Ep. 67 - Cy Twombly's Second Voyage to Italy (Second Version), 1962
VOICE 1: I've always had this relationship with Cy Twombly. I feel like I can never fully get all the way there. You know, we're seeing gray scribbles, blue scribbles, white scribbles, red, and, you know, peach tone scribbles as well. Um, I don't know. I keep saying the word scribbles, but that's kind of what it is.
VOICE 2: It has a lot of movement in color. And so it's not just like a very stagnant piece. It's has what I know because I just read it. What is like representing different pieces. But before that it like even if it was nothing but literally just color on a gray background, it's like scribbles that are like never really. It looked like the artist was moving very fast and very fluid and not necessarily like thinking too hard about exactly what he was putting down and more about just creating color and going with the movement of what he was feeling in the at the time.
VOICE 3: There's also a lot of mixed media being used, which kind of can add to the sense of the artist wanting to find what feels right for the painting, rather than having a plan mixing around. I don't know, it even looks like there's a crayon or something like right in the middle.
VOICE 4: It looks like a lot of very colorful chicken scratch. So the more I look at it, the more I'm seeing things. Um, and the more I'm actually seeing an entire picture. Yeah.
VOICE 5: Well, from a distance, I really like this painting. And the color, um, up close, it feels like it's a different experience than when you're seeing it from further away.
VOICE 6: It just seemed more like an abstract, beautiful, um, artistic piece from about 40ft away. And then when you get closer, you think? Well, wait a minute. What? What is happening here? It's ruined, a little closer. For me.
VOICE 5: You know, up close, you kind of say it feels very chaotic. You see a lot of the scribbles, but when you zoom back, you kind of see less of the scribbles and more of just the color pops. And that's what's really striking to me. I'm not necessarily getting like, a huge notion of what the subject actually is or what his reference is. It's like.
VOICE 1: Do I want to go down this road of trying to conjure something in my mind right now and really understand it? Or, you know, I feel like maybe like a lot of people say it's just like scribbles or, you know, it's just, you know, writing something, it's so simple or it's so just like I've also sometimes been like, I don't know what I'm looking at either.
VOICE 7: Cy Twombly, Cy Twombly I couldn't do what he does. Um, I mean, maybe I could do my own imitation or, um, just, I don't know, do my own thing, but, you know, I'm not Twombly.
Susan Avishai: I think I was four years old and my parents had put me to bed, and I kept calling back my dad to bring me water. And the last time he bent over the ballpoint pen from his pocket dropped onto my bed. And he left. And of course, I wanted to call him back and tell him. And he said, Susan, go to sleep. It's enough.
Tamar: Ladies and gentlemen. Susan Avishai. My mom.
Susan Avishai: My mom and I had this ballpoint pen in my chubby little hand, and I started scribbling all over my sheet, making these huge loops that that crossed over each other. And it just felt so free. These big movements that I could make were so freeing.
Tamar: Is it possible for you to tell this story without moving your arms?
Susan Avishai: No, I have to redo it. I have to show you what I'm doing.
Tamar: You’re, like, drawing circles in the air.
Susan Avishai: It's like, can you describe a spiral staircase without going like this? Or a goatee without touching your chin?
And I think I had the pen in my fist with the point down. Yeah, I do remember that. And I was just making these circles and circles and circles that went on top of each other, and then on the side of each other, and then crossed and recrossed. And I think they kept getting bigger and bigger. It was just a sensational feeling. A feeling of no boundaries. A feeling like the canvas, so to speak, was much bigger than me. And I could do anything. It was wonderful.
Tamar: Yeah, it sounds wonderful.
Susan Avishai: Do you want to hear what happened the next morning?
Tamar: Do I?
Susan Avishai: My mother got very upset, and she said that that was going to be my sheet forevermore. And that that's not what we do with pens and sheets. But since I was the only one in the family who slept in a single bed, of course that was going to be my sheet for the rest of the time. And I always thought there was such a better way of handling that. I mean, you give a kid a sketchbook and a crayon and you say, this is where we do this. Not on the sheet. I always thought she blew it.
