Cy Twombly. Exhibition poster , 2000 

Interview: Cy Twombly & Review: The Sculpture, Kunstmuseum Basel.

CY TWOMBLY: I'm southern and Italy is southern. Actually, it wasn't all that scholarly, my reason for going to Rome. I liked the life. That came first. And the background of architecture, which is one of my many passions, a great background. And, you know, I went to Rome in the fifties, which was a whole other world from what it is now. It's not the same city. In a sense, the life is totally different. It had more space, you could see it and you could enjoy it. Now you just plough through just trying to get to where you're trying to go with the least stress. It's wall to wall. If I went to Rome now, I wouldn't spend two days. But when I went I was in paradise.

Probably even more than the architecture I'd be drawn to landscape. That's my first love, landscape.

DAVID SYLVESTER: And what sort of landscape especially?

CT: All kinds of landscape, if it's not cluttered up and vandalised. Yesterday we went out to Blenheim, and I love the flatness and the trees. I like all kinds. And where I'm from, the central valley of Virginia, is not one of the most exciting landscapes in the world, but it's one of the most beautiful. It's very beautiful because it has everything. It has mountains, there are streams, there are fields, beautiful trees. And architecture sits very well in it.

And I've always lived in the south of Italy, because it's more excitable. It's volcanic. The land affects people naturally, that's part of the characteristics, for me, of a people, in a sense. Say, if you lived in the Sahara or you lived in Naples or you lived in the Alps, all these things create a main condition, beside poverty, the states of poverty. Do you think so? Maybe it's that a lot of people aren't particularly attracted to nature. A lot of people have no knowledge of plants, trees, botany and things. I knew a poet who was totally ignorant about botany. And I said: you can't be a poet without knowing any botany or plants and things like that; it's impossible, that's the first thing you should know.

DS: I think the landscape that has moved me the most is the Greek

CT:Yes, you see, that's so strong.

DS: I like the hardness of it. But I was also very moved by India, the enormous breadth of it and the light of it, and the expanse.

CT: The expanse is so beautiful, and then the river goes off in the distance like the music; there's a vast bucolic space to it, on and on. But India is one of the most fascinating countries because in half an hour you can be totally in another world - physically, culturally and everything. Architecture can change, the people can change and the landscape first of all in any direction. In America you have to go long distances to see any change in anything. Well, I have a nostalgia now for northern Europe at this time of the year when there are the white nights in Russia. I love to go to St Petersburg during the winter nights at the end of June. The Russians are really nostalgic for nature. They have a love of the land. Every time you see a book on Leningrad or anything there's architecture, but a third of it is always going to be the gardens and the nature and the flowers. Anywhere there's a grave of a poet or a painter there's always fresh flowers put. Pushkin. I like that; it's probably nineteenth-century but it has a wonderful kind of sentiment to it.

I've found when you get old you must return to certain things in the beginning, or things you have a sentiment for or something. Because your life closes up in so many ways or doesn't become as flexible or exciting or whatever you want to call it. You tend to be nostalgic. And I think about my boats. It's more complicated than that, but also it's going out and also there's a lot of references to crossing over. But the thing of the Nile boat in Winter's Passage: Luxor was about the wonderful thing, the lazy thing, of being two or three months in Luxor by the river. It was just that, it explains a winter passage. From a certain point to the other side: it's like the Greek boat that ferries you over to the other world. That sculpture didn't have it. But sometimes the large painting in Houston does have it. It's a passage through everything.

And I am very happy to have the boat motif because, when I grew up, in summer with my parents we were always in Massachusetts, and I was always by the sea. You know, sometimes little boys love cars, but I had a particular passion for boats, and now I live by the sea. For sure, it is a passage, but it's also very fascinating for lots of things. When you get interested in something you can find out a lot about things. You might meet people who are interested in one subject or another, like they collect palms. I've found people from all over the world who were fanatical about palms, which you wouldn't know unless you were interested in palms. And the sea: because, if you've noticed, the sea is white three quarters of the time, just white - early morning. Only in the fall does it get blue, because the haze is gone. The Mediterranean, at least - the Atlantic is brown - is just always white, white, white. And then, even when the sun comes up, it becomes a lighter white. Only in the fall is the Mediterranean this beautiful blue colour, as in Greece. Not because I paint it white; I'd have painted it white even if it wasn't, but I am always happy that I might have. It's something that has other consciousness behind it.

