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210909: MUMOK Museum moderner Kunst: Cy Twombly – Sensations of the Moment The last Informal
MUMOK Museum moderner Kunst: Cy Twombly – Sensations of the Moment
The last Informal
George Mathieu’s theory of Informal Art is one of the last master tales of Modernism. Convinced of historic logic, the theory discourses about the cyclicality of morphology. From a condition of shapelessness the figurations develop a sovereignty, take shape, convert to symbols of harmony and equilibrium, develop further, flow into something bizarre and eccentric, become pretentious, to finally wither and drown in a pool of the unidentifiable. Following the atrocities of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, this is the condition of Informal Art that Mathieu saw perfectly clearly.
The theory of the Informal is the tersest alternative draft to the progress-drunkenness of Modernism with its ideas on self-criticism and the radicalisation for the better. Informal Art has, despite Mathieu’s theatricality; something pausing, sceptic if not despairing, and it are European to the bone. That its most renowned representative is an American fits perfectly into the ‘concept of paradox’.
Anyway, Cy Twombly has been living in the capital of the old continent for half a century. He came to Rome in 1960, the centre of “Dolce Vita” and for a short period the trendsetting-centre. Twombly stayed, and concentrated on his foible for the ancient world, its myths, and their survival, their legacy and their renaissances. Above all, his titles deal with history’s audacity; call on “Arcadia”, remind of Rafael’s school of Athens as well as Pan, Sappho, and Orpheus.
Twombly’s canvases, and later his sculptures, live on the allusion, the impression, the afflatus of a motif. What he does on the surfaces, sounds like a noise or looks like a phenomenon, dainty, hardly capable of living under the massive presence of that what denies itself to be associated in these pictures. Because this is the first impression: many kinds of traces have left themselves behind, of pencils, of crayons and other tools, but they are not assignable, they exist as monuments of their own informality.
This kind of autonomy is typical for the global language of abstraction. But behind all of this murmuring and rumbling one begins to hear a sound, and it sounds classic. You have to take a close inspection and a world of topics and great messages becomes audible, this archive of meanings, which once stood for the word iconography. For fifty years now, Twombly does nothing but give this iconography its Modernism. With its fabulous presentation the MUMOK looks over his shoulder. And he wisely leaves his most recent works to the collection Brandhorst.
By Rainer Metzger
MUMOK Museum moderner Kunst
1070 Vienna, MuseumsQuartier, until 26.10.09
www.mumok.at
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
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210909
mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien
1070 Wien, Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1
Tel: +43 1 52 500, Fax: +43 1 52 500 13 00
Email: info@mumok.at
http://www.mumok.at
Öffnungszeiten: Täglich: 10.00–18.00 Uhr, Do: 10.00–21.00 Uhr
mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien
1070 Wien, Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1
Tel: +43 1 52 500, Fax: +43 1 52 500 13 00
Email: info@mumok.at
http://www.mumok.at
Öffnungszeiten: Täglich: 10.00–18.00 Uhr, Do: 10.00–21.00 Uhr
