Pretty harsh stance to take, right?
But my reaction upon seeing his art for the first time was exactly that. I was looking at his 1961 painting School of Athens, confused as to how he could be considered a pivotal artist of the post modern age. The scribbles and what looked like colored pencil or crayon pissed me off so much, and it took me a while to pinpoint exactly why I felt so mad.
When my art history professor asked me why I thought it was a terrible work of art, my response was, “It looks like a child drew it.” A fair assessment, and I stand by it to this day, but my professor had a rebuttal.
“Child-like drawings have merit. Drawing like a child is a style many artists adopt, especially modern and post modern artists who lean heavily into the avant-garde.”
This was a moot point to me. I did not care that it was a style. I insisted that there is a difference between “drawing like a child” and “drawing poorly” but I was convinced that Cy Twombly was just a terrible artist. I felt that giving him the justification of “drawing in the style of a child” was disingenuous to his character and giving him a free pass to make terrible art.
My professor decided to let it lie, and not try to convince me that Cy Twombly had some deep meaning I just wasn’t seeing, and I appreciate that. I had taken many classes from this professor and they had learned long ago that I am not easily convinced. However, they also knew that I would likely go research the artist or the work of art on my own, if only to come to class one day and say, “And another thing—!”
When a friend of mine asked me why I thought Cy Twombly was a terrible artist, I had better words. She gave me a look of distraught confusion, Twombly being one of her favorite artists. I calmly explained myself:
“His drawings are rudimentary at best and lazy at worst. He draws and paints and makes are like a child except he doesn’t have the excuse children do. He’s old enough and familiar enough with art that he knows what is possible in art and he chooses to make drivel. He had access to the whole of human art and experience and he made scribbles. Cy Twombly’s art is an affront to artists and art historians as a whole and all but spits in the face of the progress humanity has made up to this point in time. He takes the whole idea of dadaism and the avant-garde and goes the pompous philoso-bro route saying, “Oh, look at me, I’m making nonsensical marks on a piece of canvas that mean nothing, but I’m going to pretend they mean something profound just to make people feel like idiots.”
My friend, saint that she is, smirked and gave a few tsk tsk tsk’s before opening her laptop and typing something into google. “What you’re focusing on,” she began, “is how Twombly fits into the time period, and how the time period fits into the whole of art history.” She turned her laptop around to show me the screen.
“You need to forget all of human achievement and focus about what’s on the canvas.”
I have never appreciated advice more than I appreciate that last sentence. The work she showed me was Cold Stream, made in 1966. A dark grey background with row after row of light squiggles.
“What does that look like to you?” Her voice dripping with amusement.
“It looks like…a kid’s notebook when they’re bored in class,” I replied.
“Yes,” she said, getting excited. “If you were going to make art and you wanted to make something people could relate to without having to understand the kinds of paint you used or the techniques you used or the life you had led up until you painted the painting…you would make art of your school days, wouldn’t you? You would take the mundane scribbles and squiggles of being bored in class and make them with nice quality paint on nice quality canvas, and you would want to hang it in a nice museum. Purely so that, as viewers wander through the gallery, flexing their brains to understand the works of try-hards like Pollock and Duchamp, a person can come across your work and be reminded of those little breaks from learning they would take in class. The little things they did so their brains didn’t explode from all the learning. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
And I did. Cy Twombly tapped into that raw, emotional understanding of the world that children have, and put it into his art. His Cold Stream was a perfect example of how art doesn’t have to mean something deep and profound, and yet my friend and I were able to give Cold Stream a meaning that was deep and profound.
I had never been so glad to have been wrong. I went back and looked at School of Athens (1961) and saw it in a different light. Instead of haphazard scribbles and messy colors, I now saw a sketched outline of a building and splashes of color to symbolize figures. I saw a relaxed approach to perspective as well as an emotional attempt to capture the feeling of the original renaissance painting, rather than directly copying it. I understood how Cy Twombly was not a modern artist, nor a post-modern artist, nor an avant-garde artist. He was an abstract expressionist, and a damn good one at that.
I went back to my professor and said, “Hey, so, I learned some things, opened my third eye and all that jazz, and I have come to the conclusion that Cy Twombly isn’t all that bad and that you were right.”
So, Cy Twombly wasn’t a terrible artist. He wasn’t even a bad artist. I was just not as well-versed in expressionism as I should have been, and my friend—a person with a passion for Twombly’s art and a patience to rival oil painters—gave me a better explanation than I could have hoped for.
Cy Twombly was about as un-terrible as you could get. I would now even argue he was one of the best artists of the 20th century.
