Cy Twombly by Jenny Saville:

To Lift the Veil

“Try and stay ignored for as long as possible.” This is what Cy Twombly said to me when I was twenty-nine years old. He was a hero of mine, so of course I thought, “This guy doesn’t like my work very much.” However, I know now that what he was saying was that a young painter needs time to learn, to develop. He was at the height of his powers when I met him, both artistically and in a career sense. Every artist wanted to know him and every museum wanted to buy his work. I was extraordinarily lucky that we were represented by the same gallery and for the last ten years of his life, I was around him and able to learn from him.

My first encounter with Twombly’s work was in my first term at the Glasgow School of Art, when I was eighteen years old. I saw two of his paintings in an art magazine—Suma from 1982 and an early-1960s work. I was a figurative painter, so I was only interested in depicting the body, but something about those images caught me and held me. From that moment on, I was hooked and sought out his work wherever and whenever I could.

Twombly spent his whole life with one foot in a cave and the other in a palace. He never left the cave really—he dealt with the fundamental themes of life, the need to survive, basic human desires, lustful needs, fears. Those foundational aspects of human nature are always there in his work. And he had an erudite love of the ancient world. This is already evident in the work he made at Black Mountain College in the 1950s. Seeing photographs from his travels, I suspect the whiteness of the buildings he encountered in North Africa and Greece must have influenced him.

Twombly showed the twelve-panel epic painting Lepanto (2001) at Gagosian, New York, in 2002, having made it for the Venice Biennale the year before. It depicts a battle between the Venetians and the Ottoman Turks, which took place on October 7, 1571, in the Gulf of Patras—a crushing victory for the Catholics of the Holy League Alliance. The work completely blew me away when I saw it; I couldn’t believe that painting could be this good in the current age. It changed my life and made me realize how hard you have to push as a painter if you want to do something significant. I was lucky enough to be at the gallery on the day the paintings were installed, and it was clear that this was history in the making.

For ten years, there was a challenge of sorts going on between Twombly and Larry Gagosian. Every time the latter opened a new space he would ask the former, “What paintings could you make to fill this space? And then if I open a space in Paris or Rome or London . . . ?” They had a one-upmanship between them that felt like a constant game and it was a thrill to witness two people being so expansive in their outlook. I’m not sure Twombly would have created this run of paintings without those spaces and that encouragement. And that he agreed to participate with this level of energy, at this moment in his life, made Gagosian the gallery it is today.

The artists who become part of art history are the game-changers. They shift our perception of what art should be. One of the reasons Twombly is so revered is the fact that he took avant-garde American painting and merged it with ancient history. There’s nothing that tells you about that more than his Duchampian act of writing “Apollo” on a work from 1975. In that single gesture, he embodies four thousand years of Western culture in one word. When you read it, you think of all the poetic, literary, painted, and sculptural representations of Apollo throughout history. It’s an extraordinary act. Knowing Twombly, it was most likely instinctual—he probably just did it and thought, “Oh, that looks kind of good. I’ll write that again.” But, it is nonetheless a profound Duchampian statement that he’s making.

My favorite example of this is in Fifty Days at Iliam: House of Priam (1978). On the canvas he has repeatedly written, “Cassandra.” Cassandra was one of the daughters of King Priam of Troy, who proclaimed that the Trojan War was going to happen, but nobody believed her. There’s a kind of mania in the way Twombly has written “Cassandra, Cassandra, Cassandra,”—there’s a vibration to it. With this literal burying and dragging up of history, he creates a beautiful journey. By layering paint over text and inscribing the time needed for you to read the words, he plays with notions of time, balance, and tension. Twombly made language pictorial and artists like Basquiat followed him. You might never have had the same Basquiat without Twombly, without that decision to write “Apollo.”

What makes a great painting stand out forever? Tension. Any work from art history that has lasted has incredible tension within it. If you look at Michelangelo’s sculpture Moses (1513–15), it depicts an aged man from the Old Testament whose body is incredibly youthful. His arms have the muscles of a twenty-five-year-old, but you don’t realize it at first. When you first look, there is a believability to it. And that’s what art does—it creates tension by bringing improbable elements together. Another example is Francis Bacon’s painting of George Dyer, Triptych May–June (1973), with flat panels of organized design and areas of very thick paint. The tension lies in the juxtaposition of impastoed paint over clear modernist design and flat color—another layer that adds to the tension of the scene itself: the toilet and vomit, knowing the figure has died. It doesn’t matter whether a painting is a complicated figurative painting or a minimalist Barnett Newman Zip painting, it’s usually tension that makes the work powerful.

