Thoughts That Cure Radically: Cy Twombly ‘Works From the Sonnabend Collection’ Eykyn Maclean Gallery

Cy Twombly’s gift, embedded in his depictions of scrawls, bathhouse sgraffito, effluvia, cocks, balls, shit and piss, is to make each of his pictures seem hygienic, airy and gossamer. Standing at the entrance to a small, enlivening exhibition at Eykyn Maclean, is a photograph of Twombly painting a large picture in what appears to be a luxurious Italianate room. Wearing loafers, a sweater and slacks, Twombly is adding the finishing touches to a large, raw looking painting. Perhaps staged, the photograph nonetheless speaks to the heart of a contradiction, a healthy one, in Twombly’s work. Twombly, who passed away in 2011, combined the frontiersman aesthetic found in mid-century American painting with the Classical Apollonian heritage learned from Johan Joachim Winklemann.

Culled from the collection of the art dealer Ileana Sonnabend, Twombly’s mucky paintings and drawings translate through their touch, texture and precision into a diaphanous wonder. Sonnabend, gallerist and former wife and life-long friend to the super-dealer Leo Castelli, showed early support for Twombly’s career, purchasing several early, choice examples. Consisting of smaller drawings, works on paper and collages from the fifties through the mid-seventies, the collection on display avoids the gigantism that Twombly art sometimes erred. Pencil and pen, colored crayon and gouache are well deployed here, allowing for an intimate encounter with Twombly’s art.

Twombly’s art, classical and broken, bathhouse and atelier, enchants. Twombly was one of the last American artists, along with Arshile Gorky, to willingly participate in a European painting tradition. Winklemann, in his Essays On The Philosophy And History Of Art describes a lost classical past, could also have been discussing Twombly’s transformative gift:

By means of a secret art, however, the mind is led through all of the deeds of his strength up to the perfection of his soul, and in this work there is only monument to this very soul which no poet erects who sings only of the strength of his arms: the artist has surpassed it. His image of the hero gives no place to thoughts of violence and unruly love.