Cy Twombly in Italy, 1957. Credit Elizabeth Stokes.
“I swear if I had to do this over again, I would just do the paintings and never show them,” [Twombly] said in a 1994 profile in Vogue. “I was brought up to think you don’t talk about yourself. I hate all this. Why should I have to talk about the paintings. I do them, isn’t that enough?”…
“A bird seems to have passed through the impasto with cream-colored screams and bitter claw-marks,” is how the poet and critic Frank O’Hara described the early works. They invite not just admiration but ardor. A woman once took off her clothes and danced naked in front of them; another kissed an all-white panel, leaving a bright lipstick mark (“a rape,” the curator fumed).
(Parul Sehgal, “‘Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly’ Hunts for Big — and Elusive — Game,” NYTimes, 11-6-18)
(c) 2018 JMN.
Gotta’ love the millionaire, famous artist’s all-too-convincing statements that if they could have it otherwise, they wouldn’t want to be the one in a million artist who gets all the money, accolades, and opportunity, while the others are starved out. That said, yeah, he might not know how to talk about his work, because you really can’t transcribe abstract paintings into sentences in linguistics.