DS: When you were young, were the boats that especially interested you river boats or sea-going boats?

CT: They were fishing boats usually, because I was always down at Gloucester where the Portuguese had the fishing boats off the Grand banks. But there are millions of inlets, all of New England is inlets; it's not a straight coast, it's thousands of miles of inlets. They're always full of boats, row boats, sail boats, every kind of boat.

DS: When you did the very large painting which you talked about before and which you finally called Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the shores of Asia Minor, did you have the idea when you were working on it, or quite early in working on it, that it was about this thing of passage?

CT: No, no, I don't think it had. There were certain areas that were always there. I wanted to use Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, which is just everything, and I got very excited about it. I got different copies; I got a second edition, because I like to have the material that's as close as possible to when it was done: you're absorbing, a kind of instinct or something. And then work went on so long and never got anywhere too much. It was hanging in a big room in Rome, two side panels on one wall; it's four meters tall and sixteen metres long. Then I decided I had to call it after a Keats poem and I liked it. Sometimes I like a title to give me impetus or a direction or a feel for the way it should go. Sometimes it changes. Because it had already taken five or six years - not working for three of them - I thought it had taken so long, it was languid and I wanted to call it On the Mists of Idleness. I think it's the title of a poem; it might be a line.

DS: I don't remember that there's a Keats poem with that title, but I could be wrong or perhaps it's a line or a phrase. But actually I suspect that it's your own conflation of two different lines of his: 'Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness' and 'The blissful cloud of summer-indolence'.

CT: Well the painting went on and finally it was painted and, because I had to pass by it every day, I took it down. And then on that wall the original windows were reopened so that there was no place ever to hang it. And when they did my gallery in Houston, I thought I'd just send it back to America and maybe in one of the warehouses I could finish it. Then I went to Virginia and a friend of mine had a warehouse just near my house and I said, 'Oh, let's ship the painting to Lexington and all the paint', and I did it there, all sort of one winter. And so all the images of boats, they're like prehistoric things, and there's a beautiful Celtic boat with lots of oars. That had started a couple of years before. I had already read Catullus, and the image came that is one of the really beautiful lines. I very much like Catullus and you can just visualise his brother by reading that line. You know the line: 'Say goodbye, Catullus, to the shores of Asia Minor.' It's so beautiful. Just all that part of the world I love. The sound of 'Asia Minor' is really like a rush to me, like a fantastic ideal. In most paintings I never even have titles. But in certain ones I really have to have them.

DS: And the title come while your working?

CT: No, just sometimes. Always before this something happens, like those early paintings - Criticism and Free Wheeler and those all-over paintings. Jasper Johns and Bob Rauschenburg were there. We were going to show the work and we made a list and then gave the titles to the different paintings.

DS: But after they already existed?

CT: The paintings existed. But when I did Four Seasons I was planning to do The Four Seasons. And I wanted specifically each season to be distinct.

DS: But were you saying before that sometimes, while you're working on a painting, a title comes and then that title influences how you go on with the painting. Did you say that just now or did I misunderstand you?

CT: No, in the large paintings it changed, but actually I didn't have an idea of which one of the three titles it would be until at Houston I decided on Catullus. Everything is very flexible; it is with me and very quick in changing. Although I must say I have a certain order in my mind, but as far as painting goes there's enormous - probably more than with a lot of people - freedom. Because I have to get in a state of mind. And that's why I've slowed down.

Before, I used to smoke and look, because smoking is very conducive to stimulating the mind. Finally I had to stop because it was overstimulating my lungs. I sort of work off and on and I usually paint eight hours and never eat. And I might have some wine to stimulate a free passage of thought. And I used to have always music playing. What is that painting of mine in Philadelphia? Is it Fifty Days in Iliam? It's very strange, no one has ever mentioned it. Have you ever seen it? Well it's one of a large group of paintings. It's called Fifty Days in Iliam; I spelt it I-L-I-A-M, which is not correct. It's U-M. But I wanted that, I wanted the A for Achilles; I always think of A as Achilles; I wanted the A there and no one ever wrote and told me that I had misspelt Ilium. I'm saying anyone in America.

DS: So what did they do, just change the title or leave it?

CT: No they still called it Iliam, but no one ever noticed that.

