Cy Twombly

- - -
---Do not move
---------Let the wind speak
----------------that is paradise.
...the verb is "see," "not "walk on"

Ezra Pound


The written word is the figure of gradual acquisition, the impatient and invisible Fury of return. It is always there before we are, even when we move on. We break it and it still remains, speaking within us with the immanence of all things. It defends itself in the name of speechlessness, and yet asserts itself in the desire to forget. The connotation of the written word is its possessiveness, that inner monologue of endless transitions, of analogies. And only for moments is all that is inexpressible an empty mirror, the desire for a sense that can merge in it without speech . Without description, without echo; the desire for the intrinsicality of a thing, which cannot come to be, unless we give away something of ourselves: the Fury of a hermetic language. The empty mirror holds an ephemeral form, the root of meaning, held by nothing more than this moment of affect that makes us "speechless," that cannot be lost in the network of semantic relationships: "the interruption of our inner monologue" (Barthes).

No artist has in his work, as radically as Cy Twombly, substituted language for an expression that suspends and interrupts the discourse, the rethoric of occidental culture. Twombly insists on the transparency of the most transient at all forms, the state of conception and comprehension, when the form itself is the untranslatable event. His work is a school of sensitivity. Beyond all isms, vogues, unceasingly changing innovations of the moment, this work perseveres with a concept of time and space, in which inextinguishable moments evoke the essence of myths as lived life.

While other famous contemporaries are oriented to immediate reflection of the present and to overcoming "art and life duality" or to revelation in dramatic self-expression, Twombly mistrusted and resisted these aesthetic-social impulses as new, unserviceable hermeneutics. References to the great poetic form of Ezra Pound are probably the only recognizable influence in his work. It is an archetype of man who like Ulysses, dares to set forth onto unknown seas and therefore sings on uncertainty, which constitutes an antipodic hope of discovery for Pound, and the synthesis of a beauty, "that he searches for outside himself, that he perceives, only to be transformed perhaps into what he has sought".

In the yearning for beauty that would correspond to the "truth" of myths and at the same time could be a condition on life and work, Twombly's insisting on a non-descriptive line, that is nothing more than the event of its inner manifestation, an additional affinity to the ideogrammatic working methods of Pound can be seen. This work is not an epic, but rather a constant series of events, which do not seek a phenomenologically defined culture, but its roots: an untamable, ephemeral enchantment. Pyramus and Thisbe are separated by a veil, but only a moment of whispering reaches in the strangely wavering oblivion of time.

Constantly different in extent and in their thematic association or openness, many beautiful series of drawings have evolved in the work of Cy Twombly since 1957. Not even the famous, early cycles "Poems to the Sea" from 1959 and "Letter of Resignation" from 1959/64 have been completely and adequately published to this day. We can only hope, that this book will engender the complete publication that has long been necessary. It was initially stimulated by Katharina Schmidt's wonderful catalogue for Bonn, in which many of Twombly's series were introduced in extensive excerpts.

The cycles of Twombly's drawings were created in very different places, as striking number of which were on sea-coasts, on islands during temporary stays. A coherent iconographic-progressive treatment of the themes lends them thematic cohesion. "Poetic miniatures" or "a form of poetry" could very well entitle most of these series of small format.

One can imagine the drawings "24 Short Pieces" as moments of a journey through a changing landscape of changing seasons. But at the same time they are the memory, the subjective recollection of what was seen. But finally they do not tell us how something could have been. In a deep space without degrees-the place of their origin- with flowing transitions between memory and projection, between the intellect and sureness of the hand, they assume their own reality. No metaphysics and axiomatics lead us behind the unrecognizable space of this physiognomy, because its written words have disappeared. The lightness, the transparent materiality is only apollonic image of reflection, no more than an echo.

The picture is reality without insight. And therefore every process of conception and imagination while viewing a picture begins with the figure of resistance, with the description: "...never will we know"; a language, but what is speaking? Twombly's rare, fascinating space permits no interpretation. Something always seems left out, blurred, made invisible, but only barely, so that even this invisible something that should hide is intentionally visible. Twombly's line, his stroke have established a completely new characteristic in post-abstract painting. They do not cross the boundaries of the imagination, they only inflame. Between almost nothing and nothing this line achieves peculiarly firm hold, an affect that strives for the figure of sensitivity and makes the "drawing" as explanatory structure disappear. Line and stroke constantly and ironically seem to regret that it was not done better, but also that it could not haven been done better anyway. If what produced this sensitivity was at some point a landscape, for example, then it seems to us as if we now listened to the music of this landscape.

The first drawing of "24 Short Pieces" begins with a brief, subtly condensed graphic hatching in the lower third of the empty space. The hatching in the lower third of the empty space. The hatching marks off and holds the space. It is just there without revealing, it is virulent, and it breaks any contemplation. It represents itself and is therefore without designation. Not until the following drawings does something "happen": flashes of forms appear against accentuated concealment, a coming to life. Stroke and line open themselves topically.

Twombly organizes the entire cycle in intervals. Out of the fragile consistency of a small form, out of a coloured line loud density develops and the physiognomy of eruptive tumult. In these few drawings this "coming to life" is also the psychological postulate against oblivion. The hand leads he pencil passionately though the wet, almost white priming layer. It is means of "inscription" that does not cease and knows enough of itself to succeed without language, without language, without visible control.

Between drawings that are almost empty, with the most transparent of all traces, and drawings with the densest of structures, which completely take possession of the pictorial space, there reigns a clandestine irritation, the excitement of genesis, progression, and inconspicuous economy. Although this irritation cannot be read it is still present, and it is irreversible as in all of Twombly's work. What is generated in the paintings is syncretistic action as temporal unity, is divided in these drawings into moments, into 24 short pieces.

In each drawing a perceivable new beginning of the entire event can be read. An intellectual exchange of horizons, along which the imagination moves without hierarchies in thematic chords, stops and breaks. The sea is lost in fog, the sign in oblivion, reflection in aphorisms- a different landscape emerges out of the fog. Maybe this is one possible reading among others. The last drawing is nothing other than a kind of finale, then again it is solely a return to the metaphor of the original form. The "24 Short Pieces" describe nothing and do not seek to define, but they say, each for itself: thus it is and here it is, it cannot be said differently, thus it is written, written in water.


Heiner Bastian, "Comments" in Cy Twombly: 24 Short Pieces (Munich: Schirmer-Mosel-Verlag, 1989). Translation by Melanie Flemming. The series 24 Short Pieces was created in 1973

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