Reports    Published 04/08/11

Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
29 June–25 September 2011

“I would like to have been Poussin if I’d had a choice, in another time”
Cy Twombly¹

The painter Cy Twombly, together with Robert Rauschenberg, had scaled the heights of New York-based Abstract Expressionism in the later 1960’s. Then their ways parted and Twombly aged 30 moved to Italy, Rome and the hills and coast of the Campagna, where he lived until July 5th 2011, when he died aged 83. “Et in Arcadia, Ego” it surely was (“I (Death) am even in Arcadia”)² Twombly had followed in the path of Nicolas Poussin, a willing expatriate from France to Rome, at the age of 30. Poussin became increasingly the painter of Landscape mise-en-scène per se, as he developed. Twombly also took to the hills and coasts of the Roman Campagna, where he remained, dying in Rome shortly after this exhibition opened. “Et Ego in Arcadia” it surely was, and in the form and mood perhaps of the second slightly larger painting on this subject (now in the Louvre), which Poussin had executed over ten years later (1638–40).³ Here, significantly, the skull has been removed (so necessary an item in the Chatsworth painting) and omnipresent Death is muted, “Ego”, seeming to relate more to the occupant of the tomb itself than “Death”. As with Poussin, the Curator Nicholas Cullinan says “mortality seems to have been very much on Twombly’s mind, (even in 1958 as he settled in Italy), philosophically so to say”. And here also, Poussin had re-introduced a barely decipherable calligraphy on the tomb ,a device employed frequently by Twombly, who here lets it “float away”. Indeed as Cullinan states, “antiquity and Arcadia announced themselves in Twombly’s work before his move to Rome in pursuit of them”.

A retroactive “timespan” underpins this fine exhibition. Firstly, came the sad and yet unexpected passing of the 83-years-old Twombly himself in his adopted Rome. Then also apparent here the real similarity between Poussin and Twombly each reaching Rome at the formative age of 30 yet almost four centuries apart. Underlying it all is the occasion of the 200th anniversary this year of Dulwich Picture Gallery. Nicholas Cullinan here seconded from Tate Modern, as Curator, had been Curator of the 2008 Tate Modern exhibition Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons which so excellently preceded this Dulwich show, and clearly the further exploration of Twombly’s deep painterly interest in Poussin had fascinated Cullinan to the extent that scholarship demanded a further examination and interaction of the compact that Twombly developed. Nor was this some fleeting critical speculation, in the mode preferred by some art historians today, but a genuinely scholarly investigation of such an affinity between the two artists’ work as revealed by Twombly over 40 years or more of his own lifetime. Accordingly this exhibition becomes now a most fitting Epitaph to Twombly, a genius well approaching his great predecessor.

That inspiration which Twombly drew from Poussin is perhaps most marked in the last series that Poussin completed in 1664 before his own death in 1665:⁴ The Four Seasons Series (on loan here from the Musée de Louvre, Paris). These paintings are shown in direct conjunction with Tate’s celebrated parallel seasons series painted by Twombly: Primavera, Estate, Autumno, Inverno, (1993–5).⁵ Inverno (Winter), the second of the series to be completed (1993), reflects the unremittant condition of that season. Poussin himself had shown a dire environment where wintry floods and storms completely suborn the few desolate figures in the hostile landscape, Twombly similarly responds with a wholly abstract painted combination of grey-white, interspersed with blackness unalleviated by a few daubs of the same yellow which actually sets off spring and summer to a contrasting lightness of being. The same colours had characterised aspects of bleak midwinter in Poussin, yet also the same had notably and originally lightened Spring, and Summer crops in Poussin’s series. Indeed, one has only to back track 15 years or so in Twombly’s work to see him directly quoting (by means of a collage) from the work Extreme Unction (1644) by Poussin. Thus, in Twombly’s own Bacchanalia: Winter (5 days in February), (1977). The 1644 brown ink, brown wash on paper, as preparatory drawing by Poussin is faithfully added prominently but in small scale, to Twombly’s own version of a grey unyielding nature. This important referential work is not shown in the exhibition but is illustrated in the catalogue here. Twombly’s interest in such seasonal variations runs through the works exhibited in this show, while landscape as a defining element itself came increasingly to characterise the later paintings of Poussin. This seasonality also permeated Twombly’s work as expressed by tincture and light effect. So landscape itself, as a setting for legendary Arcadia, emerged strongly for Twombly. This followed a tentative presence as far back as 1960 in his Woodland Glade (to Poussin); then came a strong reassertion a quarter of a century later in the remarkable pair of paintings on wooden panels Untitled (Bassano in Teverina) shown here⁶, painted from his house in Teverino at Bassano (1980), which is not to pass over the idea of Bacchus and Bacchanalia. Evidently Poussin at the close of his life would “take an occasional small glass of good wine with my neighbour Claude Lorrain.”⁷ If time-span had allowed, Twombly would surely have joined them.

