"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Paul Lytle

"If a painter should decide to join the neck of a horse to a human head, . . .
could you, my friend, if you were allowed to see it,
keep from laughing?" -Horace

From the ticket counter of the Caroline Wiess Law Building of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, a visitor can look ahead and up into the main area of the mezzanine level: a large and open alcove where certain artists are placed almost literally upon a pedestal. If there are only a few paintings on display there on any given day, then the floor of the alcove with be open, and the visitor can gaze upon the works of art from close up or a great distance away. It becomes more crowded when more wall space is needed, and temporary walls are placed in rows within the large room. When Cy Twombly's 2001 composition Lepanto was displayed this summer, the floor was clear, and the twelve paintings were hung four to a wall.

Twombly is one of those painters that intelligent people are supposed to like, and yet is not really known outside of Abstract Art followers. Modernism has put a barrier between the artists and the people that had not really been present before. There was a time when the works that were considered great were also works that were extremely popular, such as the novels of Dickens, the plays of Shakespeare, and the paintings of Monet. Popularity is often a sign of weakness now, as when the heavily lauded film Titanic made a great deal of money, and all of a sudden there is no serious film critic who likes the movie. Therefore it should not surprise someone who has never heard of Cy Twombly to find art magazines praising his latest show.

Personally, I looked at the paintings for several minutes before realizing that I had started at the wrong end of the series.

There were three clues that would reveal such a mistake to the visitor. Only one, unfortunately, had anything to do with the paintings themselves. Of the other two, the first is simply that the series is arranged to be seen from left to right: a direction that has been ingrained into us from long years of reading English. The second is simply that there are signs that tell the visitor to start at the left and end at the right.

Lepanto is supposed to tell the story of the 1571 Battle of Lepanto between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. In fairness to Twombly, many of the images on his paintings are recognizable as seafaring vessels, though in sort of the same way as a four-year-old's painting resembles his family standing in front of their home. The ships are simply outlined in black — with the hull looking vaguely like lips. Two or three lines come up from each hull, being the masts, and then a few lines come diagonally down and away, supposedly representing oars. In the latter parts of the series, the boats are stained with red globs, though whether representing fire or blood, I cannot tell.

This is the third way to get a general sense of the order — as the battle progresses, the ships have more red than they did at the beginning. As long as we know it is a battle, we can understand the order from that clue.

The scenes with the ships are interspaced with other scenes — these with sharp ovals colored red, orange, and yellow. The paint was applied too wet, and placed in great quantities, so each image has paint dripping down to the bottom of the canvas. This must be intentional, since even children do not spill so much.

The question must arise: Is this art? Art critics seem to think so, though they do not seem able to say why, beyond that his work is "passionate" or "powerful." But that is not their fault, for art is no longer a field of the trained and educated, honing a work into a controlled passion, but a playground for people who either want to express themselves in the most violent and blatant way possible, or those who wish to hide themselves in tricks and evasions, allowing an audience to choose an emotion for them rather than conveying one themselves. Critics must play the game, and it only hurts them to label art concretely, for it is too easy to be wrong in such a setting.

Instead, the definition of art seems to be thus: Whatever a particular critic likes is art, and what he does not like is not. Ariella Budick laments that Twombly "looks like a jumble of squiggles and scrawls" (para. 1). At the same time, Budick is "mindful that ignorant people sometimes say the same about Pollock" (para. 7). It might be true that "there's a qualitative chasm between Pollock's delicate, breathing traceries, his elegant all-over patterns, his unfurling forms splashing across the canvas and Twombly's pointedly primitive scratches" (para. 7), but this seems shaky ground first to claim that the critics who like Twombly are being scammed and second to declare that those who criticizes Pollock are "ignorant."

Another critic debates whether Twombly will be remembered as an American painter, reacting to Pollock and that school, or more European ("Two roads to somewhere" 85). The styles are different, of course, but whether Twombly is an American Abstract painter or, in the words of the critic, a "classicist" ("Two roads to somewhere" 85) — the very use of the word in this setting says something about art critics that is not terribly complementary — says nothing of Twombly at all, but only acknowledges those who paint in a similar style. Styles are useful to help identify influence and philosophic generalizations, but if style is the only thing we can discuss about a work of art, then we are in trouble. For example, if we said that Thomas Jefferson sounds like John Locke, we would be saying something, perhaps, of interest, but if that was all we could say of Jefferson, then we have not complimented Jefferson at all.