There is so much literature about Twombly, his love of poetry, and how he worked with ancient history. I think J. M. W. Turner and Claude Monet were major influences. When you look at Catullus, and read it from right to left, it’s a journey from a landmass in Asia Minor, but it’s also a passage through life and about the fleeting nature of life. You first see these incredible blossom shapes and you move through mistiness toward a battle. A journey through life, the epic battles and quests we know from ancient history—but also a journey that every human being has taken.

Twombly used a range of techniques—scraping and dripping paint, laying down different surfaces—to create different atmospheres. He had incredible hand skills when it came to dripping. We all know that a drip is actually part of nature—it’s the way rain works. With his drips he became a conductor of nature, harnessing its possibilities. He used drips to bury things within the painting, to give depth, or to bring things forward.

Sometimes he used very thinned-down white paint, to apply over the top of text or an earlier image. If he started with yellow and then dripped white, that yellow would become misty, which is exactly what happens in traditional landscape painting, or indeed how we actually see things in nature. This “mistification” process was a device to create the feeling of space without having to depict anything at all. He used it throughout his career. There’s the horizontal canvas with the vertical drip, and the gravitational force that the drips harness create a dynamism within the painting. The misty nature adds a three-dimensional feeling. It is a very sophisticated approach that comes out of traditional painting techniques—laying down a hazy light to create a sense of illusionistic distance. The strongest contrast appears on the surface and it gives the structures three dimensions.

At the far right of Catullus, there is a bulbous shape. I’ve stared for ages at these forms thinking, “Cy, what on Earth are they? Are they blossoms? Are they stars? Are they going up or coming down?” I think they are the embodiment of fertility—the embodiment of spring. T. S. Eliot would call this “breeding.” They hint at blossoms, fruits, or a harvest. They have so many connotations in their color combinations. I find it interesting that Twombly painted Quattro Stagioni (A Painting in Four Parts) (1993–95), held in the collection of Tate, London, just before making this painting.

There is a text by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that has driven my work for more than a decade now, which connects to Twombly. While he was in Sicily, Goethe discovered the mothers of Angion—ancient fertility goddesses who are responsible for the fertility of the world and for creation in all its forms. He invented a place called the “Realm of the Mothers.” It is somewhere outside of time and place, and it is where all forms are created. In Goethe’s Faust Part II (1832), Mephistopheles says:

Take hold of it without disparaging. It shines and flashes, grows in my hand. How great its worth, will you now understand? The key will sense the right place from all others. Follow it down, t’will lead you to the Mothers. The Mothers like a shock, it smites my ear. What’s in this word I don’t like to hear? So limited in mind by each new word disturbed, will you only hear what you’ve always heard? Let naught perturb, however strange it rings, you’re long-accustomed to most wondrous things. In apathy I see no wheel for me. The thrill of all is man’s best quality. Whatever toll the world lays on this sense, enthralled, man deeply senses the immense. Descend then, or I could also say ascend. It’s all the same. Escape from the created into the unbound realm of forms. Delight in what long since was dissipated, like coursing clouds the throng is coiling around. Brandish the key and keep them out of bound. Good grasping it I feel new strength arise. My breast expands on to the enterprise. At last a glowing tripod tells you this that you’ve arrived in deepest deep abyss. You’ll see the Mothers in its radiant glow. Some sit, some stand, some wander to and fro, as it may chance. Formation, transformation, eternal minds, eternal recreation. Girt round by images of all things that be, they do not see you, forms alone they see. Do take courage then, for the peril’s great. And to the tripod go forth straight and touch it with the key.

When I’m working in my studio, trying to access something in my work by running colors together or almost being self-destructive and pushing at something, I feel a connection to this text and I think something in it also connects to Twombly’s fertile blossoms.

Twombly developed a whole vocabulary to get nature into painting. I often think of him as a child running toward a rainbow, trying to catch it in his hand. Once he’s got it, he puts it on the canvas and then he samples things—he takes a little bit of the sea, a little bit of the rainbow, and distills their essence, putting it all into paint. He had a keen sense for the way tonal transitions from nature occur. For example, we all have a relationship with sunsets—we all recognize them. When we see tones that are in tune with nature, we feel soulful. He could bring that into a painting the way others can hold a note. That was his gift. He didn’t have to be Turner or Monet, who spent their lives in nature, depicting what they were looking at. Instead he took aspects from both artists and used the potential of painting itself to show us the nature of things.

It’s similar to the way blossom works. There is a fleeting moment in spring of incredible abundance. It’s so beautiful and we can’t wait for it to come, but it only lasts a short time. And then there is a sense of sadness when it disappears. That arc of time wouldn’t be the same if we experienced blossom all year round—the beauty exists in part because it is fleeting. And when Twombly created his, he tapped into our collective memory.

