Washed in White Paint
The Sculptures of Cy Twombly
“The reality of whiteness may exist in the duality of sensation (as the multiple anxiety of desire and fear). Whiteness can be the classic state of the intellect, or a neo-romantic area of remembrance - or as the symbolic whiteness of Mallarmé” — Cy Twombly
Cy Twombly (1928-2011), who grew up around Washington and Lee University, in Lexington, Virginia, was in many ways very French; an intellectual, fascinated with the nature of language, personal anecdotes of love, sex and death permeate his oeuvre. Post-modern French philosophers, such as Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) analysed the structures of “signification”, and Twombly’s use of classic myth, and the close relationship between the painted mark and poetic language in his paintings, explore parallels between the marks painters make and the rudiments of written language. Twombly said he turned to the poets “because I can find a condensed phrase … My greatest one to use was Rilke […]. I always look for the phrase”. Generally, myth is transmitted by word of mouth, but Twombly’s paintings seem to transform spoken words into images. Living in Rome in the 1970s, approaching 50, Twombly was experiencing a sense of intellectual isolation. He had grown tired of the eternal city, and for that matter, the Italian way of life. Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) picked up trash and found objects on the streets of New York which he would take back to his studio and incorporate into his art; Twombly kept complaining that Italy had no such interesting detritus. After more than a decade hiatus from sculpture, Twombly found it was a way out of the impasse. He developed, in parallel to his paintings, a cohesive body of three-dimensional work largely from ordinary materials like wood and string; including an homage to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire in the form of a tower of white cardboard boxes. Twombly’s sculptures were a pivotal part of his practice, but for decades he showed them to no one, keeping many of the originals of the bronze and resin casts in his private collection. That said, the artists sculptures were not highly sought-after during his lifetime: “I love my sculptures, and I was lucky I had them for 50 years because no one would look at them,” Twombly told Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate museums, in 2007.
Although he was a contemporary of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Twombly directed his focus toward ancient, classical, and modern poetic tradition; a form of visual poetry, he is referred to as a “poet” far more often than a “sculptor”, or even a “painter-sculptor”. Since the cave paintings of the Palaeolithic era to the hieroglyphics of Paul Klee (1879-1940), the idea of writing as an element of abstract painting has been widely experimented. The very word poet derives from the Greek for a “maker of things” — that is, things verbal, sculptural, or otherwise. Picasso said that “sculpture is the best comment a painter can make on his paintings”. Twombly’s sculptures distill key aspects of his paintings: the dense, abstract figurations, found elements, mythic references and weathered, corroded and aged surfaces. His sculptures are an extension of his work on canvas and paper, tackling the same iconographic themes. Where Twombly’s known fascination with the mythologies and graffiti of the ancient world shows through the titles and mark-making techniques in his paintings, this show of sculptures makes allusions in three dimensions. Twombly has at times left viewers confused, with his references to semi-forgotten myths; allusions to ancient battles appear in the form of chariot-like sculptures made from simple, primitive parts — thin discs for wheels held together with wooden sticks. Batrachomyomachia (1998), which resembles fallen columns, references a mock epic poem on a “battle of frogs and mice” attributed to an anonymous Hellenistic poet that parodies Homer’s Iliad. The squat, layered Herat (1998), a stack of three diminishing geometric blocks, was inspired by the citadel built by Alexander of Macedon and damaged by Soviet bombs. Twombly made his sculptures from found objects, such as plaster, wood, and iron, as well as objects he habitually used and handled in his studio, such as crates, palm leaves, artificial flowers, nails, door knobs, wooden blocks, willow canes, pieces of string and paper. While in Jupiter Island, Florida, in 1992, Twombly dug in the sand on the beach to form a mould for the plaster base of an untitled sculpture.
“A Time to Remain, A Time to Go Away” (1998–2001) by Cy Twombly © Cy Twombly Foundation. Courtesy Gagosian
“Untitled (Humpty Dumpty)” (2004) by Cy Twombly © Cy Twombly Foundation. Courtesy Gagosian
From 1946 onward, Twombly created 148 sculptures in total, though they were rarely exhibited before the 1997 publication of the first volume of his catalogue raisonné. In 1979, Twombly began casting some of his assemblages in bronze, coating them in an artificial patina of plaster mixed with sand, or covering them in layers of white paint in order to mimic the texture and finish of antiquity. “White paint is my marble,” he once said. The first iteration of Untitled (2002), one of a series of assemblages cast in bronze, was made in 1953, soon after his return to New York following his travels around Italy and North Africa with Robert Rauschenberg in the early 1950s. Like other works from this period, this sculpture makes reference to the various charms and tombstones, among other objects, the artist encountered in his travels. Consisting of bundled sticks, it recalls the spiked fetishes and totemic assemblages of Rome’s Luigi Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography. By casting this work in bronze in 2002, Twombly literally and figuratively substantiated the small sculpture into something like an archaeological treasure recovered from the past. During the 1950s Twombly developed a consistent approach to sculptural form, constructing assemblages from wood and other ordinary found materials, which he usually painted white and attached to a base. The artist would refer to this raw, early work as his “African things”. The word fetish is often used to describe them, often without historical or anthropological particularity, used simply a catch-all term for objects that read as “primitive”, to denote its material and morphological assonances (discourses of the so-called primitivist fetish had persisted through earlier modernisms to flourish again at mid-century, everywhere from surrealist-inflected painting to poetic convictions about the glyphic figure). The word itself stretches back etymologically to the Latin facticius, our “factitious”, an artificial or a made thing not so unlike the Greek for poem. Often modest in scale, they embody all the gestural vocabulary of his painterly practice — the scribbled pencilling, the smudges and smears — evoking narratives from antiquity and fragments of literature and poetry; a fetish-bundle of sticks for e.g., reads simultaneously as a set of mute pipes evoking the Greek god Pan. Untitled (Funerary Box for a Lime Green Python) (1954), comprising two pairs of bound palm leaf fans on a rectangular base, suggests a kind of ancient monument or reliquary.