It does say something to say that Jefferson was influenced by Locke, so let us say that "something" about Twombly also. His work is perhaps difficult to classify. It seems generally agreed that he is reacting to "Abstract Expressionism and almost satiris[ing] it" ("Two roads to somewhere" 85). Ariella Budick says that he has "found himself impatient with the macho moodiness, the unwieldy ambitions and the existential rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism" (para. 5).

But this reaction takes on a strange blend of old and new, for though his work continues to be based in the American Abstract style, there is also something primitive in his style. Brooks Adams noticed it also, noting that the paintings "approach not only ancient culture but tribal artifacts in a direct and primary way" (62). These conflicts are prevalent in many of the works, primarily in the way that Twombly is using a relatively new style to relate old myths and events, such as the Battle of Lepanto. Some of his other works comment directly on mythological gods and stories. Adams, ever interested in these conflicts, says that Twombly is "a big paternalistic figure in Mediterranean culture, but with American anxieties" (109).

Perhaps that ancient influence is what we might mean by "classical," though it is still the wrong word, especially for an art critic. Twombly might have read history and mythology, but his style has nothing to do with classical art. His "scribble . . . has an affinity with Pollock drips" (Danto 29), and even hieroglyphs and cave drawings are more explicit in their narratives.

But again, a style says very little about a painter, and criticizing a painter by simply listing his "school" would be like saying that Plan 9 From Outer Space is the same as 2001: A Space Odyssey because they are both Science Fiction films. If we are to say something about Lepanto, we must not do it by speaking of Jackson Pollock, Abstract art, or even Cy Twombly as a person (Ed Wood's good intentions did not make him a great director, or even one who could express his intentions). It must be said about the painting itself.

We can do better than simply labeling an artist with big words that do not really say anything, and we can do better with our definition of art.

What is Art, and Is This It?

It will be more difficult to define art than we might hope, mainly since people have been worrying over this very problem for millennia, and a consensus has not yet been reached. It might, however, be useful to summarize some of these ideas and see how Cy Twombly emerges once filtered through each philosophy.

The best summary of the classical view of art comes from Horace, who was speaking directly of poetry, though his comments can be expanded to art in general. He explained that "[t]he aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together, in what he says, both pleasure and applicability to life" (Horace 72). Modern art in general seems to abandon this principle, replacing "to inform or delight," or the more recognizable "to teach and please," with "to confuse and bewilder." The meanings of these abstract paintings are intentionally hidden, so that it is difficult to learn anything at all. For Twombly, it might be possible to see a sea battle in his Lepanto, or at very least a Caribbean cruise gone bad, but the real subject matter of the work remains hidden without the knowledge of the title itself. This is an improvement over many of Twombly's works, which are often untitled.

But though we know the subject, still it is difficult to say that Lepanto is teaching us anything. It tells us nothing of history, since we must come with knowledge of the battle to even understand for sure that it is a battle. I do not mean to suggest that the point of art is to teach history, but if we are looking for things that these twelve paintings can teach us, that is the obvious first choice.

Is there philosophy here? Nothing immediately recognizable. We can perhaps tell that the battle was very bloody, but to say a battle is bloody does not really say whether the battle was important, foolish, or anything of the sort. We cannot tell by the paintings alone whether Twombly is impressed with the Venetian victory, if he believed it a senseless waste of life, or if he wanted it to be an example of human folly. We cannot even really tell which side the ships are on, so it is therefore difficult to say which side Twombly is on. We see no people, and so it would be difficult to say that he sympathized with the common sailor slaughtered in war. Perhaps he is trying to represent the chaos of war, though the amount of empty space on the canvas makes things seem a touch too ordered for that.

While I could believe that Twombly was trying to convey horror, excitement, or even simply relating history, critic Arthur C. Danto comments on the "serenity of the scene" (29). It is perhaps interesting that different people see radically different things in the work, but that is really a flaw under this definition of art. If Twombly has tried to teach us something here, he has failed.

