Cy Twombly is Painting Loss (Part 2)

Twombly wasn't really painting loss in Hero and Leandro, or was he? What he did was taking a poem based on Greek mythology and wove a different narrative for it. It was one of loss and sorrow. But nonetheless a far removed one all the same.

Yet, a couple of rooms before Hero and Leandro - and about ten years earlier - he was painting some of his own loss in Nini's Paintings. A series of five huge, 300x260cm tall, canvasses, in response to the sudden death of his gallerist's wife, Nini Pirandello, in 1971.

Cy Twombly, Nini's Painting, 1971, 261x300cm
Oil-based house paint, oil paint, wax crayon and lead pencil on canvas
Kunstmuseum Basel

They are all there is in the room, apart from a bench. They are all part of the same. Tall, wide, repetitive: scrawl upon scrawl upon scrawl on beige canvas. Unlike many of his other series, these five are so similar - it is difficult to discern which preceded the others. There is no numbering, no development. They are all simply Nini's Paintings. And that is important: it doesn't matter. It's melancholic sadness that repeats itself, over and over and over again. Not just across the canvasses, but in layer upon layer.

Much of the commentary on Twombly's work process remarked on such layering right throughout his work - the white housepaint that is used so frequently to undo what was before, e.g. also in the Poems to the Sea, or the centrality of the whites in Hero and Leandro, notably in Hero's drowning. It's gone and still it is there. Joane Eardley's work process was also driven by such layering: of paint, of dirt, of collage - in fact, any collagist actively builds this into her work process: to build up history, narratives, stories through such layering.

In many ways it's probably too neat an image - one of the things I like about collage or mixed media is the fusing of different layers, how they become something new, one, many, rather than staying separate.

Well, and that kind of goes back to mourning. The catalogue's opening paragraph on Nini's Paintings refers to Freud's 1915 essay on Mourning and Melancholia*. How, with any loss, mourning goes through all the previous ones to finally arrive at the most recent. [Well, and his argument is that melancholia occurs if that isn't happening right].

So, there is a layering, recalling, rewriting and perhaps fusing of past experiences. Working the way through the various rounds, experiences of loss... scrawling a name, different names over pages, over and over, whitening them out, adding new ones on top. And at some point the painting is done. Well, done in the sense that it can remain as what it is. And one can look at it.

It's funny. I read most of this when I was back home. But I remember the sheer physicality of those paintings in that room. Me sitting on that bench in the corner, they all around. It was about acknowledging the presence of something important.

Paintings I like? No, they are not pretty nor nice. They are important.


* - Hm, I tried to find a full text version of the text, but didn't; here's a summary of some sort:

Hero and Leandro

aka... Cy Twombly is Painting Loss (Part 1)

Ok - I've been carrying this one around with me for a good while, so I reckon it's time to put it on paper. There were two rooms - or rather two series - in the Twombly exhibition that didn 't leave me.

For this first one, I briefly contemplated filing it under my Paintings I like tag. But that doesn't capture it. It doesn't get to it at all. There is something terribly wrong with LIKE in this context. It's far more complicated than LIKING implicates. Liking is niceness; prettiness; oh, that is kinda cutesy.

Well, there is something really aesthetically appealling about the series of four paintings - or rather: pieces of art - that constitute Hero and Leandro. Just looking at them from a distance. A wave, viridian and a dark magenta crimson, rising up on the left...... calming, calming further until it is white nothingness - thick textured off-whites layered atop of each other to the far right of the three pieces in oil. Large paintings they are. Intricately layered in oil with the white and the wave and the green and the dark red. Violent calm it seems to shoutwhisper.

Then. Tucked on as an afterthought a small piece of paper with a scrawled line:

"He's gone, up bubbles all his amorous breath"

- a line from Christopher Marlowe's poem which gave the inspiration.

That's the art.

Cy Twombly, Hero and Leandro, 1981-84
Part 1 168,x200cm,
Part 2 156x205cm
Part 3 156x205cm
Oil, crayon and graphite on canvas
Part 4 42x30cm
Graphite on graph paper
Cy Twombly Gallery, The Menil Collection Houston

The concept? It's so obvious that it sticks; unsticks the beauty of the piece wholeheartedly. Leandro - the lover of Hero - crosses the sea to visit his loved one. One night he drowns. In despair over his death, Hero drowns herself in sorrow and the sea. Do you get it? He dies in a bloody, green wave of powerful mediterranean water. She in contrast simply vanishes into white nothingness, demurely, obediently, the nothingness engulfs her sorrow. I kind of see Kate Blanchet in all her white Lord of the Ring otherworldliness walking into a calm lake, all glowy and sacrificial.

