Letters of Transition: The “Mediterranean Effect” in Some of Cy Twombly’s Works

Abstract

AbstractIn 1957, four years after his first journey to Europe, Cy Twombly leaves New York City and crosses the Atlantic to live and work in Rome. Marked by uncertainty, especially in the beginning, the change of location affects the artist’s material practice and fosters within his work the emergence of what has often been called the “Mediterranean effect.” This essay examines this effect and critically questions its temporal logic. Cutting across media, it reflects on the artist’s process of making and relates his thinking articulated in a written statement with a staged photograph, a painterly graphic cycle and a set of collages. By drawing attention to previously unpublished letters, which evidence the artist’s reception of French symbolist poetics, in particular Stéphane Mallarmé’s use of blank space, it offers new insights for understanding how art making and writing initiate cross-cultural transfers and translate on the threshold between seemingly opposite worlds.Keywords: Temporalityprocess of makingmaterialityword and imageuncertaintyMallarméan poeticsblank spaceartist’s writingpainterly drawingcollage Notes1 Twombly’s unpublished letters to Ward (who had funded Twombly’s trip after several rejected applications for grants) are located in the Stable Gallery Records, Artist file: “Twombly, Cy,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. Varnedoe quotes excerpts from this correspondence in his essay and dates the above letter to October 1958. Cf. Kirk Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” in Cy Twombly: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 62, note 127.2 Thus, Twombly in one of his first letters after his arrival in Rome in 1957: “Had dinner with Gabriela, Toti & the Afros the other nite. […] The gallery situation is nil. Even Afro had to show at a Communist gallery on Babuino & there was hardly any response.” (Cited in the above). In Italy, Twombly was able to build on already existing contacts with intellectuals and artists such as Gabriella Drudi and Toti Scialoja. He also met, among others, the art patron Giorgio Franchetti, whose sister Tatiana he married in April 1959. Cf. Twombly, interview by Nicholas Serota, “History Behind the Thought,” in Cy Twombly. Cycles and Seasons, ed. Nicholas Serota (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 45.3 Roland Barthes, “The Wisdom of Art,” [French 1979] in idem, The Responsibility of Forms. Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 186. Translation modified by author.4 See, for example, Heiner Bastian, Cy Twombly. Bilder 1952–1976, Vol. 1 (Berlin i.a.: Propyläen-Verlag, 1978), 9–28, esp. 12–13; as well as Rosalind Krauss, “Cy’s Up,” Artforum (September 1994): 71–74, 118.5 Barthes, “The Wisdom of Art,” 187.6 Ibid., 185. The following quotations from Barthes ibid. (with modified translations).7 Barthes refers to Aristotelian Poetics, which requires not only the unity of myth but also the causally logical structure of beginning, middle and end that is supposed to shape the plot, cf. Aristotle, “On Poetics,” trans. Seth Benardete and Michael Davis (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2002), 24–25; as well as Manfred Pfister, Das Drama. Theorie und Analyse (Munich: Fink, 1997), 267–268, 331.8 An in-depth analysis of the text had been lacking. Gottfried Boehm examines the first sections of the text, but takes the 1961 translation into German (probably by Manfred de la Motte) as a basis. The latter is problematic because it very freely uses, among other things, “innocence” as a synonym for “whiteness” – an equivalence that does not occur in the original English. Cf. Gottfried Boehm, “Orte der Verwandlung,” in Cy Twombly. Bild, Text, Paratext, ed. Thierry Greub (Munich: Fink, 2014), 64–65; as well as Cy Twombly, “Malerei bestimmt das Gebilde,” Blätter und Bilder. Zeitschrift für Dichtung, Musik, Malerei 12 (January–February 1961), 62–63. The following English-language quotations are from the first publication: “Documenti di una nuova figurazione: Toti Scialoja, Gastone Novelli, Pierre Alechinsky, Achille Perilli, Cy Twombly,” L’esperienza moderna 2 (August–September 1957), 32.9 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” [1952] in idem, The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959), 23–39, here: 25. Rosenberg understands the painting process as the artist’s search for identity.10 That the use of quotation marks renders the word “contaminated” questionable and conflates it with the process of essentialization is pointed out by Kate Nesin, Cy Twombly’s Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 64–65.11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception [French 1945], trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2005), 175.12 Ibid.13 Twombly, L’esperienza moderna, 32.14 Twombly, in an interview with David Sylvester, described the painting process in a way that (despite the large time gap) follows almost seamlessly from his earlier remarks: “It’s instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it’s like coming through the nervous system. It’s like a nervous system. It’s not described, it’s happening. The feeling is going on with the task. The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning. It’s like I’m experiencing