As for entertainment, he has even failed to tell the actual story. All we can really tell is that there are some ships, and they either catch fire or become bloody for another reason. There is no way to tell who is fighting, for what reason, or who is winning. We must discover the story ourselves if we are interested.

The images themselves are not terribly beautiful. Perhaps I should not use the term "beautiful," but rather "sublime" under Longinus' definition, which is best described by Longinus himself: "our soul is uplifted by the true sublime; it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard" (Longinus 78).

It is an element of awesomeness, not necessarily beauty. Even war can be depicted in a sublime manner, as in the Iliad, where the language, imagery, story, and characters move the reader so much that they can only be described as beautiful. We are drifting to the territory of the subjective here, but the point is that the images in Lepanto are not interesting. They are repetitive and mundane. The fact that literally anyone could have done the same thing means little — after all, Hemingway's sentences could have been reproduced by a child. It is the lack of imagination here I find troublesome.

Perhaps we should shift our focus to those who say that art should reflect something of the divine. Plato and Aristotle both agreed that art was imitation, but while Plato thought art an imitation of an imitation (that is, we are mere imitations of the divine, and art is a mere imitation of us), Aristotle found art to be a way of organizing chaotic natures into something more divine. His example of portrait painters clearly illustrates this, for "although they reproduce the figure of a particular person, they nonetheless make it, as they paint it, more beautiful than it really is" (Aristotle 425). He is not criticizing artists here, but saying that this is the way it should be. His rules of the theatre are designed to take a story and make it more real than the real thing would have been by focusing the plot. In the same way, a history of the Civil War that spoke only of the battles and characters would be better than one that told exactly what happened in every second of the war. We learn nothing by noting that the soldiers slept several hours each day, unless that fact is important to the real story — that is, the war.

But also implicit in the effort to reflect the divine is the duty to bring your audience with you, otherwise there really is no point. If a painter sees something of that immortal element of the world but cannot express it, then it benefits no one but himself.

So it might be that Twombly has seen something greater in this battle than simply a battle. I cannot say what he does or does not understand about such things. Our only way to judge his work according to this standard is to seek the eternal in his work. As I have already said, we could not even be sure that this is a sea battle unless we already know about the battle and connect it with his title. So we are learning nothing of war or ships or anything of that sort in this. Since we also can say nothing of his philosophy through the paintings, we cannot see something eternal there. So unless we learn something about the color red in the paintings, then Twombly has not lived up to Aristotle's standards.

Next we might say that art is a form of self-expression. Though the Romantics did not abandon the classical ideas of art, they did add this aspect to it, saying that the work must reveal something of the artist. "For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (Wordsworth 438), and these feelings, by their very nature, cannot be separated from their source. Many today have twisted this philosophy further to say that art is only self-expression, though Wordsworth did not think so. He believed that "poets do not write for poets alone, but for men" (Wordsworth 443). But let us assume first that art is nothing more than self-expression.

By this standard, it is impossible to judge whether Twombly is an artist or not. After all, only he knows whether these paintings actually say something about himself or if they are merely an effort to scam the art-loving public, and even if he did say which was his intention, we are under no obligation to believe him.

With pure self-expression, it does not matter if the audience shares that experience or not, since that would be to mix some of that Classical philosophy into our definition. Therefore what I think of the work is utterly unimportant. So according to this standard, not only can I not say whether it is art or not, but it wouldn't matter if I did. So it may be art; it may not.

To which I would reply: it might very well be art, but if art is only self-expression, then it is ultimately useless. I can express myself by crying or screaming or laughing or a hundred other ways that would take a great deal less effort than creating a painting, poem, song, or novel. The point of creating these things is to not only explore the experience, but to share it.

Furthermore, if the only purpose of art is self-expression, then the very idea of an audience goes beyond the domain of art. It is not art's purpose to teach anyone anything, not even about the artist's feelings, and therefore, by definition, every artist who sells art is "selling out." Under this definition, any work of art that is shown publicly or sold is being distorted outside art's purpose, and so it literally becomes a scam, since it is neither possible, nor even its purpose, for art to be understood.