DS: They may have noticed it but been too polite to say because they thought you were making a mistake.

CT: Or no one cares. But Iliam was for the A in Achilles, because I did that Vengeance of Achilles with the A shape. Also it's the Achilles thing and the shape of the A has a phallic aggression - more like a rocket. It's pointed. The Vengeance of Achilles is very aggressive. My whole energy will work, and instruments and things will have a very definite male thrust. The male thing is the phallus, and what way to describe the symbol for a man than the phallus, no? Also it comes into the boat. I always make a direction that's pointed: it goes out and it's difficult to use sometimes, because it goes one way, from left to right, but it deals with subject matter that probably has a certain sensuality. The female is usually the heart or a soft shape, and certainly very painterly. There's a lot of tactile paint in those...you know which ones? Some of them got very heavy, like the last of the series called Ferragosto. It really gets heavy because paint is a certain thing. I don't have a dislike for it, but those paintings, for instance were done in August in terrific heat in Rome. All my things, every one of them, show a certain agitation. And I have a certain kind of knowledge of things. And there are certain elements that I use. This double image like the brown paint, it's verbal. There's a Jungian example of a small child. It's based on the use of words, how you effect the child.

The child is in the bathroom and the father gets very anxious. So he goes to the door and says 'What are you making?' and she says 'Four horses and a carriage'. She was making a sculpture. Because children have that. It's a sort of infantile thing, painting. Paint in a sense is a certain infantile thing. I mean in the handling. I start out using a brush but then I can't take the time because the idea doesn't correspond, it gets stuck when the brush goes out of paint in a certain length of time. So I have to go back and by then I might have lost the rest of it. So I take my hand and I do it. Or I have those wonderful things that came in later: paintsticks. Because the pencil also breaks if the canvas is too rough. So I had to find things that I could use, like my hands or the paintsticks. I can carry through the impetus till it stops. It's continual. I mean, I'm talking about specifics, the heavy kind. And also, when I talked about the Jungian thing...I use earth things and certain human things as symbols for earth - like it might be excrement but it's earth. And I did those charts, big palettes...two or three paintings with palettes and all of the colours - pink, flesh, brown, red for blood. And I think with most painters you can think and it can change very fast, the impetus of what something is. 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.

I don't know how to handle it. Pollock, when you see him working... To me, Pollock is the height of American painting. It's very lyrical. Gorky, who is very passionate, can copy a drawing or take a drawing and copy it exactly as a painting, and Miro can too, it's amazing. Miro can do a drawing to paint and that's another training in a sense. So there's a certain mannerism that comes in both of them, and probably everything becomes obvious in time. But I don't have that. The line is illustrated or the colour. I'm sure it has great feeling when they're doing it, but it's more towards defining something. It has a certain clarity because it's a complex thing. I'm a painter and my whole balance is not having to think about things. So all I think about is painting. It's the instinct for the placement where all that happens. I don't have to think about it. So I don't think of composition; I don't think of colour here and there. Sometimes I alter something after. So all I could think is the rush. This is in certain things and even up to now, like The Four Seasons, those are pretty emotionally done paintings. And I have a hard time now because I can get mentally ill. I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days. Physically I can't handle it, and I can't build myself. You know, my mind goes blank. It's totally blank. I cannot sit and make an image. I cannot make a picture unless everything is working. It's like a state.

DS: Like a state. Ecstatic?

CT: Ecstatic, exactly. I'm usually in a very good humour, except that I can be a little violent if it's going bad. If I'm making a mess I get a little sadistic with the paint, but usually I'm enjoying myself. It's more like I'm having an experience than making a picture. So I've never had anyone around. I never have. People are different, but I have to really be with no interference. And it takes me hours. Painting a picture is a very short thing if it goes well, but the sitting and thinking...I usually go off on stories that have nothing to do with the painting, and sometimes I sit in the opposite room to where I work. If I can get a good hot story I can paint better, but sometimes I'm not thinking about the painting, I'm thinking about the subject. Lots of times I'll sit in another room and then I might just go in. It takes a lot of freedom. I'm working for two years on a subject now: ten paintings, and that can carry on for two years. I worked last summer and I started this summer and with just the simplest motif I just can't seem to do it. And everything slowed down. The sculptures: I don't know, because I like the singularity of them. And I might be able to do sculptures, but the painting is less and less.

