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Cy Twombly’s Study for the School of Athens
Cy Twombly, Study for School of Athens (Rome), 1960 © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo: John Etter
Cy Twombly’s ‘Study for the School of Athens’ (1960) nods to the eponymous fresco created by Italian Renaissance painter Raphael in ca. 1509 – 1511. Commissioned by Pope Julius II to decorate the Papal Apartments of the Vatican, Raphael produced four frescoes, one of which was ‘The School of Athens’.
The artist made myriad preparatory sketches and studies in the process—a fact to which Twombly, ever an admirer of the fragmentary and unpolished alludes, with the inclusion of the word ‘study’ in his title. Raphael’s masterpiece depicts Plato and Aristotle surrounded by a pantheon of classical philosophers and statues of Greek gods in an idealized setting. Read as a treatise on the varying ways of thinking through the world, this famous referent generated a significant body of work and a vital turning point within Twombly’s oeuvre. In early 1960, Twombly and his new wife Luisa Tatiana Franchetti had moved into a 17th-century Palazzo on the Via di Monserrato in Rome (the artist had relocated to Rome in 1957). Known for its intellectual life, this location inevitably deepened Twombly’s interest in antiquity and Greco-Roman mythology. Yet, the work in question is not a straightforward salute to the Renaissance master or the grand legacy of high Western culture; in fact, Twombly describes Raphael as ‘the most boring painter I know, aside from some of the portraits.’[1] Instead, by citing The School of Athens fresco, the work marks a moment in which Twombly was developing an approach that worked both with and against his art historical forebears.
Cy Twombly, Study for School of Athens (Rome) (detail), 1960 © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo: John Etter
Raphael’s The School of Athens (ca. 1509 – 1511)
The image incorporates language but obscures legibility, juxtaposing unfamiliar, organic, and intuitive motifs with marks of the systematic, rational, and cerebral. Indeterminate shapes, orifices, and body parts free-float alongside schematic forms, numerical sequences and familiar signs—hearts and cloud puffs with central clefts marked in bursts of house paint and ejaculatory red and blue crayon. The viewer might be forgiven for thinking that the seven works of the same theme, including the present ‘study,’ function in some kind of progression towards a finalized composition.
‘What I am trying to establish is—that Modern Art isn’t dislocated, but something with roots, tradition, and continuity. For myself, the past is the source’.
However, here the term operates as a way to describe a specific mode of working. All of the paintings of the same title, of varying scales and levels of iconographic density, including The School of Athens (1961) and The School of Athens (Second Version) (1964), share the fact that they are marked with erasures and alterations, and therefore always preserve something of the status of a study or draft or what Roland Barthes describes as a ‘palimpsest.’[2] In the search for meaning in the strata and traces of gesture, Twombly’s spontaneous marks double as signs, language, and notation. The artist writes: ‘What I am trying to establish is—that Modern Art isn’t dislocated, but something with roots, tradition, and continuity. For myself, the past is the source [for all art is vitally contemporary].’[3] Twombly’s choice of title does not represent nostalgia for a lost golden age, but rather a desire to record and convey the past and present simultaneously. And so, the viewer returns through house paint, pencil, and crayon to Raphael’s fresco, and the perennial struggle to convey and rationalize an experience of being in the world. – Cy Twombly’s ‘Study for the School of Athens’ will appear in Hauser & Wirth’s presentation at Art Basel, from 13 – 16 June 2019.
[1] Cy Twombly in Kirk Varnedoe, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, New York, 1994, 33.[2] Roland Barthes, ‘The Wisdom of Art,’ 1979, in Nicola Del Roscio, ed., Writings on Cy Twombly, (Shirmer/Mosel, 2003), 103.[3] Cy Twombly in Kirk Varnedoe, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, New York, 1994, 56.