Dean Rader at the LARB:
Twombly (1928–2011) has been a polarizing figure. He is best known for his large scrawly works in grayscale, sometimes called “blackboard paintings,” that resemble the marks of a second grader trying to learn cursive and failing. The artist has drawn (ha!) admiration from some of the greatest writers and critics of our era, from Roland Barthes and Robert Motherwell to Octavio Paz and Anne Carson. Yet few artists have also been on the end of more ridicule. Donald Judd called an early exhibit of Twombly’s “a fiasco.” Jackson Arn described a Twombly series from 2003 as “too repetitively cheery to be engaging, like a bad series of children’s books.” In 1994, when the Museum of Modern Art hosted a Twombly retrospective, Artforum ran competing takes on Twombly’s oeuvre titled “Cy’s Up” and “Size Down,” in which the venerable scholar Rosalind E. Krauss and Peter Schjeldahl (who would go on to be the art critic at The New Yorker) squared off. Wading into the debate, curator Kirk Varnedoe penned “Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly.” And exactly a decade ago, in a glowing piece in Artforum, the novelist and critic Travis Jeppesen dubbed Twombly “the greatest American painter of the twentieth century, and the greatest painter after Picasso, period.”
That is an astonishing statement. And I’m not sure he’s wrong.
more here.
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