“His work is as much a form of behavior as a product of craft. It is restless, with the discontent of a dog that turns and turns, unable to feel just right about the place it has chosen to lie down. The main place Twombly has chosen since the ’50s is the New York School big painting, in its definitive combination of matter-of-fact touch and cosmic field.
This site defines Twombly as a poet of belatedness. Brilliantly, he makes it a medium for fugitive traces of other lostnesses: Mediterranean aches, Roman poetries. There is wonderful tension between vatic reference and vernacular mark, the ineffable and the crude. Twombly conveys a peculiar state—reminiscent of the poems of C. P. Cavafy—of possessing in mind and heart a territory that his body cannot share, because the body cannot inhabit memory. His body’s gestures toward that zone—itchy, stammering, tender scrawls—deliciously hurt. Meanwhile, he checks a tendency to the precious with bold and practical experiments in picture-making form.”
Size Down, Peter Schjeldahl, ArtForum, September 1994.