A painting I like? No. Nobody drowns in waves of blood, unless you've been hit over the head beforehand. Your lungs just fill with water, no blood, just no air. And then a body is washed ashore within a couple of hours and not only in three weeks, if one's lucky. I know that bit, and I wish I wouldn't. But that isn't the point. How boringly does he think he can go and construct gender? Yawn... active/ passive, red blood/ white sorrow... C'mon Cy! I'm sure you could have done something a bit better on this one! It's not even an old piece, you did this in the early 1980s! No?!

It's just a shame that it's an awfully attractive - beautiful - series of paintings. Liking? ... far too nice for it.

A throw of the dice...

... all across a white page. Remember Twombly's mention of Mallarme's thoughts on the role of a blank page as significant for what's written on it?

Have a look here - at Mallarme's A throw of a dice will never abolish chance (1897). It's about space; negative space; blank, white pages; nothingness; and a lingering doubt that after everything

On buoancy

... and some more on Twombly and his favoured poems. Thinking about it, it's probably unsurprising that there'll be plenty of Rilke thrown into the paintings of sea, shores, water, seasons, love and loss.

Rainer Maria Rilke. I heard (as mp3s) some of his autumn poems last autumn and then fragments of his work, notably his Letters to a young poet and more poetry came flying from various sides. Part of that was an exploration of how much easier music and visual art is for expressing stuff that otherwise - in written verse - ends up just tediously soppy.

So, joyfully on to the tediously soppy now - thank you, Cy!

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1987
Bronze, painted with white oil-based paint

There were three fragments of poetry that caught my eye in the exhibition. First, there was a line, scrawled on the bottom of a bronze sculpture representing a broomstick and various other bits.

"And we who had always
thought of happiness
climbing, would feel
the emotion that almost
startles when happiness falls".

It falls down the stick, doesn't it? Prosaicly, slowly, drib drab like treacle.

Secondly, another line from Rilke

"and in the pond
broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks
as if standing on
fishes"

It's written across the opening panel of Untitled (A painting in nine parts). "As if standing on fishes." I liked the idea a lot. How comforting, I felt it was. - It was about buoyancy: finding the balancing point of where one would stop sinking any deeper. After all: the fishes would prevent one from sinking. I smiled to myself, went back to read it again towards the end of the exhibition. Bob, bobbing along as you float, halfway in water.

Cy Twombly, Untitled (A Painting in Nine Parts) Untitled, Part I, 1988 Oil, water-based paint,...., 191x109cm

Then, at home, in the catalogue I would read the German line of it which goes

"Und in den abgebrochenen Tag der
Teiche sinke, wie auf Fischen stehend,
mein Gefühl"

I stumbled, sunk. Deeper and deeper. Was there not going to be any buoancy after all? I talked it through with M., she couldn't see anything buoyant in the English verses at all. So I gathered that I must have optimistically misread it. It's a line from the poem Fortschritt - progress. Progress, kind of turned on its head if you think about happiness drib drabbing rather than moving upward. Funny that.

wieder rauscht mein tiefes Leben lauter, als ob es jetzt in breitern Ufern ginge. Immer verwandter werden mir die Dinge und alle Bilder immer angeschauter. Dem Namenlosen fühl ich mich vertrauter: Mit meinen Sinnen, wie mit Vögeln, reiche ich in die windigen Himmel aus der Eiche, und in den abgebrochnen Tag der Teiche sinkt, wie auf Fischen stehend, mein Gefühl.

And an English version is here:

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
I seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,and in
the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

(translation by Robert Bly)

And, with this I'm sure it's about buoancy, about stretching upwards and downwards. Standing on fishes must be a good thing, I'm sure.

Now, the third fragment? That's for Hero and Leander.

And I'm sure there must be plenty to be said about such elevation of heroic emotion, a single being cast out in the world, their loneliness and abandon to their inner worlds, emotions and all that. Just as well as I'm sure there's plenty of literary criticism, social sciencey stuff and feminism to take it apart.

