Ah! The Peonies! Cy Twombly’s Scattered Blossoms
Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,
absentminded. Someone sober
will worry about things going badly.
Let the lover be.
--Rumi
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Untitled, 2007
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If you cultivate peonies you know well what impossibly gorgeous flowers they are, a horticultural embarras de richesses in your garden each year, making their stunning entrance in the spring. In this flower there is sexual embodiment: the peony has a sassy rounded bottom and flaunts its petals shamelessly. And we are caught in that sensual music. In his Peony Blossom paintings Twombly indulges the lushness by dripping his paint downward...the peonies appear to be oozing...they burn into your eyes. His burgundy was described by one art critic as “a merlot spiked with blood” -- a beautiful exsanguination.
But then -- with his white peonies on a background of light celedon and mint of the tenderest spring green that would survive an unexpected April snowfall -- Twombly gives us hope.
Untitled, 2001 display at Art Institute of Chicago in 2008.
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However, some art critics and historians have interpreted the Peony Blossom series as a depiction of the change of seasons wherein the white on green peonies comes to signify the oncoming decay of winter, in a kind of defiant beauty against the force of time.
Twombly’s most famous motif is loopy tumults of line in white wax crayon on grounds of dark-gray house paint, and can often seem a sort of scatterbrained Surrealism . But in his peony series Twombly shows us how poetry and painting can dance together. His inner lyricist is liberated...
Here the artist references Takarai Kikaku whose poem was inspired by the 14th century samurai Kusunoki Masashige:
AH! The Peonies
For which
Kusonoki
Took off his Armour
The noble warrior has put aside his symbols of the arts of war in deference to the beauty of a majestic bloom. And to gaze at beauty is to take off one’s armor and make yourself vulnerable to death and decay.
Poet Joshua Cores describes the startling presence of the related works in the series: “After the coolness of that [green] painting, the red and yellow peonies on the next wall are a shock, blazing out with exuberant vulgarity: ketchup and mustard, horrorshow streaks of blood.”
Seeing these works in a large museum room setting is an overwhelming experience. Several of them were on exhibit when I went to Frank Gehry’s modern Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 2008. The museum is overpowering itself but the exhibit stunned me further. These images, some of which are in private collection, are exhibited from time to time around the country (and abroad) and it is well worth your while to be on the lookout for them.
The haiku quotes that Twombly scratches onto these canvases intensify the sensuality even more: “quiver,” “spilling out yesterday’s rain,” “from the heart of the peony a drunken bee.” It is as if Twombly wants us to be intoxicated, as he appears to be when he paints the moment these magnificent peonies are at their fiery fullness.
But is it a murderous ferocity, this overload on our senses? No, Twombly simply doesn’t do ugly. We must take it as it is, as he has offered it to us. The peony doesn’t know temporality, it will bloom long and return in the next spring gladly if it is planted where there is enough sun and is not disturbed. It gives only its gift of loveliness to us, and in all its largesse, as Twombly has done.
Robert Frost so beautifully instructs us in this lesson in the poem “Reluctance”
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
= new reply since forum marked as read
and this:
As I said I did not know Twombley until you introduced me to them The shear power of the size in itself is extraordinary.
I have read much Rumi over the years, also.
And your writing is really poetry.
Thanks,
