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Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly

Author(s): Kirk Varnedoe


Source: MoMA, No. 18 (Autumn - Winter, 1994), pp. 18-23
Published by: The Museum of Modern Art
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4381274
Accessed: 08-08-2015 06:52 UTC

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KIRKVARNEDOE

Genius is only childhood recoveredwillfully.-Charles Baudelaire


"This is just scribbles-my kid could do it." That kind of remark,
often directed at Cy Twombly's paintings and drawings, echoes one
of the classic protests against modern art. It asserts that what is being
touted as specially talented is in fact only something commonplace,
which requires no skill and therefore merits no respect. It also implies
a resentment that some self-appointed elite should try to foist onto
others their pretentions about this "art," which the simple
exercise of common sense can seemingly expose as readily as The
Emperor's New Clothes.
The gap between such indignation and the often rapturouswrit-

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

valuation of something previously ignored or scorned.


Admiration for children's art is a prime case in point. Modern
ings of Twombly's admirers may seem too broad for any dialogue, artists have repeatedly drawn on "outsider"areas, from tribal masks
beyond the dismissive slur of philistinism that attacked cognoscenti to comic books, that were considered beyond the pale of high culture.
often throw back at their doubters. That derision gets us nowhere, But the specific attraction to the childlike also connects to a broader
though, and scants some basic truths that might at least provide a tide in Western cultural life, stemming from the Romantic cult of
starting point for discussion. Its advocates know, after all, that childhood as a separate state of grace, more closely and uncorruptedTwombly's art doeshave something to do with scribbles and children's
art-though in a more complex and indirect way than the mockers
imagine, via the validating precedents of a lot of "classic"and widely
loved modern art. And certainly if Twombly's work did not in some
sense "deserve"this kind of attack-if it did not pose a real challenge
to accepted norms of beauty and craft, and have the capacity to provoke the uninitiated-it would not belong as it does to the modern
tradition, nor hold the interest it does for its supporters.
It's also correct, here and elsewhere, that modern art does thrive
on a kind of clubbiness that brings together in pocketed associations
people who value one form or another of "difficult"or esoteric cul-

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"

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Acakmy. i955. House paint, pencil, and pastel on canvas. 6' 3y-"x 7' ioW'. Private collection. Photo: Jochen Littkemann.

ideogramsthat reflectedthe universal,innatelanguageof the mind,


not yet enslavedto the mereimitationof appearancesthat European
adultshad become trainedto honor. Henri Matisse,VasilyKandinsky, Paul Klee and many others studied children'srenderingswith
greatinterest,and found encouragementfor theirvariousrejections
of academicmethods of depiction.Then the Surrealists(with clues
fromSigmundFreudand others)linkedchildhoodexperienceto the
irrationalenergiesof the adultlibido;andtheylookedto graffitiespeciallyas evidencethat youthfulmarkingand drawingventedprimal
aggressions.This latter taste drew a very particularconnection
betweenuntutoredart and the immemorialbasesof society'sdiscontents: in the Surrealistromanceof untutoredsign-makingon public
walls, liberationwas linked to criminality,creativityto destruction,
and beautyto the idea of the wound or defacement.
Twomblywas heir to all of this, as to many other permissions
accordedby the moderntradition.He thus begansurein the knowledge that art of greatpowerand complexitycould be built up from
elementalmarksandragged,accidentaleffects-slashes of paint,even

skeins of dripping-that were in themselvesapparentlyartlessand


without order.He understoodthat the recurrentchallengewas not
simply to adopt differentforms of such seeming disorder,but to
weavefromthem new languagesthatwereadequateto respondto the
subtletiesof a personaltemperament,and sufficientto evokean original set of metaphorsabout modernexperience.This is what he set
mannershe developed,in severaldifout to do with the "child-like"
ferentways,as his artevolved.
In the early I95os, Twombly inheriteda part of Surrealism's
courtshipof the unconsciousthroughJacksonPollock'sfree-form
with paint;but he alsoabsorbedsomeof the other,"vandal"
"writing"
aspect,filteredthroughJeanDubuffet'semulationof scarredsurfaces
and brutally"naive"figuration.In the worksTwomblymade in the
mid-i95os,such as Academy,some of the scale and abstractenergies
of New YorkSchool paintinglike Pollock'sor Willem de Kooning's
were forcedtogetherwith some of the intentionallygritty,down-atthe-heels look of Europeanart like Dubuffet's. Where Abstract
gesturalbrushstrokeshad been boldly decisive and
Expressionism's
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EmpireofF1ora~~~~~~
1961. Oilcrayon,
and pencilon canvaa.6' 6Y~~~~~~~~~~~~~~"
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MarxCollection,Berlin.Photo:Jochen
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fluid, these thinned-out layersof pencilworkwere more scratchily


