{"id":130139,"date":"2018-10-17T13:30:00","date_gmt":"2018-10-17T17:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130139"},"modified":"2018-10-17T13:33:06","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T17:33:06","slug":"the-erotics-of-cy-twombly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/17\/the-erotics-of-cy-twombly\/","title":{"rendered":"The Erotics of Cy Twombly"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Cy Twombly in Grottaferrata, 1957 \u00a9Betty Stokes<\/p><\/div>\n

Early in Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly<\/em><\/a>, author Joshua Rivkin confesses that the book \u201cis not a biography. This is something, I hope, stranger and more personal.\u201d What, a reader may wonder, could be more personal than a biography? Chalk<\/em> is one answer to that riddle.<\/p>\n

Cy Twombly, a prominent abstract artist whose popularity has only grown since his death in 2011, is best known for his large, abstract paintings\u2014\u201cpassionate splashes of color \u2026 curves of white chalk looping through darkness.\u201d Rivkin describes the artist\u2019s work as an actualization of \u201cthe bewildering slipstream between thinking and feeling.\u201d Twombly\u2019s most staunch admirers are ecstatically unnerved by his canvases; a woman once spontaneously kissed one painting, leaving behind a lipsticked print. (She was, as lovers often are, unrepentant.) But, outside the art world, Twombly\u2019s messy, seemingly thoughtless style inspired confusion and disdain. His scratchy, hectic paintings have led the unimaginative to shrug, \u201cMy kid could do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rivkin is intensely focused on the \u201ccomplex arrangements of love and domesticity\u201d that filled Twombly\u2019s life\u2014from his early love affair with a married Robert Rauschenberg, to his impenetrable and improbable marriage to the Italian heiress Tatiana Franchetti, to his decades-long entwinement with his assistant and rumored paramour, Nicola del Roscio.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I came to Chalk<\/em> with an adoring familiarity with Twombly\u2019s work but almost no knowledge of his life. He would have wanted it this way, as he was mysterious with reporters and often secretive with even his closest friends. When the writer Edmund White asked him what his parents did, Twombly said, \u201cThey were Sicilian ceramicists.\u201d (This was a lie.) When asked how many paintings would be in his MoMA show, he said, without blinking, \u201cForty thousand.\u201d The Twombly Foundation, under the presidency of del Roscio, is faithful to the artist\u2019s recalcitrance. Yet Rivkin takes the position that \u201cLife and art are never separate conversations. It\u2019s easy to read\u2014and overread\u2014the biographical in Twombly\u2019s art. He practically dares you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rivkin\u2019s torrid relationship with the Twombly Foundation becomes, by necessity, a part of the plot. After several threats, the foundation refused to license any images of Twombly or his work for Chalk<\/em>. (The few photographs that do appear were authorized by other estates and archives.) In the end, the foundation (more specifically, del Roscio) was appalled and annoyed by Rivkin\u2019s project. Attorneys appear. Threatening letters appear.<\/p>\n

Yet part of the excellence of this biography (I respectfully refuse Rivkin\u2019s refusal of the term) is that it alchemizes this challenge into an asset. The book is more personal than a biography because the biographer, who is already an accomplished poet, offers details from his own life as they mirror that of the artist. Though it may sound like misplaced exhibitionism, Rivkin\u2019s vulnerability is a gift. Because so many details of Twombly\u2019s life were erased, withheld, or obscured, Rivkin\u2019s brief autobiographical interludes seem to transform those erasures from an absence to a presence. In this respect, at least, Rivkin is right to say that Chalk<\/em> is not a biography. Portraiture is always an act of triangulation; a biography, no matter how removed the writer may try to be, is always covered in fingerprints.<\/p>\n

Twombly, at once Southern and queer and closeted and famous, seemed animated by equal parts expression and secrecy. His paintings often contained text\u2014some legible, some erased, some scribbled out\u2014and he titled much of his work \u201cUntitled,\u201d followed by a piece of text hovering between parentheses. An undeniable and erotic charge courses through much of Twombly\u2019s work, one that has animated many serious examinations by art historians and critics. \u201cIn one version of The Birth of Venus<\/em>, his variations on the iconic, half-naked goddess on a scallop rising from the sea, he layers a hundred breasts like petals of blooming flower, a bouquet.\u201d In another collage, a response to a da Vinci study of heterosexual copulation, Twombly isolates the male anatomy\u2014\u201cFrom its tip, a cascade of lines stream down the length of the page. A fountain. A chandelier \u2026 The word \u2018reject\u2019 is scrawled beside the image.\u201d Horse and human penises are featured prominently in a Twombly collage that Rauschenberg owned, vaginal imagery populates a series of drawings done in Capri, and disembodied phalluses float throughout the rest of his work. \u201cTo say that one can read Twombly\u2019s own wants or anxieties from these pictures is a mistake,\u201d Rivkin qualifies during the section of the book attempting to untangle all this visual innuendo. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t mean his obsessions don\u2019t matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

