The Artist's Life
"One of his feet was in a cave and one of them was in a palace”
In 1952 Robert Rauschenberg photographed his friend and fellow artist Cy Twombly standing with a thin notebook next to Constantine’s colossal hand while on holiday in Rome. Juxtaposed and framed, a pivotal moment in time. Not they that knew that then.
They were both art students developing their practise and searching for art, traveling together on a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Rauschenberg agreed to accompany Twombly. They traveled to Sicily, to the mainland and into Rome; later to Morocco and Tangiers. Five years later Cy Twombly moved from America to live in Rome, Italy.
Edmund de Waal said they were, “Two young Americans on the Grand Tour”
It wasn’t the vast possibilities of Rome’s antiquities that led me to the Capitoline Hill in Rome, it was this photograph. A black and white still that captivated me.
I had been close a number of times and circumnavigated the ruins on previous trips. Some times there are too many options, too many possibilities in a city like Rome. So I went back again on a personal mission - art and writing. My own tour de force. My own excavation if you will.
Can I pull the words out of the depths? Can I tour every statue, every ancient column, see every Caravaggio?
After a humble pasta, fried zucchini flowers and vino bianco I walked beyond the Jewish Ghetto to Musei Capitolini via ruins and fenced off paths. It was terribly hot in June this year that I was laughing out loud to myself, alone and surprised by own determination. I knew it was insane to be crisscrossing Rome in the heat but I had no choice, the photograph of Cy Twombly called me there.
Italy is always this way, it is never just one thing, but a river of possibilities. It can never be sated, not that I want it be.
We have to take these journeys. To know ourselves and what has been and gone. To see what remains.
Twombly would take many journeys over his lifetime. Moving between places and homes and making art. Twombly’s fascination with ancient civilisations, the Mediterranean cultures, the Greco and the Roman would converge on his canvases. A love of literature and poetry underlines his art.
For an artist seeking their own aesthetic and making their own myths, it was a subtle and thrilling decision, a well calculated move to go to Italy. No doubt he knew the seclusion and the Roman light would fuel the direction of his art making.
Cy - Relics, Rome 1952 by Robert Rauschenberg
Twombly made Italy his home. Over time living in three distinctive places - Rome, Bassano and Gaeta. Two years after Twombly arrived in Rome he married Baroness Tatiana Franchetti, a painter and photographer. Their son Allesandro Cyrus Twombly was born the same year, he lives outside of Rome and is a painter and sculptor. Franchetti and Twombly had a comfortable arrangement, a modern partnership, both seeking refuge outside of marriage with other people.
In the later years of his life he divided his time between Lexington Virginia (his birthplace) and the seaside town of Gaeta, halfway between Naples and Rome. His assistant and companion, Nicolo del Roscio, introduced Twombly to the seaside town of Gaeta.
Years ago I saw images of Cy Twombly online. The vast canvases full of white space with a trademark style to the work. He was standing with marble busts of Marcus Aurelius and Emperor Hadrian. A large canvas of his art was central on the wall. The casual sophistication of the layered objects was interior design heaven. The photographs were taken by Horst P. Horst for Vogue as directed by Dianna Vreeland. These photographs are legendary now and still evocative of a certain moment, a casually elegant artistic life in Rome.
Bleached antique furniture, rows of canvases stacked neatly against the wall, the article published by Vogue named Twombly “The Great Outsider”, and described him as a man who walked to the beat of his own drum. That and a 17th Century Palazzo, I was all in.. head first…..
Scratches, lines, thin scrawled words, drippings, smears and layers of paint, obscured words to decipher, symbols, marks, scribbles and blotches of coloured paint.
Twombly curates a vast canvas that is enigmatic, layered, ambiguous and yet quiet. Fusing art, poetry, culture, myth, history and place. Repetition, awkwardness, conflict, violence, pain, suffering, death. There is a tension between the innocence of the awkward childlike line and the themes Twombly references. The lines of poems are buried, yet remerge again and again. Splats, drips and layers of white.
There is sensitivity and emotional depth, expressive, poetic and silent. There is a subtle controlled tension between the old world and the new. Somehow he marries the sublime with the ancient and the messy, beautiful present.
Artist Jenny Saville said, “one of his feet was in a cave and one of them was in a palace”. He lived between worlds. He honoured place and solitude. He secluded himself and suggested to young upcoming artists “stay ignored for as long as possible”.
There is something beautiful to these words, stay ignored. Just do the work, go deeper, linger.
Image, by Horst P. Horst for Vogue.
I can’t decide who I am anymore, what matters, what to keep and what to discard perhaps a like Twombly I can just paint over, scrape some back, cover up the old, reveal something new. Rewrite the myths.
I went on a journey then and now, contemplating art and words and the nuance of location. Podcasting about Cy Twombly and Italy as a place of refuge and inspiritis.
The words, my own longing, the journey of recognition and curiosity. A few days later I found myself contemplating the process of being an artist and the threads that weave… Sharing my own journey on the podcast led me to musing over Italy and Julian Schnabel with Cy Twombly, the deep connections to Italy and Pablo Picasso as muse and luminary. I laugh at the play of copying art and learning from the masters, that we all need to shed light on process and becoming.
Visit at MichelleJohnston.life
Instagram @awriterinitaly
Listen to the Podcast - A Writer in Italy
Share your favourite places or books - Let’s Connect!