Cy Twombly: Radically Retro

Cy Twombly is the man who went backward. In 1957, when New York City had plainly overtaken Paris as the art world’s center of gravity, Twombly, who was not yet 30, left Manhattan to settle for good in Italy. Even before that his art had been looking back in time to a lost classical world. His lifelong problem would be how to summon the past in a language that was absolutely of the here and now. He would solve that problem in some spectacular ways.

So if nostalgia is the sentiment at the heart of “Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons,” the career-spanning survey that runs at London’s Tate Modern through Sept. 14, it’s not the kind limned in gentle twilight. The best pictures and sculptures in this confounding, mostly captivating show — which moves later to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and from there to Rome — are as tough-minded as any art of the last half-century.

Twombly, now 80 years old, was born into nostalgia, in central Virginia, amid the faded glories of America’s pre-Civil War South. But in Italy, another old world still coming back to life after World War II, he sifted the rubble for a pictorial language that could reach back much farther, past civilization itself. Like the French artist Jean Dubuffet, he found it in graffiti, a scrawl that felt older and wilder than antiquity. In Twombly’s paintings hectic scribbles and smudges of color might share the canvas with a crudely drawn word or phrase that harks back to the classical world — Hérodiade, Leandro — but always dimly, a fading signal, the remnant of a broken order.

It wasn’t easy for Twombly to draw this “badly.” Borrowing from the Surrealists, he experimented with sketching in the dark. For a time he forced himself to draw with his left hand, which his travels in North Africa had taught him to think of as the one reserved for wiping your rear. That made it the perfect hand to bring painting back to another kind of fundamental place. The classical world that Twombly invokes in his art isn’t the white marble realm of Apollo. It’s the sweaty Dionysian scrimmage. Any of his early canvases 
 can be a landing field of airborne phalluses, breasts and buttocks, of things squirting, and of brown excremental splats. In The Italians, a 1961 painting begun after he moved his studio to a teeming quarter of Rome worked by prostitutes, darting lines like fever charts describe the local energies.

In the later 1960s Twombly’s layered scribbles became more regular, filling the picture with rhythmic webs. Working in that manner he produced a series of exquisite paintings dedicated to Nini Pirandello, a friend who had died. Oscillating in a thin wash of pigment, his lines have an elegiac feel, one of fading sensations and of words attempted but never arrived at.

The Nini paintings are gentle. Some of Twombly’s later work is merely soft. In the 1980s he began to work creamy flows of paint across the canvas in an all-too-plain signifier for the surface of water. But the last gallery of this show contains four vast canvases, part of a series called Bacchus that he completed in 2005. In each, a maelstrom of overlapping vermilion loops bleed thin trails of pigment toward the floor. The gods are dead? Don’t tell Twombly. Even in old age, he can still summon thunder from Olympus.