I gave a class today on modern art and ended by having the students draw from the paintings they had before them in the gallery where I have been curating since Sept. 2023, making this my 2-year anniversary. One of the students came to me having drawn a scribbly version of Damian Hirst's already chaotic Secret Garden print, hanging in the gallery. Immediately I recognized the frenetic seemingly random scribbles in pencil. She was disheartened and then shocked that my reaction was thrilled at the similarity and how it conjured up an artist I secretly love. I was seeing before me of a veritable Cy Twombly. Yes. That artist.
Cy Twombly, the mythic scribbler of the 20th century, made it clear that sometimes a doodle really is destiny. He died at 83 in 2011, but his influence is immortal — looping, scratching, and scribbling his way into the canon while making everyone else’s “serious” brushstrokes look like they were trying a bit too hard. Forget brawny gestures; Twombly gave us erotic hieroglyphics — as Jerry Saltz once wrote, these were historical tracings drawn with clarity, humor, and the kind of honesty that makes you blush and nod all at once.
Twombly and Rauschenberg — two men who seemed to be drawing from the same cosmic inkwell — both saw that art could be messy, bodily, and still dead serious. Twombly’s orgiastic shapes, scribbles, and smudges weren’t just stains on the canvas; they were stains of life, love, and longing. Think less “heroic action painting” and more “bed sheets after a party.” And yet, with all that erotic charge, he wasn’t a showman in the New York sense. He fled to Italy, becoming a sort of expat oracle, a legend whose work felt both ancient and impossibly fresh.
By the time he roared back with his late work — chrysanthemums exploding like supernovas, Egyptian pharaohs marching across deserts on canvases, seas and suns colliding — he’d made clear that scribbles can tell epics.
Relatability? Here it is: who hasn’t looked at their own notes, their own frantic margins, their own messy handwriting, and thought, is this art, or am I just unhinged? Twombly answered for us: both. And in that mix, we see ourselves — chaotic, erotic, historical, and just clear enough to be true.
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