I’m a figurative painter but in summer I go to Greece and try to paint the sky without any forms, to observe the way light moves. I take the studies back to my studio and put them in my figurative paintings. There’s nothing more violent than a sunset at its peak. I’ve spent time in pathology rooms and anatomy rooms, I’ve seen heads that have been blown apart by shotgun fire, but nothing is as violent as a full sunset. As it begins you see blue and yellow, then fire, then comes the darkness and it grays off—things become misty, forms become soft, and you can no longer see the edges. I try to harness that through watercolor studies, and I can see Twombly’s influence in them.

Twombly uses ambiguity, which is king in modern contemporary painting. We love ambiguity—it’s where the poetry lies. He employs it time and again. And this brings me back to Lepanto, which references a battle. He used impasto and line, introducing a series of contradictions. I believe Turner’s Peace: Burial at Sea (1842) influenced this picture, particularly its quieter, mystical mistiness. I think he used Turner’s watercolor studies for inspiration. Twombly talked about his painting not having gravity; speaking with Robert Pincus-Witten in 1994 (and cited in Pincus-Witten’s essay in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition at Gagosian in 1994) he speaks of “a generic space, a loose gravitation, comparable to mythology itself, which also has no center of gravity.” His mistiness created a feeling of being ancient.

Twombly often employed impasto in his work, layering sections of paint on top of the canvas to give them a presence in themselves. This technique of using paint for its material quality is embedded in art history. Just look at the sleeve of the infanta at the top right-hand side of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). The Spaniard used dots of pure white pigment on top of the painting. The last section of Catullus is one of the most magical parts of the piece. Two-thirds of the way across, the canvas changes tone. It goes from a mid-gray to a slightly lighter gray in the last third. It’s hard to imagine that he created a work on such a vast scale with a pencil nib—you can’t ask for more physical tension in a painting than that. He added boats using pencil and silver oil bar. The silver may have been a reference to Andy Warhol, because he was collecting the Pop artist’s work at the time, or to Delos, which was very important in the ancient world. The granite on the Greek island has silver flecks in it which shine, and it is referenced in poetry from ancient times.

So many people have spoken about the references to poetry in Twombly’s work. He not only uses the words from poems but he employs them as blocks of text to act as a counterbalance to those circular blossoms. He uses text as horizon lines; he doesn’t create a true horizon because if he did, you wouldn’t buy into the blossoms—the painting would become too fixed in the real world. He can only suggest the real world. He plays with the tension of sequencing and time, and that in itself creates another world. Including text also transports you via the language and historical references it conjures.

Throughout his career, Twombly used devices that connect with time. People often talk about space in painting, but people talk less about time, and I think in fact it is one of the things that separates painting from the other arts. If you think about film, literature, and music, you need a certain sequence of time. In painting, you have a collection of present moments and the work is a document of those moments. Whether abstract or figurative, it’s a collection and record of time. In a way, a painting exists outside of time completely, and what you can do in the act of making is freeze a particular moment.

There’s a beautiful room of blackboard paintings in the Menil Collection. That body of work might be my favorite. In these Twombly tries to personify a line. When you’re standing in front of a surface making marks, you think in three dimensions, and those marks are never made by pulling, they’re always made by pushing into the surface. In a short statement published in the Italian journal L’Esperienza moderna in 1957 he explained, “Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It doesn’t illustrate—it is the sensation of its own realization.” This comes from looking at Cezanne. It’s the kind of thinking that continues due to where and what it is and nothing else—it is of itself. Twombly epitomized this throughout his life—trying to find those moments, trying to embrace different ways of using materials. It’s also connected to the action of his body—the top is created by the rotation of the wrist, the next line uses the rotation of the arm, and the bottom relies on the rotation of the torso. The association between the blackboard works and Leonardo da Vinci’s Deluge drawings is well-known (c. 1517–18). Da Vinci made a series of about ten works of a similar size in the last years of his life in France. They’re cataclysmic visions of studying water, which I think influenced Twombly. They also seem to be related to the Pyramid Texts—the oldest religious writings known to humans, located inside the temple of Unas in Egypt—which explain how to get to the afterlife. They’re made up of repetitive sounds, which Philip Glass used in a piece of music in the early 1980s, and I think Twombly probably tapped into that.

The ancient Egyptian goddess Isis was seen as the embodiment of fertility, all the secrets of nature were held within her. It has long been suggested by historians that over the course of time, the idea of Isis moves from Egypt to ancient Greece, where she becomes Artemis and later still Athena. She moves to Rome because sailors were going between there and Egypt. Then slowly, you see her become the Madonna and Child. So this journey, this hybridity, through Western history, which she embodies, is an allegory of nature. The Veil of Isis was made in ancient times in the north of Egypt and inscribed with these words: “I am all that was, all that is, and all that shall be and no mortal has lifted my veil.” If anybody tried to lift her veil and get us as close as possible to the secret of nature in our time, it was Cy Twombly.