It sometimes seems as if Cy Twombly endured more critical slights than any other major artist of his generation. In 1964, when he was in his mid-thirties, he showed a group of new paintings — spare, florally-inclined abstractions — at the Castelli Gallery and received an infamous drubbing. Nothing sold; the sculptor Donald Judd wrote a pan and labeled the show “a fiasco.” The general public, in the meantime, looked at Twombly’s expanses of freely rendered scrawls and scribbles and instantly dismissed him as the ultimate my-kid-could-do-that artist.
How could so many people be so wrong about Twombly? A breathtaking show of his drawings is currently on view at the West 21st Street outpost of the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. Billed as the first-ever comprehensive survey of his drawings, it coincides with what would have been his 90th birthday. It covers his entire career, from early works circa 1951 that pay diligent homage to the modernist grid to the late, more lyrical works in which he tossed the grid to the winds.
I’ve always been partial to the blackboard works, which explore the difference between the marks of painters and the marks of writers. Many of his drawings put you in mind of handwriting, or rather cursive script tiling in a rightwards direction across the page. His achievement was to add a literary quality to gestural abstraction; he proves it is possible to write a beautiful sentence that has no words in it. He was also a serious colorist. There is no shortage in this show of lusciously colored drawings in which watercolor drips down the page like the juice of crushed berries, evoking the bloom of nature.
There’s a second great drawing show in town right now. “Terry Winters: Facts and Fictions,” at the Drawing Center in SoHo, brings together both large-scale drawings and smaller, so-called “page drawings” that are distinguished by their physical energy. The show goes back to the early 1980s, a time when younger artists were looking for a way beyond Minimalism. Winters, who was born in 1949 in New York City, is a generation younger than Twombly, and he shares his devotion to abstract art.
But that is where the similarities end. Twombly’s work seems rooted in a world so ripe it could be approaching a state of rot. Winters, by contrast, is more interested in how life begins — in things that are budding and sprouting and forever expanding into new patterns. His drawings extend the reach of abstract art into systems of all kinds. Initially, his drawings referred to plant cells and human cells or orbiting planets. More recently, the natural imagery has been supplanted by knot shapes and linear networks that reference technology and dot-matrix imagery. Throughout, Winters’ drawing style has been deliberately clunky. At times he presses his pencil so hard and packs his lines to closely together the marks solidify into a shiny, silvery-black substance, as if a mineral deposit of ore had landed on the paper. The works I like best are smudgy and sludgy and let the erasures show. They remind us that creativity is a system too — one with a lot of starts and stops.
Clik here to view.
