The wobbly humanity of Cy Twombly

When encountering cy Twombly’s monumental nine-piece polyptych “Untitled” (1971), I thought of the dark, dominant monolith that appears early in Stanley Kubrick’s film from 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey. The object is of such an unprecedented sublimity that it stores the human species. Many in Twombly’s Cohort Canonic American artists may have welcomed the comparison: Pollock, with his Hurtling Machismo; Rothko, who wanted viewers to stand in front of his paintings and sobbing. But I quickly revised that impression. Charcoal gray and almost eight and half a foot long, each panel only shares its scale and shade with the monolith. These works are clearly earthly efforts that present the human hand in all its striving, with its trembling, curvily blows of what Kalkekens seem to be sloping diagonally as a hail shower caught in a gust of wind. Ghostly, striped penumbra’s of blurred white buzzing under the blows and occasionally overtaking – one can imagine twombly -blotting that previously failed attempts mumbles with the fleshy side of his hand, muttering against himself, It is not entirely true, it is not entirely true. It is a suitable centerpiece for an exhibition of paintings, working on paper and a sculpture of the giant of the post -war American painting. Also on display are crucial work organizations from 1968 to ’90, some of which were borrowed from the Twombly family and have never been shown publicly.

The “Blackboard” paintings in this Senate all without title and composed of paint based on paper and was on paper or canvas, and date from 1968 to ’71-conversation but never completely English script: the winding loops of “s” S; A brand that looks like the word “start”; The italics, non -closed infinite symbols of italics, small letters “f” s. Trying to find out how Twombly hit these works is annoying: I spent my minutes try to determine whether one passage was a blank canvas or another layer of almost white that he had rubbed it up on other markings before he again marked. Indeed, these happy linguistic slips between the denotations of the words “mark” and “remark” seems to be exactly the type of non-symbol/symbol diaron that Twombly is interested: these works seem to be ready at the abyss of when a symbol becomes itself. They feel like obsessive, ruminants, the mental visual instantiation of pacing in a room-in fact, Twombly made it to sit on the shoulders of a friend who walked back and forth before the canvas and they induce a similar feeling in one Viewer. If you would follow the movement of the eyes of a viewer about these works, I suspect that the result would look a lot like one of them.

Given his preoccupation with the transition between a figure and its linguistic meaning, I am surprised that Twombly did not accept the Chinese character, because so many Euro-American artists who are interested in shape or language for him, including Vincent van Gogh and Ezra have done Pound, especially in parts of the exhibition dedicated to his distortions. The first of these is a gallery related to Italy, where the artist spent most of his life. “Condottiero Testa di Cozzo” (1987) (an astute viewer can distract the title because he is scribbled in huge, uncertain letters over the upper third part of the painting) is a highlight. It refers to the circa 1570 portrait of Titianus of the Grand Duke of Alba, and you can almost distinguish a mirror image from the titular subject in a smeared flood of thick spots, including a clear vermillion that you just get in the face. “Paesaggio” (1986), one in a series of paintings made between 1981 and ’86 in Bassano in Teverina, Italy, is another; It almost looks like he was staring at the dark surface of one of the paintings of Monet’s Waterlelies and found the groan depths of a Gymnast.

Not all of these Bassano paintings are just as attractive – at least, they didn’t get me under the spell, my gaze around and around and around as the running tracks of his blackboard paintings. A friend who accompanied me noted that a trio of titllless paintings in one quatrefoil Form felt a bit naked and I tend to agree. A series of paper works that he made about his travels through Russia, Afghanistan and Central -Asia exhibited for the first time in the Biennial in 1980 and reunited for the first time in 40 years, felt uneven. Of the 14 ordered parts, I loved both works entitled “Opium Poppy” (1980) and a called “Harem” (1980) (although I did not necessarily love these titles …). I especially appreciated the surprising result of the bright red red of the latter in both white paint and the challenged titular word. But the title map, “five -day waiting time at Jiayuguan” (1980), in which those words are written out in watercolor, the “five” immersed with a Roman figure, fell flat for me. These feel as experiments, and they don’t always succeed. But I love them for precisely that reason – for their emphasis on the wobbly human hand, literally and metaphorical, and as proof that someone like the big Cy Twomble was also someone like me.

Cy Twombly Continue in Gagosian Gallery (980 Madison Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) until March 22. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.