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

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 07-MAR-05

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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...

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