Two moments in time, prima facie completely unrelated, sometimes find each other back in retrospect. One such moment is the birth of Edwin Parker “Cy” Twombly Jr. in rural Lexington, Virginia. The other moment—around the same period, the 1920s—was when something as powerful as the birth of new life took place, namely the birth of a political and aesthetic revolution: Italian Futurism.
Mr. Twombly is a symbol—to the point of caricature—of a swank New York audience. “Smart and left-wing,” as writer John Updike called them, or Les bobos (bourgeois bohèmes) as the French singer Renaud mockingly described them. Twombly’s complex and intellectually abstract expressionism seems to be more the core than the complement to their way of life. The Futurists are its anti-thesis.
Futurism was sparked in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti. In the capital of Lombardy, Milan, he wrote the Manifesto of Futurism that deeply resonated with many young Italian artists and intellectuals at the time. In futurism, the individual comes before morality, and power before compassion. It was an ode to the industrial progress, the technological superiority, and the speed, the vitality and straightforwardness, that characterised modern life. Above all, it was a celebration of perfect creation, in the spirit of Ayn Rand’s later brainchild, Howard Roark, something heroic and pure. However, it is best known today as the aesthetic glorification of Italian fascism, promulgated by Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.
In the movement that propagated futurism, prominent and marginal figures found each other. Influential names like Severini, Boccioni, and Papini fraternised with a motley crew of writers, intellectuals, painters, politicians, and sculptors. Much more than a mere art movement—like its big, older brother cubism—futurism was a mode of being. Or more banally put, futurism was a political, cultural, and aesthetic lifestyle.
Its imagery often coincided with its subjects: powerful artworks depicting speed and movement, more often than not in the form of tearing cars, dancing people, whizzing planes, and racing animals. A static medium like painting, however, does not easily allow movement. So to introduce it, the futurists used a powerful, constant repetition—like the sound of a Swiss metronome made visible. Moving objects were painted again and again in almost rhythmic loops. If one watches long enough, one can see these powerful dynamics of the machines come to life. Those who look even longer will see in this technique the fundamentals of Cy Twombly’s celebrated works of art.
From Boccioni to Twombly: the synthesis
In 1957, a young Twombly moved to Italy. Motivations for his relocation were plentiful: his wife was Italian, Italy’s art history was rich, and the negronis just a little cheaper. While in Rome, little by little there emerged a lasting influence of the power and speed that futurism conveyed on Twombly’s work. A very fine example of this can be found in the 1968 artwork Untitled (New York City), Twombly’s futuristic work par excellence. Ah yes, this is indeed the very painting that sold for $70.5 million at Sotheby’s auction house in 2015.
Untitled (New York City) consists of a series of unassuming white loops on a pale grey background. The rhythmically painted loops—permanently repeating each other—are reminiscent of an expressionist abstraction of Boccioni, Balla, and Carrà, great futurist artists.
Twombly puts his instrument on the canvas and does not lift it, thus building a powerful but tentative suspense in the repeated movement. The work has movement and dynamism as its core subject and looks like the answer to the question of what expressionist futurism should look like. This resemblance between Twombly and the modern Italian masters is no fluke. They also share similarities in their attention to deconstruction and their interest in more abstract concepts, such as pure movement and time. Without futurism, Cy Twombly’s work—as we know it—would not have existed. And in that entanglement, two worlds collide—not in their imagery, nor in their aesthetic experience, but rather in their ideological foundation.
Twombly’s work is dismissed by many conservatives as fraud art, as something even a toddler can do—which is perhaps partly true. That he is the darling of the aforementioned New York audience might also be difficult to digest for the more delicate conservatives. Yet he should be praised for the strength and vitality that emanates from his work, from lines that do not compromise. It is an abstract vehicle that carries within it a complex aesthetic history, and in itself represents a new and challenging chapter of that history. To understand that beauty, and its artistic value, requires effort. It is not an easily digestible work of art, nor does it have any intention of being so. Its simplicity—in juxtaposition with its price tag—makes it controversial, but those who can see past their prejudices and initial thoughts will discern in Twombly’s work a revolutionary aesthetic experience, where movement flows hot and red in a thrilling abstraction of Italian futurism, as a modern Italian-American aesthetic synthesis. A synthesis which transcends every ideological debate.
So much for the descriptive part of my essay, now comes the normative part: take the time to go see a Twombly in real life. Museum Brandhorst, in Munich, houses an exceptional permanent collection, and a good number of museums in other major cities do the same. You’ll thank me.