Tamar: I could never have done that.
Susan Avishai: Really?
Tamar: Yeah. It's ironic, because I was not willing to. And you would have been the mother who wouldn't have punished me. So there you go.
Susan Avishai: That's right. I would have said go, go, go. I did that. Why not you
Tamar: I cared too much what people thought.
Susan Avishai: Well, I didn't give a shit.
My mom is a fine artist. She spent most of her career, ironically, from the story you just heard, as a realist. Tight lines and perfect renderings, cross hatching, silverpoint. A lot of gorgeous drawings of me sleeping as a baby, and now of my own kids. But around 25 years ago, something in her snapped. Dylan went electric, and my mom, more successfully, I might add, went abstract. She made abstract art for years. Now she works almost exclusively in fiber art; she’s always covered in little threads she’s snipped off her work, which is now measured explosions of contrast, bold colors and delicate stitches, loud and quiet, eruptive, yet, amazingly, just by nature of the materials, soft. It’s the kind of work that you can tell an artist always had in them, even if they didn’t necessarily honor it until later in life. Sometimes I imagine her in her bed, at four years old, crossing the loops over the loops, trying to see how contained chaos can be, or how chaotic shapes can be, but still stay constrained by the sheet and her own small hand.
I myself was a pretty careful, considered kid - I didn’t like chaos, and despite currently being 7 months pregnant with my third kid, I still don’t. I didn’t get any pleasure out of seeing if I could lose control and then rein it back in; I just didn’t like losing control in the first place. My cassette tapes were organized alphabetically, just like my spices are now, just like my grandma’s used to be, say what you will about characteristics skipping generations. Seriously. Because then I had my son. And I watched him grip a marker with his own fist and loopdeloop straight off the paper, pushing down so hard he bends the tip. I don’t get it, I honestly don’t even love watching him do it, but I’m glad for him. And I’m glad he gets his grandma, and they get Cy Twombly, in a way I never will.
It’s easy to look at a Twombly and ask yourself what the fuck you’re actually looking at. His technique is based on the apparent lack of technique, like a child’s scribbles - and by the by, have you ever noticed that we almost always qualify scribbles as a “child’s” scribbles? Like only kids are given permission to let loose this way? But of course, just look at one of his drawings, like “Untitled” from 1968, at SFMOMA. It’s literally just scribbles. Rows and rows of big, fat, energetic loops. Loops like my son’s. Loops like it’s going out of style. It’s freedom, those loops - to draw, to create, to glide through mark-making without limitations or restrictions. They’re loops that only a child’s unbridled openness and lack of inhibition can make. But then we get to his titles, his literary sources, his interest in allegory, his poetic and passionate engagement with antiquity, and you begin to understand why critics more often describe Twombly’s work as highly intellectual at best, and pretentious and rambling at worst. People who are truly baffled at how his work ends up in museums seem to be more confused by that than by what seems on the surface to be naive and scribbly and childlike.
But as we’ll look at today, the reality is that his work is both. It’s childlike scribbles and myth-infused academicism. It’s trained and untrained, formal and informal, finished and unfinished. And more than anything, it’s in progress. In process.
And I think it’s that sense of process that people are so drawn to, especially artists, even before they read the title, or realize the work is referencing something. Take the first time I saw the painting of today’s episode, Second Voyage to Italy (Second Version) from 1962 - I mean, if you can call it a painting, more like a hybrid drawing painting scribblefest…you know, let’s just call it a canvas. I saw it in a gift shop. The work was used as the wraparound image of a notebook I bought at SFMOMA, where it’s in their collection. I bought the notebook for a songwriting retreat. It felt like the perfect image to look at every time I wanted to jot down an unfinished thought, a scrap of an idea, a half-baked observation. What could possibly be better at speaking to a sense of ongoing creativity than scribbles or half-erased pencil marks, loops of handwriting, doodles? It allows for a process. A creative process. Which itself becomes the finished work.
