cy twombly

blooming: a scattering of blossoms and other things

 peonies/kusunoki
thoughts on cy twombly’s
“a scattering of blossoms and other things”

robert pincus-witten
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Previewed at the Collection Lambert in Avignon this past summer of 2007, “A Scattering of
Blossoms and Other Things” was conceived with a particular range of architectural referents
in mind—panneaux, trumeaux, cartouches, portal panels, and such like—pictorial formats
conventional to the décor of the hôtel particulier, the typical eighteenth-century town house,
in this case the Hôtel de Caumont (which houses the Lambert collection): balanced order,
symmetrical wings, a centering pedimented temple front preceded by a walled courtyard.
This note of confident decorum is crucial. Above all, Twombly is the artist of the genius loci,
the spirit of the place, the painter most stirred by its lingering ghosts and fading tastes.
True, that Avignon once had been the seat of the fifteenth-century popes in captivity would
be more than enough allure to satisfy the artist’s appetite for historicized locales in which
to exhibit or, better still, to paint.
Two sources are conflated in what I will now call the Peony Paintings upon whose
vigorous surfaces were “scattered” the “blossoms” in question, as if in celebration of the
arrival of an eminent personage. One source is Enlightenment classicism, that French
revival in humane scale of the sweetness of life attributed to a mythical golden age and
exemplified by the Hôtel de Caumont itself. Early on, Watteau, then Pater and Lancret
and subsequently Boucher and Fragonard miraculously transported Parnassian gods and
goddesses (masquerading as silk-clad Arcadian shepherds and shepherdesses) to a newly
conceived Cythera. Their luxurious garments, furniture, and rooms are the refurbished
clothing, utensils, and spaces of an exquisitely restaged antiquity that epitomizes ancien
régime taste. Lives lived as art. This antique fervor has always touched Twombly, markedly
so since he took up residence in Rome in 1957. The other source of the Peony Paintings is
Japonisme. More of that in a moment.
Notably, the Peony Paintings no longer exemplify the graffiti abstractions on which the
artist’s huge reputation rests. Those earlier works explored a broad array of abstract
pattern, diacritical ejaculation, and idiographic markings recalling the scrawls found on
latrine walls, telephone booths, disfigured advertisements, and political posters. In marked
contrast, Twombly’s works of recent years have abandoned that overstressed, vagrant range
of association, becoming, once more, fluent and direct Abstract Expressionist paintings.
This most recent group of works is composed of six large horizontal panels, each comprising
six wooden vertical units abutted laterally; two large vertical canvases of vibrant loop
variations; and two smaller vertical works on canvas flanking the entry portal that present
themselves as coded missives addressed to the visitor. Such a blunt list, of course, does no
justice to the range of these new paintings, which daringly conflate French decorative art
and architecture, Japanese history and poetry, German Romanticism, the élan vital of
Twombly’s own original Abstract Expressionism, and the human implications that these
florid paintings hold for the artist as he punches eighty. In all, a potent brew.
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