You know those annoying, clichéd complaints about modern art – that it looks like something knocked out in ten minutes, or that it could be done by a child? Well, if you’re ever making a counter-argument, then Cy Twombly (1928-2011) is absolutely the worst artist you could invoke. Launching US superdealer Larry Gagosian’s new Mayfair space, Twombly’s huge canvases, all painted in the last decade of his life and consisting of big, swirly splotches of purple or looping scribbles of red against pale backgrounds, do indeed seem like they took almost no time at all. Also on show, his drawings from the late 1960s resemble the sort of thing you might end up doodling while talking on the phone to a plumber or accountant: frantic jottings of numbers, ragged pencil sketches of simple shapes, flurries of scratchings and crossings out.
Of course, it’s precisely this sense of untrammelled, whimsical spontaneity that’s the point of Twombly’s work – and at its best it conveys a sort of childlike, absent-minded exuberance that’s really rather glorious, not to mention distinctly hard, in practice, to achieve. Occasionally, it’s true, his works veer too much towards self-indulgence – as with those languorous, later paintings, when he had become so successful that virtually anything he churned out was instantly snapped up by collectors. But even these pieces are more sophisticated than they first appear, with the background colours repeated and layered atop his scribbly marks, complicating the surfaces by making the boundaries between forms less distinct.
His photographs too, on display at Gagosian’s smaller nearby gallery, extend this trick of making apparently simple objects seem complex and unfamiliar. Taken as Polaroids but then enlarged and printed on paper, the blurry images of fruits and vegetables have a strange, colour-saturated quality, appearing both intensified and energised, yet at the same time preternaturally, hauntingly still.
Gabriel Coxhead