The_Art_Newspaper_-_November_2016

THE ART NEWSPAPER SECTION 2 Number 284, November 2016 1

YOSHIHARA: THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, KYOTO

DIANE ARBUS:

Met Breuer’s show

reveals how the artist

made time her medium

Exhibitions

Page 30

Exhibitions

23

From ‘iasco’

to hero:

the rise and

rise of Cy

Twombly

A career survey at the Centre Pompidou

concentrates on the artist’s painting cycles,

which critics once ridiculed

THE BIG SHOW AT A GLANCE

The venue: Centre Pompidou, Paris. This

is the Musée National d’Art Moderne’s

third Twombly show, following a

retrospective in 1988 and an exhibition of

his works on paper in 2004.

The key works: Along with the cycles,

major works include Academy (1955) from

the Museum of Modern Art, New York

and Treatise on the Veil (1968) from the

Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

The numbers: Around 140 works, with

more than 80 paintings, 20 sculptures,

more than 30 drawings and a few

photographs. Treatise on the Veil is the

largest, at more than 10m wide; the

smallest is Twombly’s photograph of his

son Alessandro, froms 1965, at 19cm wide.

The museum says: “With the death

of Cy Twombly in 2011, a page in art

history turned,” says Bernard Blistène,

the director of the Musée National d’Art

Moderne. “Twombly was one of its last

heroes, one of its greatest masters, the

receptacle of its major themes.”

The many

avenues

of abstract

painting

Cy Twombly worked in

a tradition with many

strains, some of which

are explored in shows

across the world

PAINTING

At the Peggy Guggenheim Collec-

tion in Venice, Luca Massimo Barbero

has organised a career survey of the

Italian painter Tancredi Parmeggiani

(My Weapon Against the Atom Bomb

is a Blade of Grass, 12 November-13

March 2017). The show looks at the

artist’s short career (he died aged 37

in 1964) through 90 works, including

one from the Brooklyn Museum that

is being shown in Venice for the first

time since Peggy Guggenheim donated

it to the US institution. Although Tan-

credi (as he was known) was an abstract

painter, Barbero stresses his naturalist

inclinations. He “spent his whole career

working to develop an atmosphere”,

Barbero says. “And if you go and look at

some fields and gardens, you’ll see what

he was looking for.”

Art Informel, the movement with

which Tancredi is sometimes associ-

ated, had a lasting impact on mid-cen-

tury Japanese artists. In 1956, a group of

Informel works from the collection of

the French curator Michel Tapié were

brought to Japan, galvanising the Gutai

group, which was led by Jiro Yoshihara.

At the Palais de Beaux-Arts in Brussels,

the exhibition A Feverish Era in Jap-

anese Art (until 22 January 2017) looks

at the development of expressionist

abstraction in the country in the 1950s

and 1960s through 58 works by artists

like Yoshihara and Osamu Suzuki. While

Yoshihara is often associated with Amer-

ican Abstract Expressionism, the show’s

curator, Shoichi Hirai, says that “though

Gutai members had sent [Jackson]

Pollock their own magazines, there was

no actual two-way exchange”.

At the contemporary end of the

history of abstraction is the work of the

British painter Cecily Brown, whose

drawings are the subject of a show titled

Rehearsal at the Drawing Center in New

York (until 18 December). The curator of

the exhibition, Claire Gilman, points out

that while Brown’s abstract painting “fits

within the tradition of mid-20th-century

American gestural abstraction”, her

drawings reference everything from “art

historical master works by Degas, Bosch,

Bruegel and Hogarth, to pop culture

images such as the album cover for Jimi

Hendrix’s [Electric] Ladyland.” The show

of around 80 works is the first to focus

on Brown’s drawings and speaks to the

complex inheritance of abstract painting.

Pac Pobric

MODERN ART

Paris. Cy Twombly is now so revered

that it is difficult to imagine a time

when his work prompted derision. But

when he first showed his painting cycle

Nine Discourses on Commodus (1963)

at the Leo Castelli gallery in New York

in 1964, critics dismissed them. Among

the most strident was Donald Judd, who

was then helping define Minimalism as

the next great American art movement.

Noting that it had been three years

since Twombly, by then based in Rome,

had last exhibited in New York, Judd

wrote: “Twombly has not shown for

some time, and this adds to this fiasco.”

He added: “There isn’t anything to the

paintings.”

In an excellent essay in the catalogue

for the Centre Pompidou’s new career

survey, the first major posthumous

show of Twombly’s work, Nicholas Cull-

inan, the director of the National Por-

trait Gallery in London, writes that the

savaging of the nine paintings by New

York critics was a chauvinistic response

to an expatriate sending exports from

“old Europe”. Even Twombly’s dealer

Castelli reflected later that the paintings

were “Europeanised and precious”—

especially in a US art scene in thrall to

Pop and Minimalism.

It is precisely because of Twombly’s

unique combination of European sen-

sitivity and American bravura that the

Nine Discourses are celebrated today.

His work is seen as a link between

the heroic past and the more uncer-

tain present. The works in that series,

which tell the story of the murder of

the Roman emperor Commodus in AD

192, reflect Twombly’s deep engage-

ment with the classical world after he

moved to Rome in 1957. But they were

also made in the immediate aftermath

of the assassination of John F. Kennedy,

in a phase in Twombly’s painting that

reflected a broader anguish indicated by

his use of blood-red colours.

More than half a century after their

creation, the Nine Discourses are one of

three painting cycles at the heart of the

Pompidou show. The two others are sim-

ilarly inspired by the ancient world: Fifty

Days at Iliam (1978) is a ten-painting instal-

lation from the Philadelphia Museum of

Art based on Homer’s descriptions of the

last 50 days of the Trojan War; the other

series, Coronation of Sesostris (2000),

from François Pinault’s collection, is also

in ten parts and is named after the Egyp-

tian pharaoh described by Herodotus.

Though made across 40 years, they each

contain the hallmarks of Twombly’s style,

with moments of violent expression and

lyrical reverie, graffiti-like scrawls and

sensuous impasto. This sublime meeting

of poetry and paint marks him out as one

of the indisputably great painters of the

latter half of the last century, and the first

decade of this one.

Ben Luke

• Cy Twombly, Centre Pompidou, Paris,
  30 November-24 April 2017

The savaging of the

nine paintings by New

York critics was a

chauvinistic response

The Pompidou’s includes Twombly’s

Coronation of Sesostris (2000, left) and

Fifty Days at Iliam (1978, above)

Jiro Yoshihara’s Work (around 1960).

The artist led Japan’s Gutai group

Partners & Mucciaccia

45 Dover Street - 
London W1S 4FF

Tel. +44 20 7629 9605 | [email protected] | http://www.partnersandmucciaccia.com

The exhibition, dedicated to the notion of time, examines the work of the three contemporary artists, pioneers of

significant linguistic and aesthetic developments, who have characterised art from the sixties up until the present day.

Exhibitions runs until 15 December, 2016

ORAMAI E' TEMPO

Giovanni Anselmo

Enrico Castellani

Hidetoshi Nagasawa

Curated by Bruno Corà