DAISY AMES

Just last night, I was sitting and talking with a friend about some of our favorite abstract painters, theory and post-war expressionism. As we sat facing a large wall of books, our eyes darted around the room from book to book, title to title, painter to painter. Then, I reluctantly came across Cy Twombly and expressed my discomfort with his half-hazard paintings, calling them unstructured, uncalculating, uninspiring scribbles. Then my friend gave me a dose of my own medicine: “It’s not that you don’t like his paintings, it’s that you haven’t come to understand them.” “Explain them to me,” I said. And so he did… calling on Cy Twombly: A Monograph by Richard Leeman, he read to me an underlined passage:

“The history of handwriting in the United States, since the colonial past when it was codified according to gender or social position, was always linked to assumptions about gender. At its zenith in 1915, the Palmer Method was part of a general reaction to the ‘crisis of masculinity’ at the beginning of the century, which also saw the birth of the Boy Scouts, Theodore Roosevelt’s The Rough Riders, the promotion of sports and so on. So the question of scribbling, raised despite himself by Twombly, belonged in a more general context of great uncertainty. The development of mechanical devices (telephone, typewriter, dictaphone, telegraph) fed the notion that handwriting was disappearing, on the one hand; on the other, the appearance, during the 1930‘s, of laxer method of teaching handwriting as a means for children to express themselves, combined with the working classes’ growing interest in graphology (the idea that handwriting reveals character) seemed to proclaim the rise of a nation of scrawlers. Illegible scribbling and scrawling, to a certain American mindset, represented the antithesis of the male virtues of order, discipline and strength: an infantilism or effeminacy that the critic Michael Fried in 1964, apropos of Nine Discourses on Commodus, associated by implication with mannerism, preciosity, speciosity - in short with Twombly’s all too European sophistication.”  (p.171)

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Sometimes we block out the very things that speak to us most clearly, because we don’t recognize it at first because it is in a different form. But now that I have been exposed to this book and other intriguing passages, I have recognized something in Twombly that I never knew was there, but always assumed existed - theory, logic, a stream of consciousness, and thoughtfulness that is not apparent at first glance, but requires intense inquiry. It’s unfortunate that I am only now starting to understand his work, since he passed away this morning.