Cy Twombley

I have a weak spot for painted drawings (or drawn paintings) and no one does this contemporary form better than Cy Twombley. I was therefore very happy to stumble upon a room of his work at the Philadelphia Museum recently - a real room, like a bedroom in a house, where you leave the rest of the place behind and are alone with the work and the space. The works all tell Greek stories - a nice connection to the architecture of the museum (see last post) now that I think of it. I should say they suggest, rather than tell, the stories - names emerge from his luscious scribbles of color and line: Ajax, Achilles, Cassandra, hinting at the power and often frightening depth of the original context through shades of red or grey, or smudged and broken line; if you didn't know the stories themselves, by paying attention to the nuances you would still feel the meaning. Although the references here are to Homer and the writings of Greek dramatists, it is said that much of our knowledge of Greek myths came to us by reading the storytelling on the vases, an extraordinary art form that also combines writing and visual imagery, thus making Twombley a 'continuer' of a tradition as well as a most contemporary artist.

At some point I'll post about the cross-country train ride that got me from California to Philadelphia, but I'm anxious to begin showing off what's going on here. Philadelphia is surprisingly quiet about what it has to offer, it seems, but I hope I can help remedy that! Lots to come on contemporary art - galleries, artists, exhibits, etc., plus the Barnes Collection - but first a note about a recent visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. If you haven't been there you've missed one of the true world class museums in this country. The building, and the site, are both wonders. Like a majestic Super-Parthenon the Museum sits on a rise about the Schuylkill River with the City in the distance, commanding everything around it; in one pediment is a reproduction of a Greek sculptural program, so authentic in intent that the gods and goddesses are brightly painted, as was the case in Ancient Greece. The reds, blues, and yellows look pretty goofy now, but it's great to be able to see what it must have been like back then! One post can't do justice to the collection, but it is deep, and broad, and very satisfying, with enormous strength in Eastern art as well as Western art of most periods. I was thrilled to discover works I didn't realize or had forgotten were here, and to stumble on many superb surprises including a wonderful room of Cy Twombley paintings - that's coming up next! Here's a taste of Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso in Philadelphia .

We'll always have Cezanne

A cynical someone I once knew opined that Picasso should have died right after he painted Guernica, that everything that followed was ... you get the idea. This person was an artist, less successful than he thought he should be, and he could be hard on other artists. His judgment on Cezanne, however, matched that of more generous-minded souls - Cezanne should have lived forever. He had some awkward years, but when he died in 1909 at age 70, he'd found his mother lode and was just getting up a full head of steam. There are certain figures in art, including Renaissance artists Giotto, Masaccio, and Donatello, who are equally important for how they affect those who follow as for their own supremely important work. Cezanne is one of these, a Renaissance artist for the modern age. I was recently in Philadelphia where I saw the exhibition 'Cezanne and his Followers,' a superb show chock-a-block with Cezanne masterworks, some of which I'd never seen in person, and intriguingly, modern names from Matisse and Picasso to Jasper Johns and Jeff Wall (Note to curator: not enough women!) Picasso's at times slavish attention to the lessons of Cezanne is well documented, but this show considers connections that seem to be new, as between Cezanne's great 'Bathers' and a Brice Marden 'Red Rocks' painting. The explanation was that Marden took off from the lines in the "Bathers" - I love Marden's work, but that one was a little hard to swallow. Easier were the connections between Jasper Johns and Cezanne - side by side it wasn't hard to relate techniques and ideas. Most fun of all were the matches of Cezanne and Jeff Wall - whatever Cezanne was thinking when he painted his "Card Players" it probably wasn't that his gloomy quartet of hunched peasants would spawn Wall's ingeniusly kitschy trio.