But enough about my process. Who was Cy Twombly? Born Edwin Parker Twombly Jr. in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia, and nicknamed Cy after the great White Sox pitcher Cy Young, Twombly just seemed like one of those artists that we come across who just always knew being an artist was his calling. He quickly fell into the circles of mid-century abstract artists like Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he was romantically involved, as well as Franz Kline, Jasper Johns, and Robert Motherwell, who arranged Twombly’s first solo exhibition. After living in New York from 1955 to 1959, he left the New York scene and decamped for Italy - Rome, to be exact - which became his primary city for the rest of his life.
But before that, in the early 1950s, he served in the U.S. army as a cryptologist – which is actually a real job, unlike cryptographer in the DaVinci Code, which is not (and yes, I had to look that up to confirm which was which). But being a cryptologist ended up having a real impact on his art. Because they’re essentially code-breakers. The work requires looking beneath the surface into the guts of any specific communication, rendering an image intentionally unintelligible in order to then find meaning. So yeah, you can imagine that his later work borrowed a thing or two from this kind of technique.
This is why you would never know at first glance how interested Twombly was in myth and allegory, or that he created a cycle of works in the 1960s based on Leda and the Swan and the Birth of Venus, or later in the 1970s he would create a ten-part cycle on Homer’s The Illiad, or that even today’s canvas should be titled “Second Voyage to Italy” when one could argue it could just as easily be called “testing out the pens from your junk drawer to see which ones still work.” And I think this is where people get annoyed with Twombly. Like, how are we supposed to look at this and identify with being the hero of his own epic poem, embarking to Rome from New York? How are we expected to see what he is seeing? To feel what he is feeling? He’s literally left us scribbles and marks that we’re supposed to code break ourselves.
Okay, so where did we leave things? Scribbles and marks. Code breaking, if that’s what we’re supposed to be doing here. Chaotic, seemingly random scrawl and scratch that we’re supposed to somehow understand, that’s meant to speak to our intellects, or even to touch our artistic souls. That sounds like a tall order, but it’s not like we’ve never been moved by high-energy, often pretentious abstraction before. Remember Jackson Pollock way back in episode 12? Who’s to say that Twombly wasn’t just born at the wrong time for those scribbles and marks to have the impact he intended on their contemporary audience? He was a decade too young to be Pollock, and his work was a lot more spare and unfinished. But they both seemed to value the same thing: that a line, a scribble, a gesture, could embody the energy of the hand, the arm that flung it, and, in Twombly’s case, the energy of the historical or allegorical moment that it was referencing, if hardly depicting. Take his canvas “Achaeans in Battle” from his 1970s Illiad series. There aren’t any perfectly rendered swords or armor or horses in Twombly’s battle scenes, nothing like what you’d find bearing down on you at Met with its cinematic narrative and ideal vanishing points. But the energy – the energy is there. Just like it’s in my son’s hand, or on my mom’s bedsheet. In this battle scene, a blood red gash has made the canvas bleed. The sheer lack of any kind of structure to the abstraction makes the scene feel more chaotic and unsettling than if we were seeing the whole, perfectly-rendered narrative. Each line of his work, Twombly said, was “the actual experience” of making it. He says his lines “do not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” He practiced drawing in the dark in order to make his lines less individually purposeful, and more in the service of the holistic, seismic explosion of the experience on the viewer. And it’s an exhausting effort; he describes having to go to bed for a couple of days after completing each new canvas.
And it’s this energy in particular that has been picked up by later artists who claim Twombly as an influence – Jean-Michel Basquiat, for example, an artist who embraced graffiti – its own structured chaos, its connection to the artist’s hand, its sheer vibrant energy. Anselm Kiefer, whom we exhaustively explored in episode 48, borrowed from Twombly’s habit of integrating the text of his titles into the work, of treating handwriting as part of the visual experience and narrative. And he also borrowed from Twombly’s use of course butamin on the canvas, which he used to raise up the texture like a scar, making it artwork tactile, heightening the work’s materiality. And many other artists as well. Yet, for all his disciples, it is just known that Twombly cannot be imitated. His work is just that unique. In the words of the French theorist and critic Roland Barthes, “if you try to imitate it, what you do will be neither his nor yours.”