DS: Going back, which word is more accurate, 'ecstasy' or 'trance'?

CT: That I don't know. If you're a saint, maybe 'ecstasy'. Well, you know, trance and ecstasy are slightly different. Ecstasy is a little more overt; trance is more passive, more dreamy, and so you're lost; whereas with ecstasy all kinds of images can come in - fireworks, Jesus and what have you.

DS: So 'trance' was wrong; 'ecstasy' was better?

CT: Probably better just to say 'excitable'.

DS: Well 'rush' was pretty good.

CT: 'Rush.' But that is such a contemporary word. I think that's even in a young culture, driving fast in a car or jumping off those bridges and things. It's a rush I guess. But 'rush' to me is too focused. Whereas it's the instinct and the motion and the whole all together. And it functions in different directions. It's not the focus. It goes beyond. It's something else where everything runs together. If you're in that state all the time you'd be dizzy, you'd fall down.

DS: And the sculpture is more tranquil?

CT: It's a whole other state. And it's a building thing. Whereas the painting is more fusing - fusing of ideas, fusing of feelings, fusing projected on atmosphere.

Copyright 2001 The David Sylvester Literary Trust.

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The White Originals - Cy Twombly, The Sculpture.

The first comprehensive overview of Cy Twombly's sculpture, a body of work that spans the years from 1946 to the present, is currently at the Basel Kunstmuseum, in an exhibition the author views as a work of art in itself.

Some painter-sculptors come to sculpture late--Renoir, Newman, de Kooning. A more common pattern for them is to start when quite young making sculpture that is hardly shown till they are old--Matisse, Picasso--or dead--Degas. One of Twombly's earliest recorded works in any medium is an assemblage made in 1946, when he was 18. His known sculptural oeuvre includes about 150 pieces, yet no more than 20 of them had been seen together in public before the current exhibition, "Cy Twombly: The Sculpture," at the Kunstmuseum, Basel, to July 30.

In one of the catalogue texts, Christian Klemm reports that Twombly has said he finds making sculpture "comes more easily to him than painting pictures. With a painting he has to create the body of the work from scratch, every time, on the canvas; in sculpture, the inclusion of found objects means that the thing starts off with an existence, an objecthood, of its own. Sometimes such objects offer themselves to him; sometimes they are brought to him by others."

So the process of making becomes more easygoing, more comfortable, when switched on by something given rather than hesitantly started by an unassisted projection of the artist's own energy onto the forbidding surface of a blank canvas. (Indeed, Twombly's frequent addition to his canvases of a word or words derived from mythology can be seen as an analogous aid--an alternative to collage as a pictorial equivalent for found objects.) The fact that he feels more relaxed and secure when doing sculpture is reflected in how the product's content overlaps less with that of his paintings than it does in the case of other painter-sculptors. Of course most of the fundamental esthetic qualities of the work are the same: the luminosity, the lightness and the energy of the form, the air of spontaneity, the nervousness of touch, the casual-looking execution, here the line that is flowing and yet taut, there a trembling stillness. But where the painting fuses euphoria and anguish and desire and panic, the sculpture is altogether more serene. It transmits delight--delight in things and in how light delights in things and things in light.

The exhibition is fantastic: great art, selection, installation, setting, and an admirable catalogue. It seems unlikely that the setting--one of whose advantages is rooms of a size that suit these sculptures ideally--and therefore the installation can be as totally right in the subsequent showings at Houston, Washington and Cologne. The Kunstmuseum at Basel is, of course, one of the world's most sympathetic art galleries, calm, beautifully daylit, handsome in its proportions. Moreover, the director, Katharina Schmidt, is in the course of making striking improvements to the building, and these have been completed on the top floor, which the exhibition occupies. The circuit, which is toplit, is rectangular: at each of the corners is a sizable room with entrances in two adjacent walls; the rectangle's shorter sides have a single stone-floored space, one a foyer, the other the only room with windows, while the longer sides each have an enfilade of five small rooms; there are thus five large and ten small galleries in the circuit. Schmidt has clarified the daylighting and has initiated the removal from the museum's walls of the gray open-weave fabric which had previously been an acceptable but not inspiring background. She has painted the bared surfaces a radiant warm pale gray that looks more like an emanation than an application of pigment and is highly responsive to the changes in the light.

