ART: The Grafitti of Loss

You don't have to be an all-out fan of Cy Twombly's -- though he certainly has them -- to welcome the show of his paintings and drawings at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Kirk Varnedoe, it is a handsome affair with a cogent, detailed catalog introduction. Neither show nor catalog exactly inflates its subject, and yet one may not be quite convinced that Twombly, despite the past slights inflicted on his reputation in America, is the powerful artist of the first rank that moma would like him to be.

By now, with recorded auction prices of $3 million and up, he must be the most fashionable abstract painter alive. Born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928, Twombly belongs to the generation of American artists that followed Abstract Expressionism and had to contend, Oedipus-like, with its influence; he is the Third Man, a shadowy figure, beside that vivid duumvirate of his friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. But unlike them, he made his life in Europe. After some gestation in one of the wombs of the postwar American avant-garde, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, he went to Italy in 1957 and has lived there ever since.

His work is cryptic, devoted to nuance and practically impossible to reproduce. No color plate conveys the way those little scribbles and blots can keep the whitish-blond surface of a big Twombly in coherent tension. Since reproduction creates reputation, this put his work at a disadvantage. Besides, Twombly could not have had less to do with the direction American art in the '60s took toward Minimalism and the iconic blare of Pop Art; being an expatriate counted against him in a New York art world saturated with cultural chauvinism. He had sided with the beautiful Italian losers, against history.

His American reputation bottomed out in 1964 with a show of nine florid paintings called Discourse on Commodus. They were trashed as a fiasco, in print and by word of mouth. Commodus was the degenerate son of Marcus Aurelius; he became Emperor in the 2nd century A.D., went mad and was strangled. Given the New York art world's self-absorption at the time, it seems fitting that Commodus' assassin was an athlete named Narcissus. Perhaps because of the trauma of their reception, the Commodus paintings are not in moma's show. In any case, Twombly was repatriated to America 20 years later by the enthusiasm that younger European artists and collectors felt for him. He acquired American imitators.

Twombly was one of the first American artists to interest himself in graffiti. Forty years ago, the term didn't suggest city kids' spraying their aggressive colored tags all over subway cars and buildings. It wasn't bound up with the seizure and degradation of public space. It was, so to speak, more muted and pastoral: harmless scratches, small obscenities, chalk on Roman distemper. To adopt graffiti to the painted canvas was to pay homage to European art informel -- Fautrier, Wols and especially Jean Dubuffet. Their influence plays on Twombly's earliest paintings of the 1950s, with their lumpish glandular forms, the movement of the paint slowed up by mixing it with earth but then accelerated by a nervous, hairy scratching around the edges.