UNTITLED, 2007

I can’t say that I knew Cy Twombly, but we had a memorable conversation. It was in 2008, a year he devoted to painting his Roses, which followed his Peonies. Twombly told me that my writing revealed truths of his art that he had never himself perceived. In turn, my intuition told me that comments of this type are double-edged.

Twombly may have been implying that I had rendered his graphic scribbles with an analytical precision ill-suited to the sensations they recorded, as well as to the multiplicity of changing sensations the scribbles themselves projected. To be sure, the closure we associate with precision had never been the aim of my writing. But perhaps I had gone too far even in my limited way. I hadn’t sufficiently acknowledged the barriers to rational prose when applied to the range of gesture emerging from Twombly’s hand—everything from cursive scrawls and numeric ciphers that are legible, to loosely geometric configurations that seem to map out obscure plans of action or assess some unfathomable expanse, to deposits of raw paint-matter that bear little resemblance to anything other than their own material substance. Untitled (1961) is a relatively early example of the artist’s graphic diversity, a veritable catalogue of markings that feel at once intensely concentrated and fully spontaneous, as if the product of a mind and a body entranced. Some elements convey the immediacy of marks made with the fingers, dispensing with the mediation of a stylus or brush. On this point, Twombly stated that “painting a picture is a very short thing if it goes well.”

Twombly’s art incorporates its own guides—poetic textual fragments, inscribed names of mythological personages, and evocative titles—all of which offer entry into interpretation. The six grandly scaled Peony paintings that he exhibited in 2007 allude to Japanese haiku. One of the works includes this classic text (as Twombly rendered it): “AH! The Peonies / For which / Kusunoki / Took off his Armour.” The evocativeness of the original poetry has been altered, perhaps enhanced, through Twombly’s irregular orthography, always a visual factor as much as it is lexical. He added “u” to “Armor—or, as the spacing of his letters suggests, he added “r” to Amour—connoting love, along with the beauty of the wild peony, as the cause of the warrior’s action. “Took off his Armour” might signify the relaxation of bellicosity as the warrior confronts nature’s aesthetic and his own emotions; it might signify his moral recognition of higher human values, his resignation as he yields his expertise at combat to those who excel at poetry or painting, those for whom the aesthetic has become their life. Despite numerous possibilities, interpretation of a Twombly painting isn’t a prerequisite to its sensory, emotional, and even intellectual comprehension. Twombly uses diagrammatic images (the “peonies”) as well as language and the act of writing, including his own signature, in the way that painters of abstraction manipulate color and shape in a direct appeal to the human sense of self. The look of his textuality is so visually compelling that, our gaze transfixed, we hesitate to proceed to read.

So, too, the peony itself when subjected to Twombly’s gesture. His image offers no refinements to description. Its dense redness evokes primordial material substance rather than botanical articulation. Nature un-evolves in Twombly’s renderings (it is not a devolution, but an evolution inverted, from greater to lesser differentiation.) The vertical drippings that flow from his peonies are consistent with the physicality of his practice, not its representational precision. Rather than representing fibrous stalks rising up, the verticals index the entropic force of gravity pulling down. (For a closely related effect within a less representational context, see Twombly’s Untitled (Bacchus) [2005].) Even when Twombly’s topic is energized, joyous, natural beauty, the mood of his art becomes melancholic as we recognize the residual resistance of matter to human will. He need not speak or write of this resistance—it remains evident through all his effort. We discern it in the muted, slightly blurred Polaroid prints of peonies that he converted to photographic editions in 1980. These flowers, though not faded, are melancholic, perhaps elegiac. When in possession of a thing of sensory value, we mourn its future loss.

Twombly’s art visualizes change, but often as reversion. In a statement of 2000, he justified the transitory, transformational character of his art; rather than “painting an object,” he said, “it’s like [the picture was] coming through the nervous system… It’s not described, it’s happening… The line is the feeling.” With feeling elevated, objective representation is reduced. At the time of Twombly’s statement, his like-minded friend Robert Rauschenberg alluded to his own search for the productive tension that accompanies situations of cognitive instability: “Being correct is never the point… Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.” A concept misapplied, or merely misstated, can yield art.

