“Cy Twombly: A Retrospective”
at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
September 25, 1994–January 10, 1995
There are one or two works in the Twombly show at MOMA that make
you feel there’s some point in your being there. In a few paintings
dating from about 1959, Twombly’s art attains an atmospheric warmth
and elegance of touch that is undeniably pleasing. Yet these
paintings are never more than elegant, a serious drawback in an
artist with such grand ambitions. Throughout most of the rest of the
exhibition, Twombly’s paintings are empty, repetitive, and boring.
How strange to find an artist who, although interested in
expressing himself in the sparest, most epigrammatic fashion,
requires acres of canvas and installations with museum ceilings in
order to do so.
I don’t buy the common interpretation that sees Twombly as a kind of
hinge between Jackson Pollock’s gestural expressionism and the
graffiti artists of the 1980s. The link to Pollock is obvious, of
course, never more so than in the celebrated “blackboard” paintings,
with their rows of looping white lines against a charcoal-gray
ground. Those paintings represent a domestication of Abstract
Expressionism, however, a draining-out of its energy
that leaves us with something tame, decorative, and dead.
Rather than an early-blooming graffiti artist, then, Twombly seems
more a species of Conceptual artist. If there’s a link to be made
to another artist, I think it is to the Josef Beuys of the
drawings. In the work of both, the