Cy Twombly and the Transporting, Transforming Power of Art That Barely Uses the Tools of Art

The first time I saw Cy Twombly’s aphrodisiacal paintings, I felt the way Patti Smith felt when first hearing the Rolling Stones: “I was doing all my thinking between my legs.” Something unrecognizable and distorted within me quivered. Twombly’s fevered phosphorescent blooms of runny jellyfish chrysanthemums with elongated, pulpy, tentacle-like sacks dripping down; his iridescent storms of inchoate cryptographic scribbles, floral scrawls, jittery jutting lines; pustules rising and falling like raw nerve endings, flying vagina dentata, plaited anuses, priapic phalli spouting involuntarily or drooping defenseless, and what his closest reader, MoMA’s late Kirk Varnedoe, called “anteater tongues” — all of it metamorphosed into my own inner Kama Sutra of urge. Sensory networks lit up; a new barometer fluctuated. It was abstract yet explicitly erotic. I was in voluptuous rut. But something like gravitas and immensity was preponderant within me, too.

Somehow, by deploying only the barest rudiments of art — jots, dots, lines, doodles, dashes, loops, scribbles, scratches, little glyphs, weird ruins, rising Gothic skeleton structures, ziggurats, wobbly frame shapes, and (perhaps more effectively than any Western artist who ever lived) hard-to-read handwritten words and phrases, whole poems, and the names of ancient poets and places — Twombly has been able to make an art that rises to the level of epic poetry and fills you up with the sweep of history and fiction. He’s one of the few 20th-century painters who produces some of the same capacious sensations we get while reading Virgil, Homer, Sappho, Keats, and others. A silent sonorous world opened. Twombly brings mythos and antiquity together with Smith’s “thinking between my legs,” and an undertow of the elemental interiority and abjection of Francis Bacon.

Right now there are two spectacular Cy Twombly shows at Larry Gagosian Gallery. (None of the work is said to be for sale, so … thank you, Larry.) Uptown are the stately so-called “solar-barges of the sun”— the ten-part painting cycle from 2000 titled “Coronation of Sesostris.” (It’s the second time it’s being shown: The group was installed almost exactly this way on the same walls that year. For whatever reason, Twombly changed the third painting, and I liked it more before he did.) “Sesostris” is ostensibly based on the stories of three 12th-dynasty Egyptian pharaohs by that name. But just the arcane Egyptian word conjures obscure twinges, the physiological effect we feel when gazing at hieroglyphics. This wraparound room-filling undertaking finds the then-73-year-old artist developing and deploying the multicolored fireballs, ship prows and oarsmen, smears that look like waterfalls, and giant floating clots that had been appearing in his work since 1987. In this tour de force, Twombly, who died in 2011, was reborn once again and began putting all this together, commencing the colossal final years of his work.