In our brief conversation, Twombly may have been suggesting that I was too “correct” in the way I analyzed his attitude, obliterating his art with a critical overlay of words that were meaningful but insufficiently felt. Perhaps I had been inattentive to the way he allowed his gestures to slip back into a more primordial condition of articulate disarticulation—a discourse, yes, but one of the emotions. According to Heiner Bastian, who organized Twombly’s catalogue raisonné, the artist “understood scripture, text, quotations and words themselves both as forms, or as allusions to visual forms, and as emotional symbolic images: he also maintained that a quotation could determine or influence the direction of a painting and that individual words or poetic quotations could instigate an interactive dialogue during the painting process.” A haiku forms the substance of a peony, while the feel of cursive peony-marking interprets the haiku. To be more direct in stating the situation: Twombly’s cursive line reads the haiku. Note those areas of Untitled where the looping edges of incipient peony-forms resemble the loops of cursive lettering.

I might argue that Twombly’s position is quintessentially artistic. But it’s surely not “correct” in relation to our standard systems of linguistic expression and pictorial representation. Consider the common base of knowledge that underlies our social practice. To promote clarity in thought—to disambiguate our communication for the sake of social harmony and mutual understanding—is to realize that experiences of the mind ought to be distinguished from experiences of the body. Objective description and rational argumentation result from thinking, not feeling. Yet the simple act of drawing a line to depict an object may demand more of an exercise of feeling than of thinking. This division of psychosomatic labor affects the human being who both thinks and feels, confining the exercise of those human faculties to a schizophrenic state. When we concentrate mentally on performing an action, our movements lose efficiency and grace; when we identify emotionally with a situation, we risk clouding our process of thought, our application of reason. From my university education, I recall being introduced to a phenomenological cliché, a relevant bit of folk wisdom: if you think of the pencil, you can’t draw the line.

Not so Cy Twombly. His art demonstrates the limitations of our prevailing wisdom, whether academic or folk. When creating his art, he would think of the pencil and draw the line, while representing a figure and simultaneously embracing its concept—and all this without one element distracting from or diminishing another. Painting, Twombly said, is “fusing of ideas, fusing of feelings”—to which he added an astounding metaphor, “fusing projected on atmosphere.” Was there no solid ground to his art? He drew lines, traced figures, deposited stains, and spread smears—all in acts that seem to integrate feeling and thought. His markings generate images from their associated poetic verbalization; his inscriptions amount to fragments of poetic language that become felt images.

Note how Twombly’s line is almost always wavering, quivering, arching, slanted, or bent, as if pulled from the orthogonal by an impulse from within its action—or from an outside force, ever present, like currents or waves in the air that generate the atmosphere to which he alluded, an emotional mood that transcends the individual being (I think of the “cry” that runs through nature in the painting of Edvard Munch, a comparably evocative artist). Even in his early descriptive notes devoted to fetish objects seen in North Africa in 1953, Twombly’s line assumes this curious sense of pulse or pull, a reference to sensations beyond those of the fixed forms of the objects he renders.

In his Peonies, Twombly’s line accelerates into centripetal concentration. I find his details fascinating, as they represent various stages of the appearance and disappearance of the graphic actions that figure generic peonies. Some forms have been overpainted to the point of becoming ghostly. In Untitled, a number of peonies, saturated with their redness, appear against a pale green ground, producing a chromatic effect both acidic and sweet. Just to the right of center, between two full blossoms, lies a linear sketch of the same—oil crayon skimmed over and pressed into the hard panel ground, offering little sense of the compacted, radiating structure of peony petals. It would be difficult to analyze why this curvilinear maze becomes such an affecting graphic figure; I wouldn’t recognize it as peony-like without the context of its more complete neighbors. More oval than round, it resembles a cartoonish human head rather than a flower. This involuted tangle connotes the boundless energy of an expanding galaxy or a moment of nuclear fusion (Twombly’s “fusing of ideas, fusing of feelings” assumes an analogous power—in man, not nature). In the upper right of Untitled are two more “sketches” or figures-in-progress, one broadly brushed in appearance, the other more linear. They hover at the edge of representation and abstraction, each with the potential to function evocatively as the other. Both are peonies emergent.

It may help to shift the concept in question from peony blossom to peony blossoming. It’s tempting, of course, to follow with Twombly’s late career as a blossoming. The title of the exhibition in which he first showed his six large panel paintings of peonies was Blooming: A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things (2007). With the gerund, we enter an unstable realm of “happening”: “It’s happening,” Twombly had said, “the line is the feeling.” His position lends itself to more of a philosophical statement, which nevertheless retains his lyricism, his poetry: “We define the present in an arbitrary manner as what is, whereas the present is simply what is happening” (Henri Bergson, 1896). “What is” is our concept, our teaching, our standard. “What is happening” is what we actually feel in the moment. As in haiku, Twombly set concepts in motion. He let them happen so they could be felt.