Thierry Greub, Cy Twombly Inscriptions
Vol. I - Vol. VI, Brill | Fink, Paderborn, 2022
an excerpt from the conversation
EDE (Eleonora Di Erasmo) – During the long research work for the Catalogue Raisonné of Cy Twombly Drawings, together with Nicola Del Roscio, we realized that the artist takes inspiration for his works not only from poetic texts, but also from prose works: recall for example a series of drawings from 1990 in which Twombly quotes a passage from The World’s Body by the American poet and founder of New Criticism, John Crowe Ransom…
ThG (Thierry Greub) – Yes, that’s right. There are quotations from them in Cy Twombly’s inscriptions too, although rather rarely. That makes sense when we recall how hard it is to extract from a prose text a textual passage that will function on its own without major reworking. Twombly turned to theoretical writings, such as those of John Crowe Ransom or Wallace Stevens, from the 1990s onward. Once you notice this, you also discover prose passages among the inscriptions, from Catherine B. Avery, Charles Baudelaire, Goethe, Robert Graves, and Georgios Seferis.
The quotation you mention from Ransom in The World’s Body, which Twombly wrote into two of his drawings [Greub 2022, Vol. I, Cat.-No. 768–769], has been known since Kirk Varnedoe’s authoritative biographical essay on Cy Twombly in 1994. Tellingly, he sets it at the end of his text. (Varnedoe 1994, 52) This inscription – “The image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness which ideas can never claim” – as has long been recognized, expresses a cornerstone of Cy Twombly’s understanding of art.
John Crowe Ransom, the founder and most influential exponent of New Criticism, in this 1938 work of literary theory argued for the priority of the image to any idea: “Image is the raw material of idea.” For him, its “relation to idea is that of a material cause [which] cannot be dispossessed of its priority.” The sentence quoted by Twombly is followed by the conclusions: “An idea is derivative and tamed. The image is in the natural or wild state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and none of ours.”
Cy Twombly
Untitled
August 16, 1990
[Bassano in Teverina]
Acrylic, oil stick, pencil, wax crayon on handmade paper with irregular size
30 1/8 x 22 1/16 in.
© Cy Twombly Foundation
As well as the conviction that the work of art is an object in its own right, central for Twombly here is the concept of the “primordial” that Ransom ascribes to the image (Shiff 2023, 1032). For Twombly, one might say, this priority applies to every kind of culture, rationalization, every academic approach. Twombly’s art is characterized by a programmatic priority ahead of every kind of fixing, definition, stabilization. This primordiality applies especially to Cy Twombly’s line, which is just as rooted in the primordial, prior to its fixing as an image or script, as graphic marks are, prior to the pictorial.
According to Ransom, only a still-unfixed, wild, raw state can ensure that the treated object or motif is authentically brought into the present, a “primordial freshness.” Every work by Cy Twombly attempts to convey this to the maximum degree. One could even go so far as to say that Cy Twombly spent his whole life seeking the primordial, in whatever form it took. For example, there is his wide-ranging interest in the civilizations of the ancient world, which was perhaps first roused by Charles Olson, who had called for the return to the pre-logical and pre-abstract vision of the world of pre-Western civilizations – for him that was primarily the “ur-American” pre-Columbian civilization of the Maya. Immediately before he took up his teaching position at BMC, Olson had tried to get into direct physical contact with the creative ur-energy of the Maya at illegal excavations on the Yucatán peninsula… This return to the, for Olson “first facts” is also a feature of Twombly’s interest in prehistoric art. That is true of his interest in children’s drawings, too, which ranges from integrating real objects (Twombly included children’s drawings in his works) to his style of painting. I mention here just the cycle Coronation of Sesostris, of which Twombly proudly remarked: “I like the sun disc because I managed to do very childlike painting, very immediate.” (Serota 2008, 50)
But in his interest in pre-classical civilizations and children’s art Twombly goes far beyond the usual topoi of modernism. The primordial implies penetration into the origins, the release of an energy that emanates directly out of the subject of the picture. The primordial as the unfiltered, creative, original energy of the material treated enables Twombly to give expression in his works to past events, experiences, actions, but also, and especially, feelings. Richard Shiff, in his review of my Inscriptions volumes, has aptly characterized this incredible ability of Twombly to transport primordial feelings, emotions, and experiences of human existence in his works, and to trigger them in the viewer, as “activating deactivated feelings and sensations.” He speaks of “waves of feeling generated by Twombly’s drawing, painting and sculpture.” (Shiff 2023, 1032)
The full conversation can be read and downloaded here
Cy Twombly's handwritten note
Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio
Thierry Greub gained his PhD in 2003 on Johannes Vermeer at the University of Basel, Switzerland, where he was research assistant to Gottfried Boehm. In 2017, he received his Habilitation at the University of Cologne, Germany, on the notations and literary inscriptions of Cy Twombly. He has held positions as research associate at the Center for Advanced Studies Morphomata at the University of Cologne and as senior scientist at the IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies| University of Art and Design Linz in Vienna. He is Professor of Art History at the University of Cologne.