#twombly.cy

[aamjp]

The paintings appear as something akin to a well-loved Persian rug and a Cy Twombly Lepanto painting mixed together.

Aram’s work:

“explores the conflict that results when the traditions and aesthetics of a culture that have existed for thousands of years become influenced by the philosophies and aesthetics of modernity [... He] describes the predicament of being a progressive artist while also wanting to integrate the imagery and textures of the culture in which he and billions of people were raised. He is not critiquing the past or offering a prescription for the future.

[aamjp]

Surface disruptions in black paintings

[aamjp]

On pp. 158-9 of Reading Cy Twombly:

“...the extent to which language enfolds the visual or, alternatively, the threatens constantly to overwhelm language: 

  ‘[...] it becomes more and more imperative to point to the real boundaries between seeing and speaking, or sentence and visual configuration. And imperative to keep alive a not in of a kind of visuality that truly establishes itself at the edge of the verbal — never wholly apart from it, that is, never out of discourse’s clutches, but able and willing to exploit the difference between a sign and a one, say, or a syntactical structure and a physical (visual, material) interval).” — Clark, Sight of Death, 176

[aamjp]

“How difficult it is...

...to refrain from replacing the thing with its sign, to keep the object alive before us instead of killing it with the word.”

[aamjp]

“The mirror of art into which Hérodias gazes...

...with such anguish engendered in [Martha] Graham herself a fear of beginnings — fear of the unknown, the empty page or study, the inception of a new work: “the fear we all have, the fear of the artist, of a blank white page when writing a composition, the fear of the empty studio when starting a dance.” [...] Mallarmé wrote of his own trepidation in 1864 when he began writing: “With a sense of terror, for I’m inventing a language which must of necessity burst forth from a very new poetics, which I could define in these few words: paint not the object, by the effect it produces”. (79)

[Robert] Motherwell [...] wrote of his own response to the blank canvas that he needed to get it dirty before restoring “an equivalent of the original clarity and perfection of the canvas that one began on.” Barthes underlines the importance of the blank surface — and its sullying — when he writes that the elements in a Twombly painting “are separated from each other by space, a lot of space.” (80)

[aamjp]

filthy walls

[aamjp]

Munich

Brandhorst 

'Cy Twombly: In the Studio’, lots of drawings and photographs

Lepanto > awesome room, spent a lot of time there // set the alarm off a number of times // no photos allowed > guard was fairly officious 

Cervantes fought in the battle of Lepanto?

bought Brandhorst collection book

Alte Pinakhotek

Wasn’t really in the mood for this gallery

Venice still looks like this > cf. Javier Mariás 

New Pinakhotek

Honoré Daumier, Don Quixote, 1868 > cover image of my edition of DQ

Eugene Delacroix, The Death of Valentine, 1826 > inspiration for the woman holding the candle in Picasso’s Guernica?

★ Gabriel von Max > fucking wow.

The Ecstatic Virgin Anna Katharine Emmerich (1885) > Richter? (or maybe it’s just a candle *shrug*)

Monkeys as Judges of Art (1889) 

The Anatomist (1869)

Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers > didn’t expect this to be so nice

Pinakhotek Moderne 

Kirchner, colour... phwoar

Luciano Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Olii (62 O 58), 1962 > interesting that it’s essentially a monochromatic painting, but the way it surface works the light via both the incisions and its material qualities makes it operate in a way that isn’t monochromatic at all

The Morandis are beautiful 

Twombly > the surface detail on Bolsena (1969) offer more than Lepanto // the simple compositional structures of Untitled (New York City) (1968) and Untitled (1971) are interesting > NNW says that landscapes like these would’ve been a better way of tackling drawing Venice

[aamjp]

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

Cy Twombly. Also: Mark Tobey (bought catalogue).