Beautiful Scribble

“I’m a potter and I’m a writer and I love Cy Twombly,” says contemporary artist Edmund de Waal.

De Waal is perhaps best known for making vessels from white porcelain and writing books like The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, a history of his family through the objects they collected. He’s also an ebullient fan of Twombly’s. De Waal has written about Twombly, studied Twombly, and shares Twombly’s appreciation for the fragment, his obsession with loss, and the irresistible urge to write on his work.

I interviewed de Waal for the audio tour accompanying the Getty Museum exhibition, Cy Twombly: Making Past Present.

Laura Hubber: What’s up with all the white that Twombly uses?

Edmund de Waal: I suppose you start with the fact that for him, often the white page is a place of erasure, actually rubbing something out or pasting something over a text, an image. So quite often, it’s not just a sort of dynamic emptiness that you find there, but it’s a palimpsest. It’s a really important word for him. It’s a writing over, replacing something that already exists to get another echo, another space on top of it.

And, of course, as soon as you are in that territory, you are thinking about the archaic, you’re thinking about Rome, and you’re thinking about Greece. You’re thinking about one thing being written on top of another, or one thing being erased, and a space being created.

What pages is he thinking about? Is he thinking about white paintings in the 1950s or is he thinking about a page of the Greek poets? He’s thinking about both of them at the same time. That’s what’s so incredibly exciting.

LH: How does Twombly use writing in his artistic practice?

EDW: It’s not writing, it’s inscription. It’s using a piece of paper or canvas like someone would use marble or stone. It’s carving a name into a substance and leaving it there. It’s making a tomb marker, a moment when you can read someone’s name and the resonance will keep widening, and widening, and widening, and widening, and widening. So, he does that.

And then he scribbles beautifully, crossing things out. He rewrites poems into his paintings, into his art. He misquotes fabulously. As a writer, I adore this. He misspells. How fabulous!

LH: If you could, talk a little bit about the importance of the fragment.

EDW: Twombly, like many of us who love the fragment, has come back to the fragment of poetry, the broken survival of a few words. Why does it matter? It matters because you feel the jaggedness of the language there. You don’t feel it’s not a complete work; it is a connection to loss. It gives you a space to inhabit, to bring your own thinking, and touch really back into something, which is—well, I’m a potter—into a shard, into a broken piece of something that was whole. And of course, that’s profoundly truthful to our experience of the world. We can’t understand Greek culture, but we can understand a broken Greek vase, or we can understand a single line of Sappho. It draws us in and helps us tune in in a way that the complete would never do.

LH: Why do you think Twombly turned to sculpture as well as painting?

EDW: How could he not, in some ways? I mean, I think I wouldn’t ask it in quite that way. I think he’s surrounded by bricolage, by things in his studio, plywood, string, cloth, canvas, white paint, and nails, and he just needs to bring these objects together. It’s a wonderfully dangerous way of making sculpture. It’s not taking one thing, clay in my case, or marble, and then setting to with gravitas. It’s much more a deeply profoundly, playful way of bringing things together.

EDW: And then, of course, what does he do? He makes anti-heroic sculpture. He makes things like this great chariot which looks like a chariot that comes from a Babylonian king, or that Homer would talk about. But it’s eight pieces of plywood knotted together in Lexington.

And then he uses either household white paint to splash it over and turn it white, turn it into what sculpture should be. Or even better, plaster of Paris from the hardware shop, slathering it on. You can just imagine him, all those energetic movements that you see in his paintings, slathering on this plaster of Paris and turning plywood into sculpture.

It’s fabulous stuff.

LH: I’m curious, how wide do you feel his influences were? There’s been a huge emphasis on Greek and Roman poetry and art, but how wide does he travel in terms of influence?

EDW: Hugely, hugely far. I mean, never forget it’s his first journey into North Africa with [Robert] Rauschenberg which changes his life. That’s foundational for him as a very young man. That’s where things begin to happen for him. And then you can concentrate on the Roman and the Greek. But I think when you look at this, I think you see Egypt, Mesopotamia; you see Babylon and you see Persia. I mean, he reads and loves the early Persian poets. And the Indian poets too.

Never underestimate the breadth of Twombly and certainly don’t make him sort of classics 101. Don’t make him someone who you have to have studied Latin at school to understand. Because the great joy of him is that you can be in front of a painting, which might have words and references and images, which might have come from lots of different places. But when you stand in front of it it’s a somatic, bodily encounter of such depth that all that learning that’s there can happen later, or not at all, or in a different life, or it just is an encounter with someone who starts again using this profound, bodily lived understanding of poetry and place and loss. That’s why he matters.

Cy Twombly: Making Past Present is on view at the Getty Center through October 30, 2022. You can listen to the full audio tour on the GettyGuide® app.