DRAWING LINES.(Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper, exhibit)

Cy Twombly was twenty-five years old in 1953, when, at the borrowed studio of Robert Rauschenberg, on Fulton Street, he made some of the inauspicious-looking monoprints and pencil drawings that open "Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper," an absorbing, uneven show at the Whitney. These are loose, gawky glyphs of spiky, unidentifiable flora or fauna. Their manner suggests both the guilelessness of small children and the insolence of graffitists, but a lurking sophistication points to certain modern predecessors, mostly European, from Alfred Jarry to Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, and Wols. Twombly, who grew up around Washington and Lee University, in Lexington, Virginia, where his father coached athletics, was already far advanced in an extraordinarily rich personal and artistic initiation. He had been steeped in modern and contemporary art in Boston and New York, where he met Rauschenberg, and at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, where he met Robert Motherwell, who took an interest in him and, in 1951, arranged for his first New York gallery show, which included paintings strongly influenced by Franz Kline. Twombly had lived in Rome and travelled, with Paul Bowles, in Morocco. Even his brief military service, as a cryptographer in Washington, D.C., was exotic, though undistinguished. "I was a little too vague for that," he said, according to Roland Barthes--whose striking 1976 essay on the artist appears in the catalogue of this show. (Remarks by Twombly are scarce; he almost never gives interviews.) In 1957, the artist moved to Italy, which became the home base for a roving life with many sojourns on dreamy Mediterranean, Caribbean, and Indian islands. Written names in some of his pictures conjure sea-scented, rather easy whiffs of myth and history: Adonais, Proteus, Anabasis.

A bohemian aristocrat, the young Twombly might have been a model for a character in a novel by E. M. Forster or Somerset Maugham--a kind that was no longer being written. Today, at the age of seventy-six, he remains a slippery figure, not quite of our time yet not of any other. He is also a major and growing success, enshrined in museums, and a sensational performer at auction, commanding prices in the millions--"the biggest long shot of our era," in the words of a friend, the late composer Morton Feldman. This could not have been predicted in the nineteen-sixties, when Pop art and minimalism reigned. The support of Twombly's confederates Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns did not prevent a weak show, in 1964, at the Leo Castelli Gallery, from being a critical disaster; the paintings' School of Paris airs betrayed the artist's obliviousness of revolutionary developments in New York. (He later said that the event left him "the happiest painter around, for a couple of years: no one gave a damn what I did." In fact, he did little until late in the decade.) At that time, even Twombly's better work struck many as an unnecessary, epicene response to Abstract Expressionism. Some of his paintings--seemingly random distributions of smudges and scribbles on large canvases--were like Jackson Pollocks drained of intensity, and his way with line could suggest slack, nerveless Arshile Gorky. But it is precisely as an attenuated Abstract Expressionist that Twombly has won a place in history. He preserved the Romantic subjectivity of a movement that, as American culture turned witheringly skeptical, lost all conviction. He did it by hazarding that conviction is overrated. Mere whim will serve just as well. Younger poetic abstractionists who bucked the tide of the sixties, notably Brice Marden, took heart from Twombly's heroically languorous example. Around 1980, a retroactive recognition of his influence combined with the resurgent prestige of contemporary European art to boost his fame.

Twombly's works of the fifties remain his most exciting, for me. Those in the show, beginning in 1954, are flurries of impulsive line in pencil, crayon, or paint--sometimes mostly erased or overlapped with white house paint--which seem barbarically formless, yet are perversely graced with sensitive touch and texture. Like Zen koans, these drawings not only defy ...