American Graffiti

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
   --T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

In the works that made him famous, Jasper Johns realized an ancient dream by painting things that overcame the distinction between reality and representation--numerals, for example, or targets. Thus a painting of the numeral 2 is at once the numeral 2 and its representation; the same is true of a painting of a target, or of the American flag. This was not quite the achievement the sculptor Pygmalion had in mind when he carved a woman in marble that metamorphosed into a woman of flesh and blood. Still, with its mischievous approach to the seemingly intractable divide between reality and representation, Johns's work acquired a remarkable philosophical interest. Like his friend Robert Rauschenberg, Johns mined what Rauschenberg called "the gap between art and life." Both Johns and Rauschenberg explored as well the gap between Abstract Expressionism and Pop, its cool successor and ostensible antithesis.

Rauschenberg's friend Cy Twombly was the third member of this remarkable cohort, united by personal bonds and comparable aesthetic ambitions, but his work stands apart from that of his more famous peers. Twombly's relationship to the New York School was closer; the signature feature of his work is the scribble, which has an affinity with Pollock's drips. Whereas Johns carefully drew or printed numerals and stencil-like letters, Twombly scrawled lines that were barely legible. Twombly had fewer qualms about being overtly representational, and he didn't seem to worry much whether his scribbles were read as imitations of scribbling or as the thing itself. Even so, his art was very much in harmony with that of the Pop generation and beyond, based as it was on loosely written texts.

Take, for instance, the painting on the cover of the catalogue for the celebratory exhibition "Cy Twombly: 50 Years of Works on Paper," on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through May 8 (after which it travels to the Menil Collection in Houston). The painting features a variation on the show's title, "Cy Twombly: 50 Years of Drawing," in three nearly unreadable lines of script. It has a feeling of urgency and almost looks as if it were written by a finger dipped in blood. Yet it appears to have been first written tentatively and then painstakingly overwritten, as if to make sure the message got through. Which it barely does: The two layers of writing bleed into each other, obscuring the words and suggesting a nearly hopeless struggle to communicate. Twombly's work draws its power from this struggle with words and inscriptions, not from their meaning, in striking contrast to Johns, who never allows the bravura of his painting to obscure the transparency of his forms. Twombly has turned hermeticism into a strangely stirring form of expression.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.