A new exhibition juxtaposes the work of Cy Twombly with paintings by Poussin. A Good Old Modernist meets a Grand Old Master ? a bold pairing that works brilliantly
The curator Nicholas Cullinan has had the bold and lovely idea of interspersing paintings, drawings and sculptures by Cy Twombly with paintings and drawings by Nicolas Poussin, in a compact exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Arcadian Painters, he bills the pairing, his working premise being that the veteran American artist (who died on 5 July 2011) shares with the 17th-century Frenchman a devotion to classical antiquity. Whether or not you feel that such an affinity comes through visually, the experiment in juxtaposition gives you much to reflect on. Above all, it refreshes your eyes. We expect Poussins to inhabit a zone of studious murmuring and fusty hauteur. (We know they are in their element in the Dulwich, the country's most venerable public picture gallery.) And we suppose that the Twomblys will be hanging out across town in the no less snooty cool of the modernist White Cube. But thrust them together and you're forced to think anew about how things made for looking at actually work.
Twentieth-century paint juts outward and 17th-century paint draws in: that's the first impression you receive, from the placing of a Poussin between a pair of Twomblys that meets you as you enter. The latter are big quasi-octagonal panels that might have been carpentered for some hieratic medieval interior. Each is cream above and green-black below, colours which meet along a ragged descending border that disrupts the panel's symmetry; and loose white paint has been slathered and sprayed across that border, here being worked with fingers, there left to dribble. This act and the physical fact of it are what the pictures principally announce, even if the caption claims that they are impressions of the countryside around Rome and that this is what connects them to the Poussin canvas. Into that picture, by contrast, you plunge, seeking spatial footholds in its deep-sunk browns. You close in on a tree, a couple of resting travellers, a swan in a pond, the towers of a small town. Gradually adjusting to a summer evening's long shadows, you register that all those elements are held in place by a single, dead straight Roman road, hurtling away from the canvas's foreground to far-off mountains. To pick out its converging lines is to peel the picture back to its structure ? which is almost comic in its simplicity. One symmetrical form, a triangle, has been inscribed on the base of another, a rectangle. The latter doubles up as a canvas of the Roman Campagna and the former as a perspective recession of Roman civilisation's most famous token.
Poussin draws you inwards only to get you looking on, or at, the structures that comprise his canvas. Twombly for his part thrusts handfuls of paint in your face only to invite you into a mist, a dissolve, a trackless indeterminacy. If there's any notion of landscape informing those panels of his, it's more Chinese than Italian: its spaces come about as the soft aftershocks of gestures, rather than through geometries of objects and light. In fact, each of these operators has an eccentric take on the standards supplied by his forebears ? in Poussin's case, the transparent pictorial window of Renaissance art, in Twombly's the in-your-face vehemence of the Abstract Expressionists. For that reason they won't be reduced to period representatives, the Grand Old Master versus the Good Old Modernist. Arcadian Painters turns out to be a study in twinned forms of vivid awkwardness.
Twombly more or less set out cussed. Arguably it was the shrewdest strategy for a young American in the 1950s to adopt. He had the luck to study at Black Mountain College, the North Carolina forcing-house for aesthetic innovation, alongside Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he then went on to tour Italy. Rauschenberg soon achieved stardom with an art that was a whole bend more urban, abrupt and grungy than anything Pollock and De Kooning had come up with. But Twombly was drawn to the dreaminess of those big boys ? their debts to surrealism, their Jungian notions of "myth". He set his hand to run loose, by literally drawing in the dark. Pencil loops and nicks cover two 1956 sheets on show at Dulwich. Their intent, it seems, is to hold back intent, to not yet mean anything in particular ? at the same time, to walk that tightrope with pace and panache.
Suchlike scribbling formed a seedbed for the art Twombly developed after he returned to Italy in 1957 and married an heiress. He unpacked a whole puppet-show of about-to-be-significant manoeuvres, spreading them out over big cream-primed canvases: the child's impulse to smear some intrusion on the clean expanse; the romantic's impulse to mouth some antique name or choice line of verse; quick coarse grunts of lust; then the impulse to stock-take, to reason, embodied in numbers and diagrams, and the impulse to round on yourself, to erase. It was the manner of the spread that was charming and chancy, the way Twombly's blurts coexisted with a broad, bright spaciousness.
With all those romantic cues, he became something of a writer's painter. John Berger cherished Twombly's slurred quotes as pointers to that great hinterland of unknown texts that lies beyond each individual reader. Roland Barthes wrote an arch meditation on the "indolence" of his scrawls, which for him bore the erotic redolence of some crumpled pair of pants discarded by a rent-boy. Living it up in a dream of Italian aristocratic languor, the Twombly of the 60s was, in a sense, pursuing a classic American lifeplan ? but by the same token, he was quite out of step with the American avant-garde. Donald Judd, its toughest spokesman, a foe to all things European, dismissed his work as goofy whimsy in 1964, and for years to come Rauschenberg's former buddy had no more than a toehold in curators' schemes of contemporary American art.