nervousand episodic;and where New YorkSchool paintingshad
often been seen as the cathartic expulsions of existentialangst,
Twombly'sseemedmoreto evokea cumulativediaryof freneticworry.Scramblinghis pencilthroughskimmedlayersof paint,Twombly
turned the heavy-muscleddramaof his elders'style into a manner
whose looserformalorganizationand peculiarcombinationof compulsivenessand hesitationseemed"child-like,"not in any cute figurations or playful simplicity, but in thickets of markings that
suggestedthe conflicted aimlessnessof accreteddefacements.Far
from logic and simplifiedclarity,the juvenileelement evokedwas
that of defilementand messiness;and the weddingof that energyto
the high-strungnervousnessof his spiderylinearitygaveTwombly's
picturestheirsingular-and to many amateursof New YorkSchool
painting,singularlytransgressive
and unpalatable-personality.
In part, the willfulscruffinessof a paintinglike Academyseems
to reflectTwombly'spersonalaffinity(firstexpressedin his attention
to corrodedartifactsof prehistory)for surfacesscarredby time;yet it
alsoconnectsto the feel for a contemporaryurbanenvironmentthen

being exploredin the mixed-mediacombine works of Twombly's


of Abstract
close friend Robert Rauschenberg.The "calligraphy"
Expressionismhad seemedto speakof big-citydynamismsublimated withinheroicindividualgestures,but both Rauschenberg's
collage
imageryand Twombly'spalimpsestsof more prosaic"writing"conjuredsomethinglessallusiveand moreconcrete,groundedin a social
vision pardyredolentof their notablyunheroicsurroundingsin an
old loft districtof lowerManhattan.
Only about five yearslater,however,in pictureslike Empireof
Floraof I96I, gesturalexpressionism
camebackinto Twomblyswork.
Insteadof scumbledand scratchedwalls, a bright,explosivelyaerated "landscape"
spacewasevoked;anda fleshyarrayof hues,with evocationsof carnalliquidity,replacedthe drierruminationsof spindly
pencilwork.If Academyhassome of the shaggy,bohemianairof beatgenerationurbanjazzculturein the laterI950s, EmpireofFlorahas the
moreexpansiveandexuberantcolorfulnessthatwe associatewith the
Popmomentin Americanpainting.The pictureis, however,markedly European,not only in its title (evokingantiquemythology)and in
its evidence of Twombly'slove for expressionistpainterssuch as

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Untitled. x970. Oil, housepaint,and crayonon canvas.II'

4"

X I3'

3".

Privatecollection;on loan tO The Menil Collection,Houston. Photo:JochenLittkemann.

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Chaim Soutine and FrancisBacon, but in its particularsensuality.


Twomblyhad moved to Rome in 1957, and his exposureto what he
has calledthe "infantile"indulgencegiven to sensorylife and instinct
in Mediterranean
culturewasa powerfullyliberatingforcein his adoption of new huesand a methodof paintingdirectlywith his hands.
The fusion betweenattractionto this "infantile"freshnessand
emotive freedomon the one hand, and a love of the ancient,deeply
layeredcultureof the Mediterraneanregion (includingEgypt and
North Africa)on the other, is centralto Twombly'saesthetic.It has
governedworksas largeand expressiveas Empireof Flora,but also a
seriesof makeshiftsculpturesthat recallthe tiny vesselsand vehicles
often found in ancient burials. Winter Passage,LUXOR(I985), which
has its parallels in the homemade toy boats that the artist collects as
well as in miniaturized Egyptian tomb furniture, recalls Twombly's
affinity for the whitewashed and sun-bleached surfaces of Mediterranean architecture. It also specifically echoes the felukas and Nile
barges of Egypt, which served Pharaonic culture as a symbol for the
voyage from life to the land of the dead. Evoking (as Freud did more
pointedly) a congruence between universal childhood experience and
the origin of mythologies, this rustic object looks back to Twombly's
early admiration for the scrap-assemblages of Kurt Schwitters, and
folds into itself a complex set of associations of youthful fantasy overlaid with the patina of age, and spontaneous play linked to immemorial meditations on mortality.
The qualities of childhood present in a huge Untitled work of
are, however, of a entirely different order. This thinly painted
grey-and-white canvas and others like it have been called "blackboards"for obvious reasons. Their repetitive, run-on markings don't
I970