But let us examine Twombly through Wordsworth's original intention. Well, the very fact that it is impossible to know by the paintings themselves what Twombly is trying to say proves that these paintings are not made "for men," but for only those people with special knowledge. These are works designed for, if anyone, the elite, which would not meet with Wordsworth's approval.

What about the idea that art should reveal something of the audience? In an age where meaning in art has become more vague, it has become fashionable to "see ourselves" in a work of art rather than some higher meaning or something about the artist. If this is the definition of art, then perhaps Twombly is a true artist, but I would again question the value of art. If all art does is tell us something about ourselves, then the greatest artist who ever lived was Hermann Rorschach. Furthermore, to my knowledge, Twombly has no degree in psychology, and therefore we might be looking for therapy from an unqualified source. No, art should be something more, else it is nothing at all.

The next definition of art we will explore is the one I personally believe, and it is that most of our other definitions must exist at the same time. A work of art should be personal (it is self-expression), meaningful (it reflects the eternal), and accessible (it is entertaining). But since Twombly has failed to reach the lesser goals discussed before, this loftier one is impossible for him to reach.

Is It Real?

Perhaps the most simple and striking "definition" of art comes from a supposedly lower form of art — a comic book. In The Sandman, Neil Gaiman writes of one of the Endless, Dream, who is not really a god, but something very close. As his name suggests, he controls the world of dreams. He makes a deal with a young playwright named William Shakespeare that if Shakespeare will write two plays for Dream, then Dream will give him the imagination necessary to be a great writer. The first of the two plays is A Midsummer Night's Dream, and one of the conditions of the deal is that Shakespeare and his actors perform it before an audience of actual fays. During the performance, Puck — the real Puck, who is in the audience — exclaims, "This is magnificent — and it is true! It never happened; yet it is still true. What magic art is this?" (Gaiman 75)

The simple outburst of a fool — or a "giggling-dangerous-totally-bloody-psychotic-menace-to-life-and-limb" (Gaiman 72), as another of the faeries describes him — gets to the heart of the matter. Perhaps the skill and gift of the artist is to make something true out of something false. And we must not mistake the word "true" here to mean merely "tangible." But it is the novelist's duty to create a false story that we will believe, even if the events are impossible (as both Shakespeare and Gaiman are doing in this case); the poet's duty to make us feel something that is not inherent in the situation; the painter's duty to make us see something that only the painter has seen; and the musician's duty to take otherwise meaningless tones and forge them into something that moves us.

Shakespeare's play is true, though it never happened. Gaiman's version of the play's first performance is true, though it never happened. We know that it never happened, and yet it is a tale that interests us, lingers upon us, and moves us.

So can this definition be applied to Lepanto? As far as creating a story that we can observe and follow, the work has all the vagaries of a child's lie, so that nothing can really be known without stepping outside of the work and looking it up. If we do that, the credit for the story cannot go to Twombly, but to the encyclopedia article that was read after the fact. As far as seeing something that only the artist has seen, inherent in that question is the requirement that Twombly's purpose can be seen, and it cannot be. We see nothing of the painter here — none of his emotions, thoughts, philosophies, or imagination. He has not created a new world for us to visit. He has not even made our true world into something real.

We cannot discuss his meanings without simply guessing, and so I will make no effort to figure it out. A detailed biography might give us clues as to what he means here, but, again, we should not be impressed with a painting that must have its meaning on a plaque for it to be seen. We should be impressed with the plaque, for it is the part that holds the meaning. Lepanto is meaningless because we must place meaning upon it from outside sources for it to make sense.

In direct contrast with Puck's discovery about Shakespeare, Twombly has taken something that, in fact, did happen, and he made it false. There can be no art there.

Conclusions

With that, Twombly has failed to achieve even one of the many definitions of art that matter. There might be success for him in a couple of the definitions, but only the ones where art is meaningless to the public. If this is what he offers, we must wonder if Plato had not been right in his desire to kick the poets out of his perfect city. He makes the claim that "the imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which has no discernment of greater and less, but things the same thing at one time great and at another small — he is an imitator of images and is very far removed from truth" (Plato 36).

Is Plato's fear not exactly what this discussion has proved? If this is the promise of art, then we need none of it.

Have a comment about this article or one of the others in this month's issue? Use our Respondere page to write to our editors.