With the advent of postmodernist criticism in the 80s, "marginal" began to mean "central", and "bad" ? the way Twombly aped Pollock's messiness, rather than his swagger ? to mean "good". For its part, Twombly's studio practice got more old-fashioned-painterly. He turned from scribbling to lading his canvases with lush oils. Dulwich exhibits Hero and Leandro, painted like those landscape panels in 1985 ? their dribbles and fingerworking here orchestrated into a deliquescent collapse of mist-greys and cerise. And it shows four lofty canvases from the early 90s, Twombly's Quattro Stagioni, in which the root muscular impulses of his art ? to blurt, to scratch, to dangle, to let go ? get upgraded to a monumental dignity. They demand to be admitted into the hall of fame, and its doors are thrust wide. Inside, curators stand waiting, eager to take the grand old man at his word when he claims: "I would've liked to have been Poussin, if I'd had a choice, in another time."
In another time, a pushy, brainy young Norman made his way to Europe's art metropolis: Poussin would make Rome his base until his death 41 years later in 1665. His production there started out along familiar Italian guidelines. At Dulwich there's an assiduous School-of-Raphael-style battle drawing from 1625 and more attractively, a 1628 canvas, The Arcadian Shepherds, echoing Titian at his most sensuous and poetic. Yet it's not their flocks that Poussin's Arcadians attend to, but an inscription on a tomb. By now, he was a draughtsman participating in an early scientific project to codify the diversity of nature: henceforward, text would always be a behind-the-scenes presence in his work. The question for him became how to deliver a self-contained analogue to verbal thinking by means of his own "mute art".
The distinctiveness of Poussin's aesthetic becomes clear if you consider the customary way he came to conduct his business. Every couple of months or so Bertholin the courier would call at his house on the Monte Pincio and collect from its straitlaced and thrifty proprietor ? a one-man operation, with hardly an assistant to hand ? a sealed case containing a rolled up canvas. A few weeks later this would get unfurled and restretched in the mansion of some Parisian patron. In such a way, Poussin compressed his consummate knowledge of Rome's buildings, artworks and landscapes, and his deep, careful reading of scripture, epics, histories and science, into forms that would pass permanently out of his sight ? since after 1642, he made no move to visit his native land again.
Courier-packet painting became a highly self-conscious procedure. You wanted to ensure that whatever thoughts went into the picture would come out the other end, but you also got singularly caught up with the canvas as a confined rectangular object. You arrived at your image by partitioning that rectangle. Hence Poussin's insistent structuring (which becomes strikingly experimental in a series of canvases sent to Cardinal Richelieu, the Seven Sacraments: the Dulwich has managed to borrow five of them to display alongside Cullinan's exhibition). It's matched by his fine-tuning of colour ? there's a gorgeous interplay of blues and oranges in many of the canvases included in the show. But all this was intended to assist the painting's meaning, which on a certain level became political. Poussin was exiling himself from France the better to serve her. Dispatching his distillations of history and religion to men of discernment, he hoped to open up a new, virtuous cultural space opposed to the corruption epitomised by Mazarin, Richelieu's successor as chief minister.
The scriptures, histories and legends of the ancient world provided an exemplary model against which the present could be held to account. Classical antiquity provided Poussin with a form of critique. What does classical antiquity provide Cy Twombly with? Mystique. Twombly adores its lostness. He goes after its baffling, mellifluous names ? Smintheus, Agyieus, Platanistius, Theoxenius ? his pencil languidly scratches, in a whimsical mock-invocation of Apollo from 1975. The letterings trail and expire, and that sighing of the hand reflects Twombly's self-declared romanticism ("I would've liked to have been Poussin") and the overall psychophysical drift towards release and collapse that is the level on which meaning actually comes through in his art.
For these reasons, it seems to me misleading to pair up, say, a 1635 The Triumph of Pan and a 1975 collage labelled Pan as if they were ancient and modern treatments of the same theme. (The exhibition captioning and catalogue toy with this tactic extensively, if irresolutely, mythologically annotating every scribble and grunt: quite frankly, they're best ignored.) Twombly may feel his way around classical subjects and his adopted terrain of Italy, but his mental activities are remote from the moral and intellectual focusing of Poussin.
Despite this, the two artists' paintings actually hang together brilliantly. You might consider Twombly's a lightweight schmoozing up to one of the great heavyweights of western painting. But a truly stylish gatecrasher makes the party swing better. Twombly's nimble hops about the canvas, his instinct to surprise himself, the pizzazz of his rudeness, all pep up his companion: the near-manic idiosyncrasy of that doughty loner starts to shine through. (The bizarre knot of branches top left in that Triumph of Pan and the foreboding chunk of pediment signing off The Triumph of David feel like Poussin's attempts at repartee.)
To better appreciate the duo's fundamental good neighbourliness, step outside the Dulwich's exhibition galleries to watch Edwin Parker, a recently made short film in which Tacita Dean trains her camera on the octagenarian Twombly. He's seen sitting about in a studio and a canteen in his hometown of Lexington, Virginia: he's seen muttering to assistants, taking a letter from an envelope and slowly rolling his wry brown eyes. Beyond the studio blinds there are bright leaves, then there are bare branches. Time does a ferocious amount of passing in the course of the film's 10 minutes, and Twombly does a ferocious amount of being. He "be"s so intensely that I had to rush out, gasping for breath, back to the exhibits of canvas and paper. Give me those singing blues and oranges, those swooning creams and cerises. I'll opt for those weird and stubborn wall-hangings to take on Time, that grim inspector. I get the feeling they might just win.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jul/06/cy-twombly-nicolas-poussin-exhibition
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