The furnishing of the galleries is worthy of the setting and the art. The pedestals, made in a light wood painted almost transparently in white, are the most unobtrusive I can remember seeing. And there are no Perspex or glass boxes surrounding the sculptures and nullifying their aura, so looking at the works does not become comparable to having a bath with one's socks on. Eschewing such boxes was a marvelously brave thing to do, given the fragility of these particular sculptures. But there's a small price to pay. As at the Brancusi exhibition at the Pompidou a few years ago, the works are protected by electronic alarms which go off as soon as someone gets too near. At the Pompidou the reaction was a series of loud short sharp high-pitched blasts; here it's a discreet hum, but it does recur a great deal.

The curators of the exhibition are Katharina Schmidt, who has also written the main catalogue text, and Paul Winkler, who, when director of the Menil Collection, was the moving spirit behind the creation of the Twombly Gallery there. But the artist also has been an active collaborator--rarely a good thing for retrospective exhibitions, because nine artists out of 10 insist on putting in too many works: their works are their children, and they don't like to see them left out in the cold. On this occasion, however, the collaboration functioned beautifully from the start. Each of the participants compiled a list of desiderata--a task made feasible by the recent publication of Nicola del Roscio's catalogue raisonne of the 147 sculptures made up until 1997--and their lists turned out to be of almost the same length and composition. The eventual choice comprised 66 items of which seven were bronzes and the rest original plasters, as they tend to get called (but loosely, because the most dominant material in these works is in fact not plaster but wood painted white). The catalogue preface therefore elegantly describes them as "the white originals."

The actual installation was largely done by Twombly. His modus operandi was to gather all the pieces together in a space apart and proceed to improvise the selection and placing, room by room; there was not even a preconception as to how many of the 15 possible rooms would be used. When Twombly got to the end, without any intervention of second thoughts, all the rooms had been filled. He then retraced his steps making minor adjustments. The result is a work of art, an unfolding of themes and variations in rhythms that constantly break curatorial rules. The mind behind it is emphatically the mind behind the individual works, a mind at once offhand and precise, with an uncanny instinctive sense of esthetic rightness and the discretion and discrimination that make for his rare knack of never producing a sculpture that is bigger than it ought to be.

Room 1, a corner room, brings together nine of the 10 small pieces in the exhibition which were made between 1946 and 1959 (10 of the 22 illustrated by del Roscio). Many of them suggest ritual objects of a kind that stand like monstrances on an altar. These include the row of sticks bound together and stood upright on a base (in both its first and second versions), the pair of palm-leaf fans on stalks standing on a base, and the artificial leaf resembling a scallop shell which is painted blood red and placed on a small base on top of a somewhat larger base and then on a big block.

Room 2 takes up the story at the point where Twombly resumed making sculpture in 1976, henceforth producing abstractions rather than totems. It contains two works, both of which could be said to be about simply placing one thing on another. The first, made in 1976, is a vertical cardboard tube surmounted by another with a smaller bore. The second, made in 1978, is a box the size of a wine crate surmounted by another the size of a cigar box surmounted by a hand-sized piece of rough wood which slopes because one end of it is supported by a smaller piece of wood. This apposition of two elements meeting at an angle of about 15 or 20 degrees is one of the most recurrent configurations in Twombly's sculpture, one that takes many elements: for example, sometimes the angle is between two planes, as it is here, sometimes between two batons or strips; again, sometimes the elements are horizontal, as they are here, sometimes vertical.

Room 3 is the first to bring together sculptures of widely different dates. In the near left corner is an example, dating from 1989, of the abstract surrogates for a Giacometti standing figure, here a clean-cut vertical wooden baton stuck into an amorphous lump of plaster. Over to the right is one of the biggest sculptures, Orpheus (1979): on a long pedestal surmounted by a long low block is a tall vertical lath from the top of which a curved lath sweeps down, looking like one half of a suspension bridge. Here again, then, we see two forms meeting at a narrow angle, except that this time one of them is curved. In the far left corner is a sort of Pandora's box, Epitaph (1992), a cubic container with a lid bearing a handwritten inscription that is half open to reveal a pile of amorphous plaster which suggests a mass of teeming, threatening organic life. Thus the two smaller works present a contrast between smooth and rough, while the large one is all smoothness.

