Cy Twombly’s not-so-simple marks

I could kick myself for selling my Cy Twombly, a very small painting in the mode of the larger one at the Milwaukee Art Museum. It was a matter of desperation — I needed a new roof and insulation in my Hartford home where I sweltered in summer and froze in winter. The work (from his Roma series) was purchased during a MAM art auction. Dean Jensen bought it from me, and I got my new roof and insulation.

Don’t laugh, but years later I sold a pile of James Rosenquist prints from the 70’s so I could get a new roof and insulation at my Bay View digs. Thank you, David Barnett.

And so it is that I find myself in the Contemporary galleries in the Kahler Building adjacent to the splendid Calatrava at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Here I stand facing Untitled (many of Twombly’s works are “Untitled”). Over the years, it’s been moved hither and yon when various galleries are re-hung, but I always locate my darling. It can run but it can’t hide.

So typical of the scrumbly blackboard-style he favored in the late 60’s and early 70’s, it’s nothing really — just a few marks on a 79 x 68 in. oil on canvas. Slightly off center, about halfway up, floats a rectangular shape and a few other marks made by Twombly’s crayon. It’s notable that the artist was interested in graffiti, and his interest in squiggly stuff eventually became his hallmark.

Born in 1928, he’s still alive and working, and rich and famous and all those other things that are the benefits of being a singular star in the second generation abstract expressionist mode. In 2008 he had a solo exhibition at the Chicago Institute of Art and it doesn’t get any better.

“Oh, my kid could do that!”

How often (when standing near my beloved Twombly) have I heard that spill from the mouth of a confused parent trying to “explain” the painting to a youngster. Decades ago, in a studio in Brewer’s Hill, I spent months trying to replicate the dusty blackboard look of this work. I used grayed-down acrylics on a 5 x 5 ft. canvas, and extended my copy-cat efforts to include an oil crayon…gray-white as I recall.

Initially, I stuck with the rectangular shape, but replicating Twombly was foolish. The image I conceived morphed and morphed. I did manage to nail the blackboard feel, though.

Is my adoration for this object rooted in the purely nostalgic, a yearning for the blackboard days of my Iowa childhood? Step forward. Pick up the chalk. Multiply. Divide. Add. Subtract. It’s all mixed in with being special enough to whack the erasers together and please the teacher at the end of the school day. As a writer, maybe I’m reminded of a page in a childhood book, a page with an important “word,” which I’m too young to recognize, though the word is both familiar and unfamiliar. The link between shape, sound and idea has yet to come.

Sometimes though, a cigar is just a cigar. Untitled has no gender, no sexual orientation, no political agenda. It hides, but where? On its dusty face there are no mountains, fields, oceans, neon slashes, majestic lions or soup cans to conceal. It’s at once bold and modest. If I take it home to hang over my bed, will the magic be lost?

Simple marks are not simple. Some viewers will snip that the marks are clumsy.

They’d be wrong.