- Venue
- Dulwich Picture Gallery
- Location
- London
Ordinarily, pairing a modern (especially abstract) artist alongside an Old Master is a risky endeavour. Yet, this exhibition, which draws on the similarities between these two artists 334 years apart from each other, magnificently combines the passions and practices of Cy Twombly and Nicholas Poussin to delight and intrigue viewers.
Twombly’s abstract and passionate, free-styled and multiple-material canvases reveal the best in Abstract Expressionism: theme-driven, colourfully-explosive, raw expression and American. Poussin’s more traditional post-Renaissance paintings contained key topics of the seventeenth-century: Greek/Roman mythology, love, anxiety and the figure. However, both artists were like-minded in their abilities to interpret themes of poetry, lyrical painting (the art of a painting to suit the needs of a previously adapted form), theatricality and Arcadia, which can leave art historians to interpret both artists as key beneficiaries to Western art for their contributions of both classical and contemporary work.
Twombly may have been either an art prodigy or the reincarnation of Poussin, maybe even JMW Turner (who has been argued as the true influence on Twombly) but one distinguishing feature to remember about Twombly was his non-coherence as an official Abstract Expressionist; much like Robert Rauschenberg, a friend of the artist; during the post-war American art scene. Poussin’s gift to contemporary art can be archaeologically dug from his use of radiant hue colours as seen in Rinaldo and Armida (1628-30) whilst some of Twombly’s most dramatic brushstrokes and marks can be found in his”creamy-pink masterpiece”* Hero and Leander (1985) and later works Camino Real II (2010) and Untitled (Bacchus)(2006-08) which were featured in his spectacular Tate retrospective Cycles and Seasons in 2008.
A high point in the exhibition as well, is the warm and basking glow of light that shines on Twombly’s That Which I Should Have Done, I Did Not Do (1998) assemblage which is exhibited in the gallery’s Mausoleum to replicate and enhance the viewer to experience themes of death and religion which Twombly magnificently mythologises in his abstract and funeral-like sculptures.
Whether Twombly himself was a Surrealist (for using the technique of automatic drawing in his legendary canvas scribbles, sometimes converted to paint) is left to the viewer as they stare at both artists’ work to draw their own comparisons and similarities. Admittedly, the gallery’s special exhibition space which is housing the exhibit is a tight squeeze and could have done with either a larger host gallery or more of the Dulwich, but nonetheless the two seemingly opposed artists are fitted with a standing and reflecting ‘monument’ to their individual genius as the exhibition becomes the obituaries they deserved.
*Jackie Wullschlager in The Financial Times, 1 July 2011
