Cy Twombly

The end of the 1950’s saw Cy Twombly’s paintings resound with the most delicate and vulnerable graphology. Any sense of ‘action’ imbued in his almost fragile delineation carried the same psychological and aesthetic properties as those imbued in the automatist drawings of the Surrealists. Soft, gentle lines fluttered across waves of cream, beige or gray grounds, serving to electrify, in the most discrete fashion, the neutral ‘space’ of Twombly’s canvas. This tender and tenacious treatment of line served Twombly’s overall compositional flux, manifested as a web-like mesh that captured a series of personal thoughts and memories. As such, these canvases became vehicles of autobiography; visualizing the artist’s own experiences –real and dreamlike- in the fluctuations of his sophisticated line and sensitive ground. This meandering, intentionally erratic graphology here becomes the visual language with which he interprets one of the second millenium’s most dazzling works of art – Raphael’s School of Athens. Raphael’s extraordinary portrait of the great Greek masters of philosophy is translated by Twombly in his typically florid delineation, juxtaposed with contrasting moments of painterliness. The present work is one of a number of ‘Studies’ he made for his own final painting, The School of Athens from 1961. Twombly has remained faithful to the overall compositional design of Raphael’s painting, which effectively echoes the shape of a semi-circle. Twombly’s marks reach a visual crescendo at the center of the canvas, much in the same way Raphael’s do, given his focused presentation of Plato as the composition’s vanishing point. The present work, thus sees Twombly, once again, immersed in the world of history and myth and this imposing canvas reveals his extraordinary visual momentum, that betrays a voracious appetite for history and for painting.