Room 4 presents a trio of variations on that theme of forms meeting at a narrow angle. To the left is a piece that is wondrous in its elongated horizontality, with the sloping line a long, shallow curve: an abstract version of an Etruscan chariot, it's the sleekest of conveyances and a penetrating engine of assault. More or less straight ahead is a very simple and rigid tall vertical piece with a sloping plank leaning back against a vertical one, a configuration immediately evocative of an Egyptian walking figure. In the right-hand near corner is a work like an architectural model in which right angles are contrasted with one sloping plane; here for once the slope is at 45 degrees.

Room 5 contains two works. Twombly told me that he personally would have preferred to isolate The Keeper of Sheep, 1980 (one of two biggish pieces with that title). It presents a sloping staff, presumably a shepherd's, at the foot of which is a small vertical wheel made of parallel palm-leaf fans, the gap between which may suggest a sexual slit: the whole construction recalls the lever of a railway switch and induces a strong desire to take hold of it. The other piece, one of the few in the exhibition to include a bright area of color, again a blood red, suggests an altar on which a sacrifice has just been consummated.

Room 6 includes one of the most tenuous of the sculptures: a palm-leaf fan attached to a block. The other two pieces are emphatically heavyset: a complicated form of box and a block with a very roughly shaped fragment of a thick plank, rather like a flatfish, lying on top of it. It is inscribed: "In time the wind will come and destroy my Lemons."

Room 7 is a corner room and concludes the first enfilade, the vista for which has been a chunky sort of chariot, different from others here in having a smooth surface and clean-cut contours: seen frontally it looks like a bishop's miter. The other five works include some vertical pieces, some lumps of plaster evocative of Medardo Rosso, and By the Ionian Sea (1987), the most complex, with its variously angled parts, and most poetic of Twombly's horizontal compositions.

Room 8, the long stone-floored gallery with windows on both sides, is arranged as an avenue. On the left are three chunky pieces of which the first and third are a chariot, in plaster and bronze versions, while the one in the middle is a more amorphous plaster mound. On the right are a Giacometti-standing-figure surrogate in which the vertical element is of wood, the angled element of wire; a related work in which the vertical and the leaning parts are both rigid; and a more complex version of the piece in Room 4 that suggests Egypt.

Room 9 is a corner room with a vista provided by a piece which from a distance looks like a blowup of one of those Giacometti sculptures of the early 1940s in which a tiny figure surmounts a comparatively huge base. When we get near we are not surprised to find that the figure is a simple stick but may be surprised to find that the apparent base is a slightly sloping plank. Among the other five pieces here are two compositions that are each shown in two versions--the original assemblage and a bronze cast. These very frontal works are Twombly's most obviously monumental sculptures. One, an untitled piece dating from 1985, is like a tombstone in which a relatively smooth rectangular slab is surmounted by a rough-surfaced semicircular slab which seems, especially in the bronze, to be melting like candle wax: Rosso again. The other, Rotalla (1986), is made from two barrel lids, one standing at the back, the other bisected and hinged, with its top half leaning against the upright lid and its bottom half on the ground. In bronze the work is picturesque; in white-painted wood it is iconic.

Room 10 has two closely related pieces reminiscent of young trees. Room 11 continues the vegetal theme in three works about flowers. Two of them are again bronze and plaster versions of the same image, Thermopylae, four separate blooms with their stalks rooted in a large mound. Actually the two versions are different in form as well as texture: in the bronze the stalks are in a state of intense erection; in the plaster they are slightly wilting.

Room 12 contains three pieces, one of which is among Twombly's grandest quasi-architectural models, Ctesiphon, a combination of Sassanian and Roman arches. Two of the three works in Room 13 are plaster pieces that are not at all amorphous but precisely formed. The three works in Room 14 include one of the most unformed of the plaster mounds and its counterpart, a large white wooden piece consisting simply of a long diagonal strip supported halfway up by a short vertical strip--a sleeping form and one that is perfectly alert.

Room 15, a corner room housing six works, presents one vista for the preceding enfilade and another for the empty hall that follows. The first, which is the second Keeper of Sheep, dating from 1992, is a tall Giacometti-like standing figure which evokes its prototype with particular directness. The second seems to have a similar simple verticality when seen through the portal, but within the room shows itself to be jointed and angled. The other works include two of Twombly's finest horizontal compositions: Vulci Chronicle (1995), in which the found parts are sliced-up pieces of palm fronds and which seem a deliberate evocation of Giacometti's Surrealist piece Model for a Piazza; and Winter's Passage: Luxor (1985), with its sloping stick of wood on a concave plank, a stick that is both the mast of a boat and a schema for Giacometti's walking figurine on a long slab.

