ART REVIEW : Twombly’s End Game : MOCA Retrospective Shows His Achievements While Clarifying His Place in 20th-Century Art

Cy Twombly’s achievement as a painter is deep but narrow. The often big, airy, gestural abstractions he made in the 1960s and early 1970s stand as an estimable coda to the great age of 20th-Century abstract art, but their status as a terminus cannot be ignored. Twombly’s paintings feel less generative than end-of-the-line.

The Twombly retrospective that opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art lays out the painter’s career in clear and concise fashion. Organized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where it had its debut in September, the beautifully installed show features more than 45 paintings, three dozen works on paper and eight sculptures.

The sculptures, typically assembled from scraps of wood that have been bound together and painted off-white, are dispersed throughout the galleries. Reminiscent of toylike chariots, litters, gateways, altars, grave markers and other such classical and formally ritualistic objects, they add an appropriately austere cadence to the unfolding narrative of Twombly’s career.

At MOCA, the show has been displayed in an unusual but useful way. Two galleries at the start are given over to a pair of high points in Twombly’s practice. Then, after you’ve seen the 66-year-old artist at his most resonant and compelling, you backtrack. The chronology of his development is laid out in the next several rooms.

The first gallery houses five paintings from 1961. A

shared compositional structure, which seems to blow like an unseen wind starting at the lower left and building in density toward the right, is prominent throughout.

Among the five paintings is the monumental “Triumph of Galatea” and the smaller, densely packed “Ferragosto IV.” Such titles identify Twombly’s abiding passion for artistic traditions that began in classical Greece, as well as for Rome and its environs, where the expatriate American has principally resided since 1957.

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F erragosto is the name of a Roman holiday in the sweltering heat of late summer, when the city empties out and layers of history remain behind like the discarded cocoons of disappeared butterflies. “Triumph of Galatea,” of course, refers to the famous Greek myth of a statue of a maiden, which was given life by Aphrodite after its sculptor fell in love with his inanimate creation.

In Twombly’s 16-foot-long “Galatea,” paint has been applied, smeared, smudged and clotted with the artist’s hands and fingers, not just with a brush, as if to more viscerally engage and mold the stuff of art in an effort to make it live. (The hands-on technique isn’t new; it was prominently used by Rembrandt.)

In addition to pictorial allusions to testicles and other lower-body parts, the smearing of often muddy color recalls a Freudian concept of fecal matter as the primal source of creative urges.

This bodily connection is also carried by color. The 1961 paintings are all dominated by a warm, roseate hue, although inflected with bits of yellow, ocher, blue, white, tan and brown. The red-complexioned fields give to the torrential flow of marks an impression of human or animal evisceration.

Twombly’s gestural mark-making inevitably evokes the problem of how to visually represent speech; the paintings’ most obvious likeness is to graffiti-covered walls, and he often uses pencil in addition to paint. The marks comprise an expansive lexicon of handprints, tracings, big sweeps of the arm, furious doodles, languid meanders, bored inscriptions, anxious erasures and more.

The result is paintings that chatter in a dense visual language, which reads from left to right and aspires to a painterly kind of epic poetry. A sense of narrative is thus cleverly implied, with these pictures creating a place for themselves in the line of a classically based, Western continuum.

The second gallery of the retrospective features four of the black-and-white pictures Twombly began in 1966 and continued into the early 1970s. These are the “blackboard paintings,” so-called because they look like grade-school penmanship exercises in chalk on slate (remember the old Palmer Method?); actually, they’re made with white crayon drawn on gray house paint.

The knockout here is a huge, untitled example from 1970, more than 13 feet high and 21 feet long. It demonstrates how aggressively Twombly meant to take on the legacy of Jackson Pollock, whose gestural, mural-size drip-paintings from 20 years before stand as their obvious precedent.

In their stoical refusal of color, however, and in their schoolmarmish evocation of the classroom, the blackboard paintings also seem a stinging rebuke to the vapid Color Field painting of the day, which failed in its attempt to extend Pollock’s achievement. Twombly typically records a simple gesture--a loop, an up-and-down scribble, a figure eight--which is repeated over and over across the canvas, often in overlapping rows that cover the entire surface.

The result is paintings that abruptly sever the conventional link established in Modern art between painterly gestures of the hand and uniquely individualized expressiveness. His penmanship marks wittily evoke a “signature” style, but they are in fact a wholly programmatic activity.

Twombly’s repetitive, elementary marks thus remove the expressive self from the focus of artistic activity. Personal inflection reverberates against conventionalized behavior, as it does in much post-minimal art of the time. These paintings reject the heroic subjectivity of Pollock, while reinventing gestural abstraction on a monumental scale.

From here, the exhibition begins its chronology in 1951 and follows Twombly to his breakout work of 1961 and after. (Helpfully, MOCA has installed in nearby galleries a generous group of paintings and sculptures from the period, selected from its permanent collection, which provides illuminating context.) Beyond the blackboard paintings, however, Twombly’s work quickly drops off in interest. The show, rather than coming to an end in the present, just seems to unravel.

It’s hard to know why this should be, and whether the dissipation accurately reflects Twombly’s art of the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. MOMA curator Kirk Varnedoe points out, in his very good catalogue for the retrospective, that Twombly periodically stopped working for long stretches; his output slowed most dramatically after 1972, when the blackboard paintings came to an end.

But large-scale works such as the 10-panel “Fifty Days at Ilium” (1977-78) are not in the show, and neither the watery pictures of the 1980s (ruminations on Monet, among others) nor the 1993-94 paintings of “The Four Seasons,” which are included, come close to the most convincing examples of his earlier work.

As a coda to Abstract Expressionism, Twombly’s art has significance. Apparently, however, it hasn’t been able to sustain itself the further we have gotten from the glory days of New York School abstraction.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through June 25. Closed Mondays.