Those whose intention is to mock Cy Twombly when they toss him into the “my child could do that” category of artists maybe forget that Picasso once confessed that “it took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”.
And it would be quite some child who created art as beguiling, as defiant and as exuberant as that produced over six decades by Twombly. While thick with significance, his canvases and drawings can yet seem perversely meaningless. His daubs are difficult to decode. Those signature loops of white against a dark background that seem so instinctive and simple evoke complex emotions. They tease and taunt with their poetically, precisely crafted langour. They discomfit even those who reckon they know their way around postwar art. As Roland Barthes put it: “He wants to create an effect, but at the same time he couldn’t care less.”
As a result, although Twombly was routinely bracketed with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in America’s grand trio of Post-Abstract Expressionists, he was tricky to slot neatly into the movements, fashions and trends of postwar art.
His reputation was kept barely at a simmer through the Pop Art and Minimalism era of the 1960s, coming to a boil fairly late in his career as the world warmed to an artist whose scribbles and scratches it found subversive, erotically lyrical, elementally human and vulgar, spiked with quirky colours and with allusions to Homer, Eliot and Rilke. There may be nods to Pollock, de Kooning and Dubuffet, but Twombly was a man out on his own.
He said that he “couldn’t care less” about being acclaimed as an artist. “It’s something I don’t think about,” Twombly said in 1994 in a rare interview. “If it happens, it happens.” It happened.