Cy Twombly,  HRIH (detail), 1982, Oil stick, pencil, colour pencil, 100 x 70cm . Photo courtesy of
Gagosian Gallery © 2004 Cy Twombly

This is false history, partly because it's absurd to reduce Rauschenberg's densely allusive works such as Bed (1955), with its disturbing evocation of the night, or Johns's erotically sinister Target With Plaster Casts (1955) to mere forerunners of something else, but also because it is chronologically inaccurate. Rauschenberg made some of his most powerful works contemporaneously with Pollock's masterpieces. In 1951, John Cage helped him make Automobile Tyre Print: Rauschenberg spread 20 sheets of paper along Fulton Street in lower Manhattan, put black ink on the front left tyre of Cage's car - a Model A Ford - and the composer of 4'33" drove along it with his inky tread. It's not hard to see how this is a literal interpretation of Pollock's "action painting". Pollock's painting possesses a meshed, mighty sense of daily life. You can see cigarette butts in the paint, handprints, can feel the man in his paint-spattered boots out in the chill air thinking about the A-bomb. Twombly, Rauschenberg and Johns expand on the memories that cling to Pollock like bits of dirt in paint. Twombly worked not just in intellectual but emotional intimacy with Rauschenberg. They met in 1950 or 1951 at the Art Students' League in New York City. Rauschenberg had recently married the artist Susan Weil, who was expecting a baby, and at their suggestion Twombly joined them at Black Mountain College, a freewheeling arts centre in North Carolina. By the time Rauschenberg and Twombly went back there for a second session in summer 1952, Rauschenberg's marriage was over. That autumn, Twombly won a travelling scholarship to visit Europe: Rauschenberg went, too, and it was with him that Twombly discovered Rome. Back in New York, the two artists cleared out a stable and had a joint exhibition. Then Rauschenberg met and formed a close relationship with Johns. Just when Johns and Rauschenberg were starting to sell to museums as well as private collectors - in 1958 the Museum of Modern Art bought Flag (1954) and Target With Four Faces (1955) and two other works from Johns - Twombly vanished from America. He married the Italian artist Tatiana Franchetti at City Hall in New York in 1959. Then they and their newborn son Cyrus Alessandro moved into a grand residence in Rome's centro storico, and Twombly rented a studio in the grimily baroque surroundings of Campo de' Fiori, where heretics were once burned and today vegetables and flowers are sold.

Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper

Since then, he has restored a Renaissance house in the village of Bassano to the north of Rome; he has a place, too, at Gaeta on the coast. He escaped all right - stepped out of New York loft life into a Visconti film. What did Twombly get by abandoning America? Today, it is possible to answer this. By leaving, he preserved in his own work everything that American art has lost since 1959. Twombly, you realise in his 50-year retrospective, is one American artist who asked himself, what if there is no such thing as progress? What if you can't supersede Pollock; what if Pollock is where American art begins and ends? Conventional histories of modern American art like to see an evolutionary ascent from the primordial soup of Pollock's paintings to the enlightened rationality of today's video installations. But what if it was a descent all along? It is a thought worthy of Edgar Allan Poe.

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