Cy Twombly: Living In History
Twombly in Rome — 1966The past is a springboard for me….
Ancient things are new things.
Everything lives in the moment;
that’s the only time it can live,
But its influence can go on forever.
― Cy Twombly
Making Past Present
This last fall we were fortunate enough to visit The Getty in LA for their exhibit of Cy Twombly’s sculptures and paintings: Making Past Present. Work included in the show demonstrated Twombly’s love of antiquity and the old world. Engaging with writing and poetry, objects and paintings to fuel his own work for decades. The past was alive, the past still lives.
The role of artists is not forgetting our past in our contemporary practice in order to be relevant in context with world events acting as a postmodern artist our job is to dissect what we have learned for history and bring these things to light by applying them to our time and place, unraveling truths to shed a light on matters that we have still not healed from and continue to repeat like a bad habit.
Twombly photographed in his apartment in Rome — 1966 Photos by Horst P HorstAntiquities Collecting
Twombly so loved history and antiquity that he amassed his own collection of sculptures and other artifacts while living in Rome. The old sculptures of his collection mingle effortlessly with his own new paintings and assemblages. The artist was a true fan of art, and history. Twombly knew was was not separate from history, but a part of it.
"I love my sculptures, and I was lucky I had them for 50 years because no one would look at them and I really liked having them around.”
—Cy Twombly
Twombly often used poets names, the names of Gods and Heros, or lines from their poetry directly his work. Abstracting the ideas further and further away from representational works to pure symbols.
This group of canvases inspired by a quote from the seventh-century-BCE choral lyric poet Alkman.
50 days at Illium — 1978
Here is an artist reveling in transforming these dusty stories from the birth of western civilization into crude, gut-wrenching tales of love and power and revenge. Giving the story of the Illiad new life in a new modern context. Twombly refreshes our connection to the past, sweeping away the cobwebs, drawing a bright red bleeding line from the past straight through us.
These are some of the biggest stories in all recorded history and so they are often returned to by artists in their own day. Each bringing the ideals and freshness of whatever time they find themselves in.
Victory 1987 - cast in 2005There is a haunting quality to Twombly’s sculptural work. These objects feel like they could be found in an attic or on the side of a trail. Self organizing or very deliberate. This gives the work an uncanny quality, as if these might be found accidentally in a walk in the woods, or a basement, a sidewalk.
Twombly used humble materials, plaster, found objects, discarded scraps of wood, and unpolished bronze.
These works seem to us, related to the Inuit stacked stone Inuksuit, which are built to show a safe place or path, in the wilderness. As a sign from those who came before us, wishing us well in the present. A message through time, not unlike stone carvings in a graveyard marking the dead.
The simplest from one can come to with materials at hand, in this case, raw materials of an artists studio in the mid 20th century or later.
What I am trying to establish is—
that Modern Art isn’t dislocated, but something with roots, tradition, and continuity.
For myself, the past is the source.
—Cy Twombly
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