But of course, as we keep returning to, not everyone found his work so inspirational, not viewers, or even artists. Which seemed to be okay by him. He largely eschewed the spotlight, valuing his own personal freedom to create over any particular validation from the art world. Which was probably for the best, given how divisive the art establishment felt his presence was. His work was dismissed as both too hung up on the past and barely there. I’m thinking particularly of a solo exhibition he mounted in New York in 1964, which was excoriated in a review by the sculptor Donald Judd – already no great fan of painting – who called the show a fiasco. “There isn’t anything to these paintings,” he sneered.
And so Cy Twombly himself was barely there, at least in terms of his own reputation, his own artistic hustle. “It’s just not something I think about,” he said later in his life. “If it happens it happens, but don’t bother me with it.”
And this is what makes his reputation today, 14 years after his death in 2011 at the age of 83, so remarkable. His posthumous honorifics now include “the last great American artist” according to the Guardian, and “the greatest painter after Picasso, period” according to Artforum. He keeps setting and breaking new records for how much his work will go for at auction. And it’s not just the pretentious art-buying set, either. It’s normal people, maybe especially normies who are moved to create, whether or not they even trust if they have something to say. It’s me, in the gift shop at SFMOMA. People are really, genuinely moved by his work. A lot of times it’s gentle, although it’s been known to get out of hand. In 2007, an artist named Rindy Sam kissed one of his works on paper, smudging it with red lipstick and effectively damaging it, at least according to the subsequent trial. Her rationale? “It was just a loving gesture. I kissed it without thinking. It was an artistic act provoked by the power of art. I thought the artist would understand.” The red smudge is now, of course, considered a part of the drawing, and its process.
But I digress. Maybe he can be spoken of with such reverence by art publications because he never particularly cared about acclaim, and so never let it influence his work. He didn’t change his tune after Donald Judd called his work a fiasco. Critics can respect that. But why us normies? What does he offer us? He lets us in on something rarely seen: his whole, vulnerable artistic process. He gives us permission to work out our own, our half-baked scraps, the inherent fragmentation and stream of consciousness that creativity demands from us at our least self-conscious. It’s validating to see an artist go through this himself, and let us see it, and even more validating that a canvas entirely of this can fetch record-breaking sums at Christie’s. And it gives us permission to reconnect with our inner children, even ones we never even experienced personally, who want nothing more than to let ‘er rip on a piece of construction paper, or a bedsheet. It’s permission to pulse with the energy that only a little kid can possess inside, alone with their canvas, with the space all around the canvas, eager and unself conscious and ready to blow.
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The Lonely Palette is written and produced by me, Tamar Avishai, with production assistance by Debbie Blicher. It’s great to be back. To see all the images from this episode, and to find out everything else about the show, how to support it, sign up for our newsletter, visit our soon-to-be-revamped merch shop, and more, go to thelonelypalette.com. You can also follow the show on Instagram @thelonelypalette, and reach out any time with ideas for upcoming shows. And if you’re a business looking to sponsor a show enjoyed by an active and engaged audience like yourself, email us a sponsorship@thelonelypalette.com. We’d love to hear from you.
The Lonely Palette is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a fiercely independent collective of mind-expanding, thoughtful podcasts. We have newsletters to subscribe to and Radio Hours to listen to, and more than anything lots of podcast episodes that have been released during my hiatus. One you might want to especially catch up on is Erica Heilman’s award-winning Rumble Strip, especially now, as the country readjusts to our new normal, without, I daresay, allowing it to be normalized. Erica’s series in particular, What Class Are You, is an empathic and unflinching series of audio portraits of people maybe like you, maybe not, but given a mic and allowing their voices to be heard. It’s the best blue collar human interest documentary since Studs Turkel, and I’m always honored to realize that Erica and I share the same collective. Listen at HubSpokeAudio.org, RumbleStripVermont.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’ll see you in two weeks.