Rightfully so, I suppose. And still... all the same, I'm looking forward to the next time I'll be standing on fishes... well... if I keep misreading it as something good, that is ;)

The virgin, the beautiful, and bright today

... so goes the opening line of Stéphane Mallarmé's The Swan.

I stumbled across it in some of the notes on Cy Twombly's earlier works in the Cycles and Season's exhibition at the Tate Modern. Stumbled across a whole series of white square drawings in pencil with splatters, splashes and markings of white oil paint. Each of them has a horizon line, drawn with a ruler, just a couple of inches below the top.

Cy Twombly Poems to the Sea i-vi (1959)
oil, graphite, wax crayon on paper
approx. 33x31cm
Dia Art Foundation

The series is entitled Poems to the Sea. I thought of Joan Eardley and of Edwin Morgan's poem to Eardley and Floodtide (see post here).

On the surface Twombly's drawings and Eardley's seascapes don't seem to have all that much in common. One is white - classically white - sparse, restrained with some pencil marks and the faintest hint of colour. Well, for the other one - as Morgan says

All becomes art, and as if it was incensed
By the painter’s brush the sea growls up
In a white flood.
The artist’s cup
Is overflowing with what she dares
To think is joy, caught unawares

[Sorry, but you need to get the link to Morgan reading the poem again, too: here]

So, a whole wall full of these poems to the sea. The commentary remarks the influence of Mallarmé's poetry on these drawings. Notably: a play with words, connotations and sounds.

And it poses the question that if meaning is created by the relationship between words and sounds then surely the blank page on which these sit must be part of that relationality also. So, here the white, blank page for Mallarmé and Twombly.

I went hunting for the poem. Found it in French alongside some discussions on the difficulty of translation.

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujoud'hui
Stéphane Mallarmé

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujoud'hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d'aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui!
Un cygne d'autrefois se souvient que c'est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n'avoir pas chanté la region ou vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l'ennui.
Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie
Par l'espace infligée a l'oiseau qui le nie,
Mais non l'horreur du sol où le plumage est pris.
Fantôme qu'à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne,
Il s'immobilise au songe froid de mépris
Que vêt parmi l'exil inutile le Cygne.

And then there's the playfulness of so many translations and renderings, to keep the symbolism, to keep the obscurity, the creation of meaning and sounds and rhyme? John Holcombe's review of existing translations into English (see his site here), and various further attempts are intriguing: it is the play with words, meanings and translations which is fascinating in everyday use alone, but just leaves me speechless when it comes to poetry.

The virgin, the beautiful and bright today.
For us can the rapture of a wing-blow break
Beneath this frosted and forgotten lake
Snowy cascades of flights not fled away?

In past magnificence of another day
The swan remembers its freedom, but cannot make
A song from surroundings but only take
On the sterile dull glint of the winter's stay.

Out of white agony the whole neck lies
In a space inflicted that the bird denies.

Cold and immobile in its feathered being
Not in horror of earth but to brightness gone:
A dream wrapped in scorn, and a phantom, seeing
How futile is exile for the Swan.

(Translation John Holcombe
http://www.textetc.com/workshop/wt-mallarme-1.html)

Cy Twombly Poems to the Sea xix-xxiv (1959)
oil, graphite, wax crayon on paper
approx. 33x31cm
Dia Art Foundation

So. The first post on Twombly is on whiteness, relationality and poetry.

It's the use of words, meanings - almost graffiti-like - that intrigued me in the exhibition. There'll be more on that. There's also some ideas on the playfulness of words and meanings in different languages - how it cannot be translated and the fact that purity of one language is just restrictive.

And having been in Germany for six weeks brought back some of those wonderfully idiosyncratic German words that I had already forgotten about. Like pingelig, Ausgleichssport, Dienstliches, sich so schoen vorfreuen, and many more... funny, can't think of them anymore already...

So many discussions I had on this over the past few months, quite a bit of writing done too. And Twombly's work picks up on that. I think there's something to be done around this. Let me think and write - and possibly eventually paint - on this a little bit more. Soon...

But there were more things in the exhibition. In fact, there were so many things that I did buy the catalogue. Only to add five more kilos to my other 25kgs of luggage to take with me on the final leg back to Glasgow. But that's been well worth it. Let me show you. Soon...