Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
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tural activity. But it's the very self-appointed nature of those "elites,"
and their diversity, that recommends them: membership has always
required enthusiasm, curiosity and commitment to debate more than
exclusive credentials such as formal education or wealth. By devaluing what we know in order to change what we like (and vice versa),
new art like Twombly's has in fact typically shunned established elites
in order to form fresh constellations of adepts. These recurrent inversions have discomfited many who thought themselves believers in
previous revolutions; and one of the most discomfiting kinds of
change has been not the invention of something new, but the new
ly in touch with the wellsprings of nature. The parable of The Emperor's New Clothes itself, which affirms the superiority of the innocent
eye, is a part of this outlook: only a child, as yet untrained to accept
the sophisticated lies that blind adults, can see (and speak) the truth.
Artists in this century have recurrently found that children's visual
representations-with their economical simplifications, their disregard for accepted canons of proportion, and their untrammeled
elements of fantasy-spoke with just such exemplary candor.
Ideas of what truth they told, however, have shifted repeatedly.
Early in the century, modern artists thought children's stick-figures
and other simplified renderings were "logical" and "rational"
18
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Acakmy. i955. House paint, pencil, and pastel on canvas. 6' 3y-"x 7' ioW'. Private collection. Photo: Jochen Littkemann.
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suggest playroom freedoms but schoolroom tasks (such as basic exercises in proto-penmanship). Much cooler emotionally than the
works of the early sixties, these paintings seem as parallel to the aftermath of Minimalism as the I96I paintings were to the advent of Pop;
and we might well link them in spirit to a broad range of reductively concrete experimental music of the period. Most of the grey canvases were painted in New York (where Twombly had a studio in the
late I96os);
and they were especially well-received by American critics, who saw them as acts of a kind of penitential self-discipline in
which the artist renounced the "artier"splash of his earlier European
color paintings in order to submit to analytic cerebration and systematic devotion to labor. Ironically, it was these reductive, colorlessly linear works that also eventually led Twombly most directly
back toward the expansive ambitions of earlierAbstract Expression-
ism; the huge Untitled canvas, with its turbulent coils of all-over
energy, was painted near the time Twombly saw a large room of Pollock's poured paintings in a I970 exhibition, and testifies to his desire
to reinvent in new terms the fields of epic lyricism Pollock's poured
sonal "rules"about where to act and where not, how far to go and
when to stop, in such a way that the cumulative courtship of seeming chaos defines an original, hybrid kind of order,which in turn illuminates a complex sense of human experience not voiced or left
marginal in previous art. While any isolated, individual mark or sign
in Twombly's art-a scrawled phallus, a stumbling line of writing-
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courtesyKunsthaus,Zurich.
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