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A Life of Cy Twombly Brings a Poet’s Eye to the Artist’s Mythic Work
CHALK
The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly
By Joshua Rivkin
478 pp. Melville House. $32.
Some artists — Picasso, say — are limelight junkies. As such, they’re a gift to the popular press and a boon to biographers. Others, for whatever reasons, stay out of sight, keep mum and edit their paper trails. The American artist Cy Twombly, who died in 2011 at 83, held the personal details of his life close to his chest, and his survivors have respected his discretion, making any detailed account of his life almost impossible to write. That hasn’t deterred Joshua Rivkin, a poet and essayist, from trying. “Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly,” the most substantive biography of the artist to date, is the result.
Biography? “This, dear reader, is not a biography,” Rivkin insists in the first chapter. “This is something, I hope, stranger and more personal.” And indeed, it is more personal: It’s basically a memoir by Rivkin about researching and writing the book.
In the preface, we learn that Rivkin’s interest in Twombly began a decade ago in Houston, when he was leading school groups on tours of the Menil Collection. The Menil owns classic examples of Twombly’s work: monumental semiabstract paintings depicting mysterious narratives — violent, erotic, possibly diaristic — and marked, like chalked-up blackboards, with half-legible phrases. That some of those phrases are by Rilke or Keats immediately appealed to the poet in Rivkin. But it was the mystery of the work, and of Twombly’s life, that turned interest into obsession.
The preface keys us into a factor that makes the book, in Rivkin’s word, strange. He wrote it without being able to consult the most essential source material, the artist’s archives, which are held by the Cy Twombly Foundation. The foundation’s president, Twombly’s male partner, Nicola Del Roscio, told Rivkin that he would consider granting access in exchange for being able to make “corrections” to the text, at one point seeming to threaten legal action on the grounds that Rivkin was purveying inaccuracies and “gossip.” ( Ultimately, Rivkin was denied access to the archives.) Inevitably, in the absence of hard data, his book is long on speculation. As the subtitle suggests, it’s more a poetic essay on Twombly’s art and elusiveness than a chronicle of his days.
An example of “gossip” comes in a scene that opens the book. On a winter night in 1952, a young man wades deep into a freezing pond in what appears to be a suicide attempt. Another man goes in after him, coaxing him back to shore. The place is Black Mountain College near Asheville, N.C. The wader is the artist Robert Rauschenberg; his rescuer is Twombly. The two are fellow students at the school. They are also lovers. Rauschenberg, his marriage to the New York artist Susan Weil in crisis and his professional future uncertain, has been seized by a fit of despair. But within a few months, Rauschenberg has separated from his wife and joined Twombly in Europe, there to begin what will be major art careers.
We would never know of this near-drowning incident had not a witness, the poet Charles Olson, included an account of it in a letter to a friend. Twombly was silent on the subject. And although Rauschenberg eventually grew at least somewhat comfortable with a public identity as a gay man, Twombly — who married and had a child, but spent most of his adult life with Del Roscio — never did.
From this dramatic start, the book then proceeds with a quick tour of the artist’s early life. He was born Edwin Parker Twombly Jr. in Lexington, Va., in 1928. His parents, old-stock New Englanders, were transplants to Lexington, where his father, after a short stint in professional baseball, worked as athletic director at Washington and Lee University.
Even as a child, Twombly was an avid reader, fascinated by mythology and ancient history, with an interest in making art. That interest took him to art school in Boston and, in 1950, to the Art Students League in New York City. There he met Rauschenberg and followed him to Black Mountain. In Europe, they settled in Rome. And at this point, Rivkin begins to weave himself into the narrative, making it his story as he revisits places in Rome where Twombly had been: “I couldn’t not try to see the city through his eyes, his mind gathering up the forms and colors of the city: the washed-out yellow of the arriving night sky, the carvings in the narthex of Santa Maria in Trastevere, the endless graffiti — … love notes, political slogans — on the sidewalks and walls, on bridges and iron grates shuttering the cafes at night, as ever-present now as when he first walked these streets. During my seven months living in Rome, Twombly was like a radio playing in another room.” The comparison of Twombly’s presence to the sound of a distant radio is telling: It places the artist in the background and the biographer up front, a positioning that will shift back and forth, but only slightly, over the book’s length.
Within a year, the two men returned to the United States, where they would part ways as lovers while remaining friends. Twombly’s appetite for the Old World, however, was strong. By 1959, he was living in Rome again and married to Tatiana Franchetti, a woman from a culturally well-connected local family originally from Reggio Emilia. They had a son, Alessandro; they acquired a run-down palazzo. In a bohemian-luxe way, their lives got grand; Twombly’s career, with dips and rises, prospered; the mystery around him, mostly thanks to his studied invisibility, grew.
Gradually, he and his wife, known as Tatia, began to lead independent lives, in part because Twombly spent much of his time in his studio, but also because he had met Del Roscio, then a university student, who became his lover and his life organizer, a function he in effect still serves as the zealous president of the Cy Twombly Foundation.
As the book unfolds, the image of Twombly comes in and out of focus depending on whom Rivkin is talking to. Aged contemporaries of the artist tend to see him through the static of their own regrets and resentments. His son, Alessandro, obliges Rivkin with a lunch meeting at a restaurant near the Spanish Steps, but has no intimate commentary to offer. “I don’t want to get in my father’s head,” he explains. In a handful of short encounters, Del Roscio, “the person closest to Twombly, living or dead,” as Rivkin describes him, is coolly withholding, then hostile. “Lies. You’ve written lies,” is his response to reading an excerpt from a draft of the book.
Rivkin describes these tense meetings in a tone of anxious exasperation, though this is by no means his only voice. When he is talking about Twombly’s art, or the book’s larger themes of evasiveness and evanescence, you stop hearing the thwarted reporter and start hearing the poet, who approaches this art as a gold mine of metaphors and symbols, and finds the experience enrapturing.
Toward the end of his book he writes about the great 1994 painting “Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor),” which is permanently installed in the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil: “One is overwhelmed by its size at first, but then by how much there is to see. One chooses either intimacy and detail or scale and sweep. … I simply returned again and again. I sat on the wooden bench opposite the painting. I paced along the painting’s edge, a border, a river, a church; I waited. I wanted to be changed.”
And he was changed. That’s why the book happened, and happened the way it did. Poetic ardor can be exhausting. (As the many quotes from art critics that pepper Rivkin’s book demonstrate, Twombly tends to send writers into lyric overdrive.) But it is also a propulsive, positive and persuasive mode. Over the stretch of this long but surely not last Twombly biography, it carries the day.
Holland Cotter is the co-chief art critic of The Times.
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