Art I like - Cy Twombly's blackboard paintings

[The final case study for my essay, Between Image and Text. It has a title! And it's now about 3000 words long. All that remains to write are the important bits - the beginning and the end...]

Untitled, 1968

Words - fragmented into almost indecipherable letters, giving hints of classical allusions - are sprinkled throughout Cy Twombly's work, but it is in the "blackboard paintings" of 1967-71 - that his "writing", or rather scribbles, is most gestural. (Despite their whispering quietude, these canvases announced a dramatic break with the heritage of Abstract Expressionism.) The label of blackboard paintings derives from the grey, painted background, with its lighter areas resembling erasure. The large linear marks (made in wax crayon - drawing suspended within liquid mediums) evoke the idea of a proto-text, "something almost being said". As these are not chalk marks on slate, the writing cannot be easily wiped away, leading to a temporal tension between permanance and impermanence.

Reviewing a 1995 retrospective at MOMA, Brooks Adams says: "these works don't really look like blackboards with random markings on them: they are, rather, carefully wrought field paintings that re-enact the Abstract Sublime on a megalomaniacal scale commensurate with the most bombastic 19th-century Salon machines. ...There is an implicit athleticism and an underlying calm to these tenebrous, stormy works, where every crackle of pictorial lightning and each exquisitely wrought drip is perfectly calibrated to give an effect of happenstance."

Untitled, 1970, Cy Twombly Gallery, Houston

Some of the works in the series use just one form of mark, amplifying it; others play off several kinds of line with each other. The paintings operate in a language that only some of the viewers speak: some elements are recognisable and categorisable; but even without writing a recognisable language, they act to evoke mysteries and emotion. Each work, says Roberta Smith (1987, p18) "is a kind of demonstration or rumination upon some isolated fact of gesture, movement or measurement. These paintings are...motion studies that diagram the action of air, water or the arm itself."

The repeated looped elements resemble handwriting exercises, yet making the paintings is an unpredetermined process aiming for any particular outcome, and the viewer's experience is not about any particular mark or line, but about the repetition of the process and the accumulation of lines. Within the gesture of the loop, the effect of layering seems almost random, yet it is this process that generates the complexity of the painting, balancing order and disorder, randomness and control. The accumulation of lines flattens the field of the canvas, not offering a focal point. Even so, the drawing-as-handwriting makes the large canvas into an intimate and personal space. The intimate scribble has been skillfully scaled up. This physical release of energy from the hand speaks about nothing, but communicates a tremendous amount.

Untitled, 1970

Here, the line is a visible action, liberated from the dictates of material; Barthes (1985) wrote that "however supple, light or uncertain it may be, [it] always refers to a force, to a direction; it is an energon, a labor which reveals - which makes legible - the trace of its pulsion and its expenditure."

Untitled, 1970. Oil-based house paint and crayon on canvas, 405 x 640 cm. MoMA, New York

The works are large - the one above is the largest - but the line is fluid, due to an unusual technique: Twombly sat on the shoulders of a friend, who moved back and forth before the canvas, allowing Twombly to draw continuously.

Early in his career Twombly undertook exercises to suppress virtuosity - drawing in the dark, drawing with his non-dominant hand - in order to arrive at what he called primordial freshness. Panorama (1955) shows the result, and is a precursor of the blackboard paintings -

 Of Twombly's one-man show in 1955, Frank O'Hara wrote: " A bird seems to have passed through the impasto with cream-colored screams and bitter claw-marks."

Deanna Petherbridge (2010, p418) sums up Twombly's strategies: "Twombly's practice, where drawing and painting media are combined, is a performative dance around assertion, revelation and concealment: he equally fetishes the actions of laying down, cancelling out and erasure and hints of ideas to arrive at apparently nonchalant non-bravura statements that aim at a poetics of subjectivity."

Synopsis of a Battle, 1968

After the 1970s, Twombly isolated, integrated and expanded word, mark and material - language, drawing and painting - in various ways, sometimes incorporating long phrases or entire poems that make various themes and readings unavoidable, and encouraging a sequential reading that gives even his abstract work a narrative character.

"Untilted (Bolsena)," oil-based house paint, wax crayon, lead pencil on canvas, 79 by 94 3/4 inches, 1969; sold in 2002 for $2,869,500

Untitled, 1967; Yale Art Gallery

Twombly's large paintings have been compared to grafitti; on this topic he has said: "Graffiti is linear and it's done with a pencil, and it's like writing on walls. But [in my paintings] it's more lyrical. In those beautiful early paintings like Academy, it's graffiti but it's something else, too. I don't know how people ­react, but the feeling is more complicated, more elaborate. Graffiti is usually a protest - ink on walls - or has a reason for ­being naughty or aggressive."

Cy Twombly gallery, Menil Collection, Houston, TX

In a review of his retrospective at MOCA, The Times’ art critic Christopher Knight wrote: “Twombly’s gestural mark-making inevitably evokes the problem of how to visually represent speech; the paintings’ most obvious likeness is to graffiti-covered walls, and he often uses pencil in addition to paint. The marks comprise an expansive lexicon of handprints, tracing, big sweeps of the arm, furious doodles, languid meanders, bored inscriptions, anxious erasures and more.”

Tacita Dean, who like Twombly is fixated with time, has made a film, Edwin Parker, of Twombly in his everyday life.