“Chariot of Triumph” (1990–1998) by Cy Twombly © Cy Twombly Foundation. Courtesy Gagosian
Many of Twombly's sculptures are coated in white paint, a binding element that serves to unifify and neutralise the heterogeneous effects of their assembled materials, fusing the newly formed object into a coherent whole. Twombly has spoken about the whiteness of his two-dimensional work in terms of the draughtsman’s or writer’s empty page. In discussion of his three-dimensional work, however, he refers to white paint as his “marble”, thus emphasizing his desire to evoke the traditions of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sculpture while also subverting marble’s classical connotation of perfection with his roughly smeared surfaces. Often diminutive in scale, they nevertheless embody his artistic language of handwritten glyphs and symbols, evoking classical Greek and Roman myths and fragments of literature and poetry. Twombly's allusive use of the ancient and classical past in his art is a familiar theme, but he did not allow himself to be weighed down by the minutiae of art historical discourse, rather he lived the ancient traditions with a renewed feeling. He had a profound aesthetic sensitivity toward ancient or time-worn surfaces, and his signature language of linear signs and an affinity for white, was attuned to the ruins of ancient Rome. Many of Twombly’s three-dimensional works, like his most sculptural paintings, which heave with textured impasto, look bent on breaking their own forms, as in A Time to Remain, A Time to Go Away (1998–2001) — a soaring, curving, upended boat-like form in plywood, plaster and wire. He once said he was “very happy to have the boat motif” in his work, not only for its autobiographical relevance — as a child, he spent his summers with his parents by the sea in Gloucester, Massachusetts — but also because he liked the “references to crossing over” associated with it.
Some of Twombly's sculptures allude to architecture, geometry, and the hieratical figures in Egyptian or Mesopotamian art, as in the rectangular pedestals and circular structures of Untitled (1977) and Chariot of Triumph (1990–98). Untitled (In Memory of Álvaro de Campos) (2002), comprises a rounded wooden trough stacked with a rectangular box, an elongated mound, and a vertical wooden board-all accumulating into a small, plaster-spattered, tomb-like form, at once elegiac and elemental. Thickly daubed in white, the sculpture bears the prosaic inscription “In Memory of Álvaro de Campos” scrawled in the graffiti-like hand so typical of Twombly's drawings and paintings, and below it, the words “to feel all things in all ways”, drawn from a poem by Álvaro de Campos (one of the fictitious “heteronyms”, or alter egos, of the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa). Twombly’s sculptures provide a way in which we can think about words away from the two-dimensional realm of the page and in relation, instead, to the three-dimensional realm of the object or thing. In this context, the inscription suggests the legibility of the sculpture itself, and positions the three-dimensional object as a surface to be worked on. Other white monuments of loss include Thermopylae, Epitath and Untitled (In Memory of Babur) (2000), which recalls the form of a monument to the first Mughal emperor Babur in Kabul.
“Untitled” (2009) by Cy Twombly © Cy Twombly Foundation. Courtesy Gagosian
Most of Twombly’s works, found-object constructions, assemblages of studio or other everyday materials, transformed by varied slips or washes of paint, chime with what he called the “white, white, white” of the Mediterranean light that he saw each morning from his home in Gaeta, Italy, the small coastal fort north of Naples where he lived much of each year. Also integral is the American impetus for the sculptures: recollections of the white painted vernacular of his childhood in Lexington (which he was keen to point out had “more columns … than in all ancient Rome and Greece”), as well as New York’s urban detritus. Writing on his fascination with white paint in the exhibition catalogue for “Cycles and Seasons”, his 2008 show at Tate Modern, Twombly noted: “I think, psychologically, it’s like there’s no beginning or end.” The artists body of sculpture is representative of both sides of the Twombly enigma: the errant schoolboy, inclined to construct with wood, paint, cloth and nails a toy wagon, stripped down, painted off-white, calling it Chariot of Triumph (1990–98); but also the erudite classicist, his toy wagon, candidly figurative, becoming a wheeled chariot of victory in the great cycle about the Egyptian warrior king, Coronation of Sesostris (2000).
Twombly’s sculptures have remained a spectral presences at retrospectives, which have focused largely on his celebrated paintings. Neither Clement Greenberg nor high modernist critic, Michael Fried, wrote about Twombly’s sculpture, nor was the artist included in William Seitz’s 1961 The Art of Assemblage exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art. The Tate in 2008 and the Pompidou in 2016 included the driftwood choreographed into approximations of a prow and stern Winter’s Passage Luxor (1985) and By the Ionian Sea (1988), but dedicated exhibitions have been few and far between. Gagosian’s Cy Twombly Sculpture was the first UK show devoted to these enthralling, splendidly fresh, laconic yet exquisitely precise, poetically rhythmic works. Twombly occupies a unique and bizarre place in the story of modern art; his sculptures are mythological poems, playful, witty and at times even very very strange. “I wouldn’t be surprised if one day, way down the line,” remarked the playwright Edward Albee, “Cy Twombly will be known as the great sculptor who also did some amazing paintings.”