GREGOIRE
JEANMONOD
Art and its stories as an inspiration
Cy Twombly
summer madness
1990
To learn to unlearn
Cy Twombly, American artist born in 1928, became known worldwide with works
disconcerting, excesses of energy between fig-
ration and abstraction, freed from all form
control and inhibition. On his canvases,
impastos of paint rub shoulders with
hastily scribbled, sometimes crossed out,
without reference to his sources of inspiration,
often literary, mythological or poetic
ticks. But who makes the strength of his work,
it's before all its radical and manifest rejection
of all mastery of the gesture: the material, the
colors and words collide in
an exalted chaos, often loaded with violence, sensuality, even eroticism.
While his works spontaneously evoke childish words such as "daubing" or "scribbling",
Twombly was actually a cartoonist
accomplished, educated in American art schools
Americans as renowned as the Art Students
League or Black Mountain College. But
to find his way, he tried to
"unlearn" the techniques he had
assimilated. He therefore developed
working methods intended to force
the emancipation of his gesture, for example by
drawing with the left hand, in the dark, or
blindfolded. So he succeeded in freeing
his art, while evoking his apprenticeship as an essential prerequisite to this transgressive process.
Cy Twombly
Self-Portrait , 1947
What we can take away:
​
Training, in any discipline whatsoever, is essential in understanding the process, issues, ins and outs. However, by definition innovation consists of departing from the beaten path to generate novelty. The paradoxical interest of learning is therefore in fact to give us the means to turn away from it, precisely because we have mastered our subject.