During a chapter about anticipating the birth of Twombly\u2019s only son, Rivkin folds a few details of his own wife\u2019s pregnancy. While expecting his first son and having a summer fling with a \u201cbeautiful Canadian boy,\u201d Twombly made twenty-four drawings in a single day, Poems to the Sea.<\/em> Rivkin spends much time with Poems to the Sea\u2014in one drawing Rivkin notices \u201ca question mark drawn inside a square \u2026 I love that mark. A little frame around all the uncertainties\u2014set apart and held up and contained. The mark like a buoy in a turbulent sea.\u201d Later Rivkin includes a story of Twombly, who was a largely absent father, speaking of his son to a friend in Virginia: \u201cI don\u2019t know where he slept.\u201d When Rivkin asks, \u201cWhat artist hasn\u2019t wished to undo all the bounds that hold them steady to the earth?\u201d he is not only referring to his subject, but implicating himself. The stability and instability inherent in both parenthood and artistry, and the way those two roles\u2014father and artist\u2014were often at odds for Twombly, has an obvious personal resonance to Rivkin.<\/p>\n

Authors who write sentences as playful and passionate as Rivkin\u2019s are anomalous in the world of scholarly nonfiction. A biographer can easily slip into a work-horse automation for pages or chapters at a time, but Rivkin rarely (if ever) does so. A dark night is \u201ca purple-bruise, a crow belly.\u201d A marital spat shows \u201cdistance and anger nested like cup and saucer.\u201d By completing and publishing this work, despite threats of litigation from the Twombly Foundation, Rivkin is \u201ctilting at windmills in a hurricane.\u201d At times, the text scatters into vivid fragments, a linguistic reflection of Twombly\u2019s work. The reader can infer that the artist\u2019s style has changed Rivkin\u2019s own, shifting it like a house off its foundation. If there is a flaw of this approach, it is that the text sometimes swerves into lyrical saturation. But for the most part, buoyed with insights from hundreds of writers from Albee to Woolf, Rivkin stays afloat.<\/p>\n

Rivkin\u2019s quest for information while living in Rome, a place which runs \u201con its own languorous, maddening time,\u201d becomes its own plotline in Chalk<\/em>. Putting aside his role as devout biographer, Rivkin steps into the narrative as a determined but slightly mad detective. He is determined to establish and maintain contact with Nicola del Roscio, giver and taker of access, but the enigmatic man flits in and out of the story like a white shark in dark waters. Near the end of their first periphrastic meeting, del Roscio asks Rivkin, \u201cWhat is it you want from me?\u201d A seemingly panicked Rivkin manages to say something brief and unmemorable, but as he speaks, his mind is spiraling: \u201cTell me about the \u2018turmoil\u2019 you felt after you first met him, or how it felt to shake Twombly\u2019s hand \u2026 Tell me about the first time you talked when there was no one else there, how the rooms of Via Monserrato smelled. Tell me about grief. Tell me everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

But for every boyish burst from Rivkin, there are plenty of measured, keen observations. Nicola is \u201cat once imperious and vulnerable \u2026 An island. A keep \u2026 Perhaps this was one of the things Twombly recognized in him \u2026 One wrong word, it seemed, might have ended the lunch.\u201d And when an unexplained man joins their table: \u201cCue-ball bald, gold jewelry jostled on his wrist and neck. I didn\u2019t catch his name or why he was there exactly, something about money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most important subject of this book is the desire to know others: the desire to know an artist who has unwittingly changed your life, or a person whose life seems to hold some secret about your own, or one\u2019s lovers, or oneself. It\u2019s also a long, haunted letter of unrequited love, and a meta-analysis of true biography\u2019s impossibility. If the work is incomplete in reporting the truth of the artist\u2019s life, it is because the Twombly Foundation wishes for it to be so. Yet it is a fitting thrill to end Chalk<\/em> still wanting more. \u201cDesire is not simple or safe. In life and in art, desire is the complication.\u201d Desire, too, feeds on incompletion, on distance, on inscrutability. Chalk<\/em>\u2019s readers, just like Twombly\u2019s devotees, will recognize the erotic pull within the omissions.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Catherine Lacey is the author of <\/em>The Answers,<\/em> Nobody is Ever Missing, and, most recently, <\/em>Certain American States.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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