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CY Twombly: New Works

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Twombly's drip drip drip effect

Way too drippy: Cy Twombly’s trademark of wet paint streaming down the canvas has been done to death in his latest exhibition

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Could someone please tell me when I become a parody of myself? Because, as this exhibition of new paintings by Cy Twombly shows, it is not an edifying sight. Gagosian’s cavernous white cube in King’s Cross is filled with five huge pictures, each depicting three splodgy roses and scrawled with extracts from poems.

The colours — it must be said — are marvellous. In recent years Twombly has set himself loose from the disciplined pastel palette, dominated by red and white, in which he worked most of his long life (he is 80 this year). Here, circles of roughly painted orange, purple and red throb against a background of smooth and saturated turquoise. The archetypal Twombly sensation, that a bit of a page of sketch book has been massively enlarged into a monumental painting, is in full effect.

But the work is way too drippy — both literally and emotionally. Twombly’s great, oft-copied trademark, letting the wet paint stream down the canvas, has been done to death in these pictures, giving the impression that the artist is performing one of his most popular routines, not making new work.

Another Twombly-ism, the handwritten texts, which were once elliptical references to Greek myths, are here quotations from the romantic poems by the early 20th century German poet Rainer Maria Rilke — “Rose, certainly earthly and our equal, flower of all our flowers…” Puhleese.

Over the past 20 years Twombly has made many bold paintings of flowers — peonies, irises etc — but these roses are plain soppy.

In the past five years so many artists’ work has descended into sentimental cliché and bombast — think no further than those glittering skulls and supersized exotic flowers popular at White Cube.
They were pandering to the awful tastes of the new credit-rich

billionaires, and it is depressing to see Twombly, too, succumb to this.

Since the Eighties his work has moved from an expression of the existential angst of “zero hour” (how to start again after the Second World War), to a soft-focus Romanticism. As last year’s Tate show demonstrated, that produced amazing paintings evoking sweeping landscapes and flowing waters. Here, though, the whole ensemble amounts to little more than a bank boss’s Valentine’s Day card.

Still, if you think Twombly is bad, go and see the work of Murakami — another “talent” who rose to fame and fortune in the contemporary art boom — in Gagosian’s other gallery in Davies Street.
Until 9 May (020 7841 9960, www.gagosian.com).

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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