Cy Twombly: In memory and review | The Spectator

Artist Cy Twombly passed away last Tuesday, just a week after Dulwich Picture Gallery opened an exhibition of his work, Twombly and Poussin – Arcadian Painters. His obituaries, quite rightly, mark the tragic beauty of his passing in tandem with the showcase of his Arcadia.

Modern Arcadia, a rocky region of the Peloponnese, is a far cry from paradise. It’s hard to believe that it was the ancient city of that name that inspired the pastoral poets of old. The consensus among Classicists is that their Arcadia is a dreamlike place, not a geographical one, embracing the beauty of nature, love, and song. Theocritus and Virgil, the most famous exponents of the pastoral genre, probably only used the name because it was originally home to Pan, the woodland god.

They certainly never penned the famous words et in Arcadia ego (‘I am even in Arcadia’), so often applied to the verdant scenes of art and literature. The phrase probably derived in the late Renaissance, but it was the French 17th Century painter, Nicolas Poussin, who ensured its enduring fame when he placed it upon a tombstone in his painting The Arcadian Shepherds, thereby endowing it with the voice of the dead.

This very painting is juxtaposed with Twombly’s Arcadia (1958) in the first room of the new exhibition at Dulwich. Twombly lived between 1928 and 2011; Poussin between 1594 and 1665, but the pairing is in no way haphazard. While Poussin declares Arcadia in an anonymous green landscape, punctuated by Roman ruins (c.1628-9), Twombly presents a white canvas annotated with the word ‘Arcadia’ and characteristic Twombly scrawls. It is all too easy to criticise canvases like these, and maybe that’s one reason why Twombly struggled in his lifetime to achieve popularity in his native America.

But bear in mind that Twombly trained as a cryptographer in the US army, and his ‘automatic writing’ (more dramatically explored in the pencil drawings, Untitled) perhaps acquires a fresh nuance. Compared to the precision of Poussin’s version, Twombly evidently revels in the freedom of a blank canvas, of space, and the natural spasms of an artist’s wrist. While Poussin remained rooted in the tradition of the Renaissance pastoral landscape, albeit rendering it through far more constricted, less expressive brushwork, Twombly was inspired by the un-trodden path. It seems conceivable that, for Twombly,Arcadia was the sum of his artistic innovations.

Poussin and Twombly both travelled to Rome at the age of 30, lived there for some years, and died there. The Eternal City yielded for both the poetics of love as well as pasture. Ovid tells the tragic tale of Leander, who would swim the Hellespont each night to meet his lover, Hero, until one night he drowned in a storm. The verses inspired the poem by Christopher Marlowe, to whom Twombly dedicates his breathtaking reaction to the myth.

His large, landscape canvas (1985) of greys and pinks is sea, sky, and fire all at once, but for all this feels tranquil, as if the storm has subsided and the lover been wholly submerged. As here, there’s a (wholly belied) effortlessness to Twombly’s work that one sometimes feels would have lent itself to Poussin’s iconography. Take, for example, hisTriumph of Pan (1636), a convivial scene showing a herm (apotropaic statue) of the god, red-faced as Vergil described him, in the midst of all manner of drunkenness, theatricality, and lust.

A looser, less illustrative, style of painting would have well suited the subject, perhaps even have enlivened it further. The canvas is saturated with references to Renaissance Venetian paintings on similar themes. To name just one, Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, completed in 1514, oozes an effortless joviality through its rich tonality and lively brushwork. Poussin was very consciously exemplifying his own style here, which is admirable, but in the directly comparable context of his predecessors, he doesn’t quite carry it off.

The best result of the exhibition is that it promotes, through presenting polarities, precisely this kind of constructive criticism. One artist’s work bounces off of the other, and suggests alternative ways of how an image might have been constructed.

Its niggling downfall lies in the disparity between what the curator has to say in some of the descriptive plaques, and what can reasonably be envisaged by the viewer of each work. The highly learned commentary is faultless and fascinating in its own right, but it’s sometimes hard to perceive its truth in the art to which it is applied.

Nevertheless, the show is so unusual, and its theme so enduringly relevant, especially now, that it truly should not be missed.

Twombly and Poussin, Arcadian Painters is on at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 25th September 2011.