Twombling Free

Have you ever noticed how onomatopoeic the names of some of the g reatest painters of the 20th century sound? Like Jackson Pollock: you can hear the paint spatter and drip, or "pollock-pollock", on the canvas. How about Mark Rothko? Those soft-sounding and melancholy syllables announce the mysterious foggy rectangles of colour which form his paintings. Cy Twombly, the subject of a marvellous and meticulous new retrospective at the Tate Modern, is a third example of this little-remarked phenomenon. He possesses a name so evocative that it could have been devised by a Hollywood agency. I am surprised that he hasn't yet become a verb. Twombly doesn't so much paint as ... twomble.

If it were a verb, "to twomble" would be to make small marks, scribbles, scratches, dabs and squiggles of crayon, pencil and paint on a canvas. For more than half a decade, Twombly has been working in a vocabulary of elliptical signs - slanting hearts, sexual organs, blobby orbs and splodges of squishy paint applied with brush and finger, and loops of "automatic" writing. His art is primitive, rough, messy; he is the cave painter of abstract expressionism. Yet his pictures are also - for those of us who fully understand the art of twombling - graceful, magisterial and delicate.

Ranked in the top five alongside Pollock, Rothko and De Kooning, the 80-year-old Twombly is one of the legends of American postwar painting. Yet unlike them, his work inspires extreme reactions. To those with little patience for modern art, his paintings look like the bib of a two-year old who has just tried spaghetti alla bolognese for the first time. They are further infuriated by the epic scale of the splurges and the portentous titles they carry, which often refer to classical myth or great poets. But inside the art world, Twombly is the equivalent of a saint who has been beat-ified before his death. Without exception, museum directors and curators look at a Twombly and see the clouds part and God appear surrounded by angels. Twomblys for them are revelations about the spiritual essence of life on earth. Both sides, I'm afraid to say, are equally wrong.

Born in 1928 in Virginia, USA, Twombly was quickly recognised as an original talent, and offered his first solo show at the age of 23 - a premature invitation which he turned down with calculated modesty. He went to study at the celebrated Black Mountain College where his teachers included the American Abstract Expressionist Robert Moth-erwell, known for his massive gestural compositions in black and red paint. Twombly travelled to Morocco with Robert Rauschenberg and mounted a joint exhibition with him in 1953. Both artists shared a raw aesthetic, yet their paths were strikingly divergent. Rauschenberg built his paintings out of the newspaper images and street furniture of urban America; Twombly took inspiration from classical mythology and avant-garde French poetry.

In 1954 Twombly was conscripted and trained by the army as a cryptographer - one source of his taste for graphic symbols. From the late Fifties he spent increasing periods in Italy, basing his studio in Rome and then Gaeta, on the southern coast of Lazio.

This show of 100-odd works pilots us skilfully through the most inventive episodes of Twombly's career. He began with a black and white palette and tribal motifs typical of the Abstract EExpressionists, before that gave way to whitedout canvases that bear the emaciated traces of lead pencil and wax crayon. Astonishingly for an artist of such apparent spontaneity, his style developed with discipline and logic, as if he were pacing himself. Traces of red and yellow paint - sexual and violent - appeared; they congealed into denser and denser impasto Expressionism by the early Sixties. At the end of that decade, fascinated by space exploration, Twombly introduced motifs of diagrams and measurements into his paintings, as if to remark on how man's greatest scientific achievements start out as primitive scribbles and notes.

Twombly found ever new ways of innovating within his style. When a friend died in 1971, he executed elegiac canvases covered in writing-like layers of illegible scrawl - a simple metaphor for the inability to communicate with the dead. By the Eighties his work had taken on a romantic air. Like many other great 20th-century artists, Twombly eventually became a victim of his own style, churning out semi-abstract landscapes and seascapes that verged on the sentimental, while still displaying consummate skill. In the final room the frenzied whirls of long looping red brushstrokes, no doubt painted in minutes, titled Bacchus, are overblown and out of time (twomblandum ad absurdum, as a classics scholar might say) - but no more so than the late works of Picasso. And at least there's no lessening of the passion.

When he unveiled his new style in the 1950s it was a mind-blowing assault on the prevailing idea of a painting, far more radical than anything Pollock or Rothko attempted. Their work was beautiful and colourful, ordered and patterned; Twombly did ugly. His canvases did not so much look like paintings as sections of the walls of a prison cell or dungeon, marked unevenly and sporadically with scratched-in words and bits of paint left by lonely, tortured inmates. Present in these works was the widespread post-war aesthetic of failure and despair, an art "after Auschwitz", an anti-aesthetic which turned against the grand claims of painting from romanticism to Cubism.

THERE'S no need to use lofty metaphysical language so often employed to explain Twombly - his art is not mysterious, it is obvious. Like the American abstract artists of the day, he redefined abstract painting. It no longer was an arrangement of colours and shapes that worked on the mind like music. Now the way the paint was applied to the canvas carried the meaning of the work. Twombly's painting style carries its own messages. In his work there is an interplay between conscious and unconscious activity. He paints impulsively but only after thinking about it long and hard - he might spend three hours looking at a canvas and only 20 minutes painting it, so fast that the thinned paint cascades down the surface. The eruptions and fingered messiness of red and brown paint suggest base sexual and scatological instincts. He celebrates and ennobles the most primitive beginnings, the first uncertain marks of creativity. It's all about letting yourself go.

Twombling is about finding a raw and primal "before" state. In paintings like the Ferragosto series, he squeezes paint directly from the tube onto the canvas and shapes it with his fingers, before it has been mixed or encountered a brush. He uses pencil and crayon - the medium before paint - whose lines are often interrupted by the bumpy surface of the paint underneath. It's the stage before even the page of the sketchbook - the notebook. His rolling loops of scribbles are a kind of writing before words, as are the little pictograms of hearts, amulets and - if you look hard enough - penises.