Last weekend, I visited the new Cy Twombly exhibition at the MFA—Making Past Present—in the company of a 9-year-old child. I should have anticipated her complaint: “Why are these pictures in an art gallery? I could have painted them!”
It would be an enormous boon to adults in my position if museums posted an admonitory wall panel at the entrance of every such exhibit, explaining
(a) why your 9-year-old could not have painted these
and/or
(b) why it’s artistically irrelevant that your 9-year old could have painted these.
The panel could be copied and distributed worldwide, curtailing countless unenlightened conversations. (Is there an orthodox reply to the 9-year-old’s objection? Feel free to put citations in the comments.)
Part of the answer, I suppose, is that like other conceptual art—from Duchamp’s Fountain onwards—aesthetic interest lies in the presence of this object in this context. Making Past Present collocates with Greek and Roman relics Twombly’s fragmentary texts: graffiti from the walls of Pasargadae, where his namesake is interred.
There’s a performative dimension too. It is important to our encounter with artists like Twombly that we grant, for the sake of the experience, that they are able to paint naturalistically. Twombly could have made a photorealistic portrait of Achilles or Adonis—we suppose—but he decided not to. His crude, almost violent calligraphy is intentional, a deliberate suppression of profound mimetic power, as a typical 9-year-old’s would not be.
And then there is the matter of scale, which ranges from robust to monumental. At times, the scribbles give a kinaesthetic sense of more-than-human physicality, the marginalia of a titan.
But there is only so much one can say at this level of abstraction. We have to descend from the clouds of theory to the mud and dirt of particular works of art. For instance, according to the wall text, paintings that depict the Greek gods Ares and Aphrodite “raise fundamental questions about the relation between sex and violence.” What the questions are we are not told; but the wall explains some visual details:
As if to underscore Twombly’s identification with both the masculine and the feminine, disembodied breasts and phalluses are scattered about.
I had been wondering what the breasts and penises stood for—now I know! But not in a way that helps to pacify that nagging 9-year-old, who can paint breasts and penises, too. (I don’t mean to mock the wall text, which on the whole is excellent: its authors face a difficult task.)
My favourite piece in Making Past Present, perhaps predictably, is philosophical. Plato (A Painting in Two Parts) dates from 1977 and was displayed at the MFA beside a Roman bust of Plato from the mid-3rd century CE.
In case you can’t make it out, the lower, smaller panel reads “PLATO / PhAEDRUS / SYMPOSIUM / REPUBLIC”—scrawled carelessly, descending right. The left panel is a gorgeous, enveloping, inconstant blue, a sky with wisps of cloud. Standing in front of it, one feels immersed and energized: the first sustained field of colour in an exhibition of mostly off-white planes besmirched by Twombly’s blundering script.
The blue is at once abstract and mimetic; the text in the right-hand panel is neither. The written word of Plato’s dialogues is comically insufficient to its subject-matter: beauty, and the path from beauty’s physical to its Platonic form.
But then the sky is inadequate, too, its blue a dream of scattered sunlight. Unrepresented, unrepresentable is the Sun: an ineffable third panel, the Form of Beauty or the Good, not fit for human vision. Plato’s dialogues are a copy of a copy, the scattered light of scattered light.
Why are these pictures in an art gallery? I could have painted them.
Well, actually, I couldn’t. But even if I could, Twombly’s painting in two parts speaks to our question. All we can do, as artists, is to imitate the Forms at two removes. The differences between Cy Twombly and the 9-year-old are differences of degree; there is a difference of kind between artistic poesis and the beauty it aspires to. Twombly’s stunning blue stands to the Form of Beauty as the scribbled names of Plato’s dialogues stand to it.
Twombly’s paintings point to an experience we desperately want but cannot have, which we can only represent at some remove: a gallery of paintings so sublime that no-one could have painted them.
BONUS CONTENT: Another take on Making Past Present, by Jonathan Neil in The Brooklyn Rail.
The most succinct-and-properly-complicated response to this question I've seen is in this short video in PBS's The Art Assignment series. I show it to students regularly—a set of observations and arguments from history that build and compound as the minutes tick by. Lots of ideas packed in here!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67EKAIY43kg
Cy Twombly's success shows how charitability in an artist's work is confined to a particular class and privilege. The general prima facie reaction to Twombley's work is not a wrong one. It makes one wonder why some artists can find major success with childish expression, often projected as having a deeper embodied meaning which gives substances to a substance-less work. Yet the same charity is rarely applied to other marginalized group of artists. The last statement isn't a criticism of you Kieran, just a general observation.