something frightening, I’m experiencing the thing and I have to be at that state because I’m also going.” David Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” in idem, Interviews with American Artists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 179.15 Cf. Twombly, “History Behind the Thought,” 52.16 Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 31.17 Twombly, “History Behind the Thought,” 52.18 Susan Stewart, The Open Studio. Essays on Art and Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), as cited by Mary Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly. Poetry in Paint (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 85.19 Roland Barthes, “Cy Twombly: Works on Paper,” [French 1979] in idem, The Responsibility of Forms, 172.20 Cf. ibid., 173. Translation modified.21 Cited in Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 62, note 116.22 In no other extant letter to Ward does Twombly end with a correspondingly peculiar lettering.23 Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems, trans. Henry Weinfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 124–145.24 Stéphane Mallarmé, “Observation relative au poème ‘Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard’,” [1897] in Mallarmé. Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 391–392, here: 391. The English translation reads: “The ‘blanks,’ in effect, assume importance and are what is immediately most striking […].” Mallarmé, Collected Poems, 121.25 Ibid.26 Cf. Hjorvadur Arnason, Robert Motherwell (New York: Abrams, 1982), 235.27 Mallarmé. Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, 663.28 Stephanie Terenzio, ed., The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 217.29 Marcel Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism (trans. of the French edition from 1947) (New York: Wittenborn, 1950), 27.30 Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik. Von Baudelaire bis zur Gegenwart (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956), 92.31 Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism, 27–28.32 Shortly before Twombly left for Italy in 1957, the works he had produced up to that time, including the large-scale painting Panorama, were shown at the Stable Gallery. The exhibition is followed by a scathing review by the critic Alfred Frankfurter, who sees the paintings as an expression of an “utter nihilism” (cf. idem, “The voyages of Dr. Caligari through time and space,” Art News 55, 9 (1957): 29–31, 64–65). Twombly’s statement in L’esperienza moderna seems to respond implicitly and without naming names to precisely this accusation.33 Henry Lapauze, “Revue des revues. Un poème de M. Stéphane Mallarmé (Cosmopolis),” [1897] in Mallarmé. Collection Mémoire de la critique, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1998), 447. “[… ] this magazine [Cosmopolis] publishes ten pages of Mr. Mallarmé today. Incidentally, they are completely incomprehensible and precisely for this reason are indeed important. They are called: Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard. Mr. Mallarmé himself felt the need to explain his poem to us: Unfortunately, the commentary is of such obscurity that we must refrain from understanding the mysterious beauties within them.”34 Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik, 86.35 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 80.36 The works discussed here include two more ‘similar’ ones, as well as a series of collages in which the notebooks are replaced by sheets of paper as grounds. See Nicola Del Roscio, ed., Cy Twombly: Drawings; Catalague Raisonné, vol. 1, 1951–1955 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2011), 198, nos. 164–165; as well as 185–197, nos. 149–163.37 Barthes, “The Wisdom of Art,” 186. Translation modified.38 “the signature is showing signs of fading” – according to the note in Del Roscio, ed., Cy Twombly: Drawings; Cat. Rais., vol. 1, 199, no. 167.39 Cf. Giorgio Agamben’s remarks on Twombly’s sculptures: “This is what Twombly’s gesture is like in those extreme sculptures where it is as if every ascension has been inverted and broken, almost thresholds between doing and not doing: beauty that falls.” Idem, “Beauty that Falls,” [Ital. 1998] reprint in Nicola Del Roscio, ed., Writings on Cy Twombly (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2002), 283.40 Achim Hochdörfer, “‘Blue goes out, B comes in.’ Cy Twomblys Narration der Unbestimmtheit,” in Cy Twombly. States of Mind, Malerei, Skulptur, Fotografie, Zeichnung, ed. Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2009), 22.41 Cy Twombly. Cycles and Seasons, 78–81. The London hanging can be seen in a video by the Dulwich Picture Gallery: youtube.com/watch?v = 9-Rukq7Px6w (00:14:04) (accessed June 30, 2023).42 Sotheby’s auction catalogue, Contemporary Art Evening Auction, New York (November 13) 2013, 138–145.43 Leo Steinberg, “Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public,” [1962] in idem, Other Criteria. Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 15.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAnne-Grit Becker Translated from German by Jacob Watson Originally published as “Briefe, Gedichte und zwei Collagen. Twombly und der ‘mediterrane Effekt’,” in Cy Twombly und Robert Rauschenberg. Bilder im Prozess (Munich: edition metzel, 2020), 152–177.