Yes, your kid could (probably) do this
Cy Twombly imagined Alexander the Great’s legendary victory as a hastily scrawled diagram
With its fanning lines and scrawled numbers suggesting troop movements, Cy Twombly’s “Synopsis of a Battle (Primary Title)” (1968) evokes a military diagram dashed off on a blackboard — a blackboard still holding the erasures of previous diagrams, earlier slaughters.
In fact, it’s an oil painting with wax crayon marks, about 80 by 100 inches, and it alludes to a particular conflict: the Battle of Issus (333 B.C.), in which Alexander the Great defeated Darius of Persia’s much larger army. (The word “ISSUS” appears in the top-left corner).
Twombly was a poet of belatedness — the feeling that you’ve arrived after the party is over. He rose to prominence in the aftermath of Jackson Pollock. If Pollock made painting feel like an event, like the performance of some extraordinarily intense and concentrated action, Twombly was alive to the ways in which so much of life takes place in the aftermath of events.
Not only life, but art, too, and perhaps especially modern art: There was no going back, he realized, to the days of Velázquez or Titian, or indeed to Albrecht Altdorfer, the German who painted the astonishing “The Battle of Alexander at Issus” in 1529.
Twombly’s restive, twitchy marks are cryptic, conjuring both the fog of battle and an atmosphere of human and creative fade-out. The “math” part of “aftermath” is old German for “mowing.” And there’s a sense in which Twombly’s work relates to the Old Masters as a field of stubble relates to a golden wheat field in high summer.
Although Twombly becomes more popular every year, for many people, his work is just indulgent scribble, a travesty of painting. He is a perennial target of those who get aroused by the idea of the Emperor’s New Clothes. But I find his best work intensely moving.
Born and raised in Virginia, he traveled as a young man to Italy, Spain and North Africa with Robert Rauschenberg. Years later, he moved to Gaeta, on the coast between Rome and Naples, where he ended up spending about half of each year. The other half he spent in Lexington, Va. (This painting is owned by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.)
Both Virginia and Italy are soaked, of course, in history — including military history. Odes and epics were written about the events that took place there. In Italy, Twombly became more and more attuned to Mediterranean history and mythology. He registered, as does anyone who travels there, the past existence of a shared conception of the world involving gods, demigods and heroes — a worldview utterly alien to our contemporary preoccupation with profit margins and metrics, and the coins of publicity and complaint.
We expect the art and poetry of the distant past to be focused on great people and passionate acts, whereas the focus in our modern, disenchanted era is more likely to be on the everyday. (Think of the movement from Homer’s “Odyssey” to James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”) Twombly conjured with the aura of earlier times. But rather than paint passionate lovers at a bacchanal, he attuned himself to the poetry of the clothes they left strewn on the floor.
How, he asked, does the graffiti scrawled by delinquents spat out by a 20th-century democracy relate to a 2,000-year-old Corinthian column, a Roman bath, an Egyptian sphinx? What does a general’s battle plan look like, pulled out from under the rubble of a ransacked palace?
Twombly was not, I think, a reactionary, pathetically nostalgic for the good old days. He simply understood that belatedness is part of the human condition. (The imperial French felt it in relation to the Romans; the Romans in relation to the Greeks; the Greeks in relation to the Egyptians.) It was as if he wanted to excavate some secret, friable essence of the past and — like an ancient object preserved in an airtight tomb that disintegrates the moment it is exposed to the air — watch it sink back into the mulch of the modern.
Great Works, In Focus
Yes, your kid could (probably) do this
Cy Twombly imagined Alexander the Great’s legendary victory as a hastily scrawled diagram
With its fanning lines and scrawled numbers suggesting troop movements, Cy Twombly’s “Synopsis of a Battle (Primary Title)” (1968) evokes a military diagram dashed off on a blackboard — a blackboard still holding the erasures of previous diagrams, earlier slaughters.
In fact, it’s an oil painting with wax crayon marks, about 80 by 100 inches, and it alludes to a particular conflict: the Battle of Issus (333 B.C.), in which Alexander the Great defeated Darius of Persia’s much larger army. (The word “ISSUS” appears in the top-left corner).
Twombly was a poet of belatedness — the feeling that you’ve arrived after the party is over. He rose to prominence in the aftermath of Jackson Pollock. If Pollock made painting feel like an event, like the performance of some extraordinarily intense and concentrated action, Twombly was alive to the ways in which so much of life takes place in the aftermath of events.
Not only life, but art, too, and perhaps especially modern art: There was no going back, he realized, to the days of Velázquez or Titian, or indeed to Albrecht Altdorfer, the German who painted the astonishing “The Battle of Alexander at Issus” in 1529.
Twombly’s restive, twitchy marks are cryptic, conjuring both the fog of battle and an atmosphere of human and creative fade-out. The “math” part of “aftermath” is old German for “mowing.” And there’s a sense in which Twombly’s work relates to the Old Masters as a field of stubble relates to a golden wheat field in high summer.
Although Twombly becomes more popular every year, for many people, his work is just indulgent scribble, a travesty of painting. He is a perennial target of those who get aroused by the idea of the Emperor’s New Clothes. But I find his best work intensely moving.
Born and raised in Virginia, he traveled as a young man to Italy, Spain and North Africa with Robert Rauschenberg. Years later, he moved to Gaeta, on the coast between Rome and Naples, where he ended up spending about half of each year. The other half he spent in Lexington, Va. (This painting is owned by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.)
Both Virginia and Italy are soaked, of course, in history — including military history. Odes and epics were written about the events that took place there. In Italy, Twombly became more and more attuned to Mediterranean history and mythology. He registered, as does anyone who travels there, the past existence of a shared conception of the world involving gods, demigods and heroes — a worldview utterly alien to our contemporary preoccupation with profit margins and metrics, and the coins of publicity and complaint.
We expect the art and poetry of the distant past to be focused on great people and passionate acts, whereas the focus in our modern, disenchanted era is more likely to be on the everyday. (Think of the movement from Homer’s “Odyssey” to James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”) Twombly conjured with the aura of earlier times. But rather than paint passionate lovers at a bacchanal, he attuned himself to the poetry of the clothes they left strewn on the floor.
How, he asked, does the graffiti scrawled by delinquents spat out by a 20th-century democracy relate to a 2,000-year-old Corinthian column, a Roman bath, an Egyptian sphinx? What does a general’s battle plan look like, pulled out from under the rubble of a ransacked palace?
Twombly was not, I think, a reactionary, pathetically nostalgic for the good old days. He simply understood that belatedness is part of the human condition. (The imperial French felt it in relation to the Romans; the Romans in relation to the Greeks; the Greeks in relation to the Egyptians.) It was as if he wanted to excavate some secret, friable essence of the past and — like an ancient object preserved in an airtight tomb that disintegrates the moment it is exposed to the air — watch it sink back into the mulch of the modern.