The frequent echoes of Giacometti and Medardo Rosso detract no more from the insolent originality of Twombly's sculptures than echoes of de Kooning and Pollock detract from that of his paintings. The originality resides in an acute awareness of how little an artist can dare to do in the course of creating great art. Some cursory scribbles scattered across the surface of a canvas can invest it with life and balance and light; a few lengths of wood put together with seeming carelessness and painted white can present a construction vibrant with life and balance and light. Twombly does as little as possible. The reductiveness is not didactic, as it is with John Cage when he induces us to look at nuances that are usually overlooked. It is more like the economy of effort of an athlete, an economy partly instinctive, partly learned--the economy of the tennis or squash player who turns to his own advantage the speed his opponent has imparted to the ball. Twombly cultivates a garden where the spadework has been done by others. Giacometti and Rosso are not so much influences as sources for finds, archeological sites. Twombly takes Giacometti's walking figurine and reduces it to a single slanted piece of wood that has a still greater momentum than its prototype. His art is a shorthand whose signs call to mind existing images created by others which are loaded with meaning--meanings, often rooted in mythologies, that he probably intends, and meanings we see in them that he probably doesn't.

There are broadly two types of Twombly sculpture. On the one hand are the compact pieces. Some are shaped in plaster, often mixed with sand; some combine shaped plaster with found blocks of wood, as in the chunky chariots; some are assemblages of wooden elements partly coated in plaster, as with the melting tombstone. On the other hand are the articulated pieces. Most of them are transparent constructions made mainly from lengths of wood, but they can also be solid, as with Rotalla.

The articulated works are palpably as well as technically assemblages of used parts--as some of the compact pieces also are to a degree. Moreover, we have Twombly's testimony that appropriating found parts induces him to work. Nevertheless, the fact that a Twombly sculpture is an assemblage is not crucial to its esthetic impact. We do not as we look at it immediately respond, as we do with an assemblage by Schwitters or Picasso, to how its parts fit together--to the wit or the drama of their combination. Certainly, we are moved by a sense of the process of its formation, but much less than we are by its presence as an integral image.

These sculptures are paintings, too, when their ubiquitous white pigmentation becomes as essential to them as their structure. The paint here is not used as Giacometti used flesh-colored paint on some of his bronzes: to get a general effect, to lighten the annoying darkness of the bronze casts and recover some of the luminescence of plaster; Giacometti didn't use paint to create inflections of the form, for these were already there in the solid matter he had worked. Sometimes Twombly, too, depends entirely on his modeling of the plaster to create the form--as in the upper part of the piece I allude to as the melting tombstone. More often he depends on his painting of the surface to complete the form. In Winter's Passage: Luxor, the contours of the stick figure seem to be dissolving into space, not because, as with a Giacometti, the solid matter is so formed as to suggest this, but because it has been painted to give an illusion of that phenomenon through tonal variation. The form of the sculpture is completed by the illusionistic effect of the painting. But above all that white paint is a materialization of light.

"White paint is my marble," says Twombly, who for more than 40 years has been living in Rome surrounded by marble columns. But his early life was spent--as part of each year is now spent--among the Neo-Classical columns of Virginia, wooden columns painted white. Back in 1958, when we in England were beginning to respond to contemporary American art, Lawrence Gowing wrote a remarkable article, "Paint in America," exploring the crucial role in American experience of wood painted white.

"It is the quality of wood which has lasted in America and remains as strong as ever, a quality as definite and pervasive as marble ever gave to a country, and one that similarly supplies the base of life and imagination. The classical material of American building is wood and the characteristic structure is clapboard, frame surfaces of overlapping strips. It is painted white.... In America the idea of structure envisages a broad assembly of slender parts, standing squarely, but with a quality of light attentiveness, independent but aware.... In the balance [of the construction] there is the most lively serenity: it is recognisably embodied in the colour, the white paint."

David Sylvester

Art In America

(Copyright 2000 Brant Publications, Inc. Art In America)