Nicholas Cullinan states, introducing this excellent Dulwich Bicentenary Exhibition, (the catalogue was sponsored by Gagosian Gallery): “Through the exhibition we are invited to think through how meaning and subject matter can be conveyed by abstraction as opposed to figuration and how these two  painters have reinvented timeless themes in strikingly divergent modes.”  Twombly brilliantly depicted human mood directly on canvas. Notably, for example, Orion III, which is directly inspired, by Poussin’s painting,
Blind Orion Searching for the Sun of 1658, where the artist creates semi-circular sweeps to follow each other repetitively and yet forlornly on the canvas. Or more to the extreme of human desperation with blood-red or wine-red swirls of paint in Untitled (Bacchus) painted in 2006–8. These depict tellingly the ecstasy and the insanity of the crazed yet triumphalist Roman god in Poussin’s, Triumph of Bacchus (1635–6).

James Wilkes, a regular contributor to this journal, and also a poet, in his review of the Tate Modern exhibition (2008), focused on Twombly’s appeal for poets,⁸ and on how Twombly, for example can relate Rilke to his work and indeed the extent to which Twombly would engage with translated fragments of poetry, from Pope’s Iliad to Rilke’s, Sonnets to Orpheus. Twombly’s finely curved white sculpture in wood, Orpheus (Du unendliche Spur) of 1979, actually takes its title from these Sonnets. Wilkes also picks up on Cullinan’s own very relevant quoting of Heiner Bastian’s magisterial five volume, Catalogue Raisonné^.9

An invaluable interpretation of Twombly is here looped in, (within a separate room): the 16mm film interview by the artist Tacita Dean with Twombly, itself premiered at the opening. As has already been touched on of real significance too, in this exhibition, are Twombly’s sculptures, intermittently inserted in five of the galleries. Cycnus (1979) invoked the significance of the swan in legend. There is also exhibited the elegant “Pan-pipe” image, Untitled (1985) as well as the maquette-like yet mini-monumental Pasargade piece (1994), a distillation of the effect light has falling on a pure white set of surfaces. Then there is also shown the strange, self-denying image, entitled That, which I should have done, I did not, (1998). All these sculptures seem to contain both parody and wit in their elegant posture.

It is perhaps unfortunate that the exhibition occurs during the school and university/college vacation dates for the most part. But apart from younger school groups most truly interested art (and art history) students will surely find their way to this exemplary and profoundly informative exhibition before it closes. In all, this is a historic and moving valedictory homage to Twombly, a contemporary Master who will be much-mourned. The Catalogue is an indispensable accompaniment to the literature on both Poussin and on Twombly. ¹⁰

References

1. Cy Twombly in discussion with Sir Nicolas Serota, 2008.

2. Arcadia was a mountainous and infertile region of the central Pelopponese in Greece, well shepherded (and hunted), but romanticised by the Roman poet Virgil, so transformed into a fabulous and blissful location, yet where he then introduced Death with the inscription on the tomb of the shepherd Daphnis (Eclogues V, 40–44). This is, subsequently borrowed by Poussin, for the inscription ‘Et Ego in Arcadia’ carved on the tomb in both his paintings (1628–9) and (1638–40) entitled The Arcadian Shepherds.

3. In the second Louvre painting the skull has significantly been removed, (so prominent in the (Chatsworth) first painting and omnipresent Death becomes more muted seeming to relate more to the occupant of the tomb itself. As Cullinan says, “mortality seems to have been very much on Twombly’s mind,” philosophically so, even before he settled in Italy, in 1958. In these works also, Poussin espoused an indistinct calligraphy in stone, an inscriptive device, which Twombly as indistinctly yet more freely inserted in his own work frequently, at least as early as 1960.

4. The set of landscapes, which Poussin completed for the Duc de Richelieu, a major patron in Paris, and which consolidated his reputation in his own country, France.

5. The first set of Quattro Stagioni is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York and was completed at Gaeta on the coast near Naples (1993–4). The series was started at Bassano near Rome and reveals the influence of Venetian painting on Twombly.

6. Part of the series of four Untitled paintings on identically sized and elaborately shaped wooden panels: only three were completed. Twombly here aimed to capture the transient effect of light and shadow within the woodlands and forested hills outside his Bassano house.

7. Quoted from Catalogue, p151 which excerpts Ruffino (1916) p173, Galleria Ruffo nel secolo XVII in Messina, Bullettino d’Arte Vol 10 1916, several pages.

8. Twombly’s keen awareness of both classical and contemporary poetry was commented on by Roland Barthes among others, with reference to Valéry and Keats, as with Poussin’s own familiarity with the works of Ovid and Catullus, so for Twombly also, Rilke.

9. See Heiner Bastian, Cy Twombly: Catalogue of the Paintings Vols 1–5, Munich 1992–2008.

10. Nicholas Cullinan, Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters, 
Dulwich Picture Gallery with Paul Holberton Publishing, London, 2011.