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-

European'sinquiry: "Twombly!"But he's trying to killpainting." Yet


as so often in modern art's past, what initially appears as nihilistic
subversion can turn out to be an act of renewal and even admiration.
Twombly in fact admires Pollock tremendously; and just as Cezanne
sought to "re-do Poussin after nature," so Twombly and countless
other modern artists have held that the most powerful hommage to
such an admired model is not to follow or mime the style, but to reinvent the art'sperceived values in new terms. Opposed to the desiccation and distortion that academicism imposes in trying to emulate
past achievements, such modern artists have sought to recover the
founding spirit of past art through personal intuition, and recast it
with unfamiliar forms and emphases that will make it more fully alive
and newly challenging in the present.
Metamorphosisis a key idea for Twombly-the effortless shifting
of one thing into another and the dreamily fluid transgression of normal physical limits that he finds so frequently evoked in classical
mythology. Translationis also a basic principle-the reimagination of
poetry or art in other languages, such as Pope's recasting of Homer's
Iliad in metered English verse (which in turn inspired a series of
Twombly paintings on the Trojan war). In both these ideas, preserving spirit while drastically changing form is axiomatic; and
Twombly's own manner can be seen in this light, as a means of recovering with a new edge some of the fundamentally challenging precepts of earliermodern art-especially those imperatives to authentic
engagement with the act of making that required subverting accepted notions of finish, skill, and control, and encouraged an uncensored response to the promptings of personal energies. It is in this
endeavor of unexpected translation, too, that Twombly so often
reimagines the antique in terms of the juvenile. Listening not only to
the lessons of his modern predecessors, but to an inner conviction
that past art of all ages speaks to shared human concerns, he seeks to
avoid mere nostalgia, and to obliterate any opposition between the
life experience encapsulated in the high tradition and the visceral
experience of the immediate present.
One could say that any child could make a drawing like
Twombly only in the same sense that any fool with a hammer could
fragment sculptures as Rodin did, or any house painter could spatter
paint as well as Pollock. In none of these cases would it be true. In
each case the art lies not so much in the finesse of the individual
mark, but in the orchestration of a previously uncodified set of per-

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-

paintings had created.


Certainly the founding Director of The Museum of Modern
Art, Alfred Barr, would have been deeply surprised to think that a
future curator might mention Twombly and Pollock in the same

might seem wholly common and without discipline, the poetry as it


is written out whole in paint or crayon or chalk or pastel, in each
work as in the sweep of the career,is in fact inimitably personal in its
inflections, and challengingly rich in the range of (distinctly adult)

breath;in the late I950S, Barrrespondedincredulouslyto a visiting

emotions it can hold in paradoxical coexistence. His singular fusion

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Wnter! Passage LUXOR.


1985.Wood, nails,and paint.21X"x 4Is". Privatecollection;on loan to the Kunsthaus,Zurich.Photo

courtesyKunsthaus,Zurich.

of rawand refinedelementsis such,in fact,thatit has beencriticized


almost as often for "decadent"over-eleganceas for childishcrudeness. Both assessmentsdirect us to somethingof significance,but
only taken together do they begin to point toward some fuller
accountingof the particularpersonality,andpoeticpleasures,thisart
can hold. Twomblyhas refinedthe choreography
of his "simple"elements-the raggededge of contour,the shiftingpaceand tensionof
run-on line-into a signaturestyle that pressescontinuallyon the
surprisinglyfine borderthat separatesthe most sophisticatedand
dandyishtouch from the crudedaub,and links truculenttoughness
on one side to tremblingtendernesson the other.Grimydefilement
and pristinerestraint,blunt aggressionand fragilevulnerability,epic
rhetoricand confidingintimacy,liberatedindulgenceand strangling
nervousness,casualvernacularand deft erudition,orgiasticfantasy

and measuring analysis-these unlikely pairings flirt through


Twombly'sworkin permanentlyunsettledardor.
Cy Twombly:A Retrospective,on viewthroughJanuaryio, I995, was
organizedby Kirk Varnedoe,ChiefCurator,Departmentof Painting
and Sculpture.The exhibitionis a surveyof the completerangeof
Twombly's
workand includeslittle-knownworksfrom the I950S as well
as keypieces,someneverbeforeseenin the UnitedStates.
Cy Twombly:A Retrospectiveisgenerously
supportedbyLilyAuchincloss.Additionalsupport
hasbeenprovidedbyLufthansaGermanAirlines.
An indemnity
fbr theexhibitionhasbeengrantedbytheFederalCouncil
on theArtsand theHumanities.Theaccompanying
publicationis made
possiblebya generous
Emily
Fisher
Landau.
giftfrom
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