Reflecting on Twombly’s late style (alterstyle), Robert Pincus-Witten sees the abstraction of writing itself as the mark of Twombly’s artistic origins in, and struggle with, Abstract Expressionism.76 Yet Twombly’s handwriting is anything but abstract in its sensuous appeal. A steady refrain in both laudatory and critical accounts of Twombly’s work emphasizes his attempt to recapture the materiality of primal marking, whether made by children or by cultures whose art is continuous with primitive modes like scraping and incising. On the face of it, there is sizable gap between the elegant calligraphic performance of Twombly’s late flower paintings and the rebarbative North African paintings of the early 1950s, the cryptic inscriptions of the early 1960s, or the austere loops of his blackboard paintings. But in their own luxuriant fashion, these huge flower paintings are continuous with his interest in biomorphic shapes and with his experiments with writing—an enriched return to the beginning with new ease and mastery, known to the masters of haiku as kotan.⁷⁷ Twombly’s late style recovers the very beginnings of shape-making, with all its powers of evocation and invocation, while continuing to interrogate the inexhaustible relation of image and text—distinct, yet propped on one another.

The poetic texts of the Blossoms and Rose series raise the perennial question of why a painter chooses to quote one verse fragment rather than another; why a particular line or a passage captures the ear or imagination and finds its way onto canvas or paper. What is the corpus of poetic recollection, or the workshop of selection? And how should we read the proliferation of literary reference in Twombly’s late work? Apropos of the peony paintings, Pincus-Witten asserts: “Twombly does not illustrate: he demonstrates.”⁷⁸ Yet the opposition between “illustration” and “demonstration” may not be so clear-cut. Apropos of the oscillation of text and image, Nancy writes that they at once attract and repel each other: “Each is monstrative and monstrous to the other.” The (de)monstration is agonistic, as text and image draw together and apart: “There is always a tension.”⁷⁹ The tension extends to poetry’s invocation of voice. What Rilke, with a touch of religiosity, calls “a supple vocable / by the text of things enclosed” (“le souple vocable / encadré par le texte des choses”) also describes the characteristic form of utterance in Twombly’s work, where “the text of things enclosed” makes them eloquent despite themselves.⁸⁰ Lyric invocation is “framed” (encadré), yet overflows its purely semantic function—an action represented by the pure “O” of poetry, or the exhaled “Ah” of the samurai warrior as he lays down his arms.

In The Ground of the Image, Nancy uses the figure of the Latin os, or “mouth,” hence face, from which are derived not only the related osculum, or “kiss,” but also the word oscillum, meaning a small mouth. A secondary, ingeniously deployed meaning includes “a small mask of Bacchus hung in the vines as a scarecrow” whose movement in the wind gave rise to the word “oscillation.”⁸¹ The oscillation of mouth and eye, speech and vision, gives Nancy his explicatory figure of the “Oscillator,” as opposed to the “Distinct,” or what he calls “the distinct mark of sense, its trait.” This nonsensory mark is not, he writes, “embodied” in the sense of a pencil stroke [trait]; yet at the same time it is “not incorporeal like signification.” At once impalpable and distinct, it is the mark of separation or distance; but for Nancy it is not without (that is, outside) “sense.” Text and image oscillate in relation to one another; each calls on and tries to illuminate the other in a form of endless ekphrasis—“A phrase image and a sight of sense.”82 The figure of touch that undergirds Nancy’s phenomenological understanding of this chiastic relation insists on noncoincidence (no kissing!).⁸³ Using a bibliographical analogy, he writes that text and image oscillate “in a paper-thin space: recto the text, verso the image, or vice (image)-versa (text).”⁸⁴ Is it an accident that the “ground” of both image and text should be figured by Nancy as a paper (-thin) surface?—like one of Matisse’s illustrated books, or Rilke’s enchanted Livre-mage.

Working within a Modernist poetics of absence, Nancy invokes the flower of Mallarmé’s “Crisis of Verse” (“palpable as the impalpable in this saying of the saying”): “I say: a flower! And, out of the oblivion where my voice casts every contour, insofar as it is something other than the known bloom, there arises, musically, the very idea in its mellowness; in other words, what is absent from every bouquet.”⁸⁵ The lyric vocable is always missing from the Mallarméan bouquet. Nancy asks why avant-garde writing and painting, from Apollinaire’s Calligrammes to Kurt Schwitters’s collages, have been obsessed with words in painting—“with the painting of words, with painted words and with writing as painting.” He locates in their obsession the artist’s perennial desire to find ways of inscribing the “sense” of words within painting itself: “Sense deposited right at the painting’s skin.”⁸⁶ Punningly, he refers to this skin as “already brushed against [affleure] in language,” its texture marked by the untranslatable grain of English, French, German, or Italian: “If I say ‘flower,’ fleur, Blume, fior, I do not say the same flower and yet I also do not say the flower itself (the flower ‘as flower’).”⁸⁷ In an evocatively sensuous phrase, words become “petals stuck to the tongue,” at once tasted and resistant to translation. Yet with this diminution of signification comes a paradoxical increase in sensation. Writing in painting pays tribute to the desire for the word “flower” to be rendered efflorescent and luminous on the skin of the painting. Twombly’s lapse and ours—like the samurai warrior’s “AH!”—lies in falling for the palpable pleasure of the flower, the sense of the word as it sticks to the tongue: peony, rose.