ART REVIEW

Cy Twombly is the last great American artist                                                                                     By Jonathan Jones

It was America's greatest offering to world art, yet it has been belittled there ever since. Cy Twombly, heir to Jackson Pollock, left for Rome in the 1950s and has kept the flame of abstract expressionism alive with his smeary spatters and oozy blotches. The decadence of old Europe, says Jonathan Jones, is Twombly's glory

'Photo: Painting by Twombly. Emotional waterfalls of colour': detail from Untitled, 2001 by Cy Twombly. Photo: Gagosian Gallery
 

Cy Twombly is the last great American artist. Never say never, but it seems almost inconceivable that another epic talent like his will appear in an American art world that has spent nearly half a century dismissing its own achievements. At the end of the second world war, art in the US displayed unparalleled freedom, improvisation and achievement. Jackson Pollock and his contemporaries - the abstract expressionists - seized the high ground of modern art. In the 1950s, New York became the capital of the 20th century. The Museum of Modern Art, the dealers Betty Parsons and Leo Castelli, the critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, defined the new in art. American painters justified their hype: Pollock and Willem de Kooning most of all, then Clyfford Still, the sculptor David Smith, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.The decades since have been spent by Manhattan's museums and critics belittling and denying that achievement. The adjectives "patriarchal", "pompous", even "imperial", have smothered what was, simply, great painting. There is one painter, however, who never fell for this, and who still creates art with the power and liberty of Americans 50 years ago. Cy Twombly's paintings are grand histories whose louche drips, purple washes and bursts of poetic quotation written in paint or pencil on the canvas are abstract, and also tell a story. Of course, you can never quite fathom what the story is, but you are involved by it all the same, and moved by the scope of Twombly's emotional waterfalls of colour. His art is tearful, sensual, pessimistic, and on the edge of bad taste. Walking into Twombly's exhibition of 50 years-worth of works on paper - drawings, paintings, collages - the images and words and washes and blotches and smears appear to be fragments of some heroic conception. Sketchbooks have been passionately, almost hysterically, covered in unfurlings of violet and crimson. There are strident, fiery paintings of flowers. There is a freedom in this painter in his late 70s reminiscent of the late de Kooning - without, of course, the Alzheimer's. This freedom suggests that Twombly isn't worried about whether his work is any good. He seems happy to court misunderstanding, to make daubs that might be called sentimental and lambasted as kitsch. He's doing incredible work now. You can set him alongside any young artist. Yet everything he does, every squished crimson bloom or crush of black undergrowth, allows itself to be pulled back, sucked down, underwater, into the swamp, into the past. The past is Twombly's passion. Edwin Parker Twombly Jr inherited a sense of history along with his father's nickname, Cy. He was born in the Old South, where history throttles the present like weeds overgrowing a plantation house. He took his first breath in 1928, in the Stonewall Jackson hospital - named for the flinty Civil War soldier - in Lexington, Virginia. The US that emerged from the Civil War is an optimistic nation. It tells its history as progress - and that includes the history of art. Pollock was championed, by Greenberg and other Manhattan critics, as going beyond Europe, into a higher American stage of modernism. Which meant the next generation had to go beyond that in a spiralling folly of upward progress.

In 1950, Pollock, who made paintings by flicking, pouring, drooling and splashing paint on to a horizontal canvas, had a solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery that was the culmination of his achievement. On the walls were paintings - quickly to be purchased by New York and Washington's leading museums - in which an individual finds identity and acceptance, and simultaneously invents an art that can only be American. Unfettered swirls seem not random but secretly coherent in these paintings. "No chaos, dammit," as Pollock said. Yet even as the abstract expressionists were becoming famous, three younger artists were looking at Pollock's paintings and recognising in them not abstraction but a tangled confessional. It is significant that Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly were from the South, which has never bought into Yankee utilitarianism. The history of American art allots these three the part of young rebels who mocked the authority of the big, drunken macho men with a more plural, ironic, playful aesthetic, which gave birth in turn to the art of the 1960s - of Andy Warhol and the minimalists.

The article continues on the following pages.