Transferred Impressions: Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1986.
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TRANSFERRED IMPRESSIONS: ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG AND CY TWOMBLY
Since the early sixties a number of artists have investigated the fundamental nature of drawing with its distinctive expressive possibilities. As this exhibition of work from the Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery shows, two artists have reached a similar, and yet very different, summary of experimentation and discovery.
Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly are artists of major achievement and influence in contemporary art. They are among the American artists who reached maturity in the fifties and, with such contemporaries as Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, generated an enormous output of painting, collage, sculpture, graphics, film and performance.
Both artists attended the New York Art Students League and Rauschenberg, who had been to Black Mountain College, North Carolina in the forties, persuaded Twombly to return with him in 1952. It was at Black Mountain that composer John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham and poet Charles Olson became the stimuli for a generation of artists. In the fall of 1952 Rauschenberg and Twombly continued to travel together to Italy and North Africa. Twombly remained in Rome and Rauschenberg returned to New York.
Maturing in the context of Abstract Expressionism, they responded equally to a concern with surface, gesture and the use of collage. In a method one could describe as free association, object, image or idea became stimuli for new directions. Approximately the same age, both artists are involved in a translation of choice, and both are aware of history and of appropriating it for themselves through the use of expressionistic gesture.
For Twombly, who incorporates the language of writing, the scrawl, and the stylization of the mark into the act of painting and drawing, expressionism is cool and distant. The flat surface is covered with what looks like calligraphy or random jottings, often amid washes of delicate and elegant images. Meditative in nature, familiar forms and poetic images with classical references to Greek and Roman history, literature and philosophy, occur throughout his work.
In the process itself, Twombly starts with line and body gesture, working up to the internalized images in which form and poetic imagination combine—a visualization that depicts inner state more than idea. On the other hand, Rauschenberg starts with identifiable images of popular culture and mass media, using them more directly to organize and interpret the contemporary urban world into a coherent work of art. These externally observed images are very American in their boldness, while even identifiable images, such as the mushrooms in Twombly's Natural History, Part I, Mushrooms, are more liquid in structure with their poetic and magical references.
Rauschenberg has often been compared to the German artist Kurt Schwitters, one of the European masters of collage. However, Rauschenberg saw collage as a means of injecting reality into his art without imitating it. This cause and effect method of setting one thing beside another reflects the thinking of an artist who does not want to imitate the real world, but reflect it with a collaboration of materials working for him. In a summary of experimentation even his interest in photography becomes an important element. Such sources become stimuli, opening up possibilities of a new kind of image, combined in complex and unexpected ways.
Both artists are aware of art as a mental and behavioural act—art as an extension of perception and life. Perhaps at Black Mountain the emphasis on freedom of experimentation made it all seem available and usable as one's own.
For Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, whose first two person show was at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1951, connections that inhabit their work took two common, but different, directions.
This exhibition will allow us the opportunity to re-examine both artists' work.
Lorna Farrell-Ward
Curator, Vancouver Art Gallery
