… one of America’s greatest painters, has died.
Like Henry Miller and Terrence Malick, Twombly’s part of what UD calls the Being Brigade – an artist who above all wants to capture on canvas or on film or in prose what it feels like to exist. To exist intensely, euphorically.
Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Years later, he described this more plainly. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture,” he said. The process stood in stark contrast to the detached, effete image that often clung to Mr. Twombly. After completing a work, in a kind of ecstatic state, it was as if the painting existed but he himself barely did anymore: “I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days,” he said.
Isn’t something like this precisely what all the reviewers of The Tree of Life are saying? It does not illustrate. It prompts in us a sensation of intense existing. A journalist asks a man who has just seen the film what it means. He says meaning’s not the point: “There are no answers to existential questions.”
Twombly, Miller, Malick – They’re not illustrating anything. They’re not even telling much of a story, or offering much of a representation. They are all, we feel, about movement, the sheer onrush of human being in time. Hence Malick’s primary use, in his film, of Smetena’s Moldau with its rapid light spiraling notes building and building through major and minor modes, more and more triumphal, more and more exuberant, exhilarated. Everything’s caught up and brought along in that strong current of sound – even sorrow, marked by dips into minor keys, is somehow assimilated into the fundamentally delighted music.
Miller’s American heroes, dragging their impoverished asses through depressed interwar Europe, are peculiarly vitalized by this dour atmosphere. They are, said George Orwell, “Whitman[s] among the corpses.”
The Being Brigade wants to bring home to us our capacity to transcend this and that life narrative and instead uncover an intrinsic flowing joy within, a ceaseless ecstatic internal movement that speaks of the imperishable bliss of simply being.
This joy is most dramatic, most defiant, when it bursts out of situations of profound negativity, as when, imprisoned in Lubyanka, Aleksander Wat finds that the darker the literature he reads there, the happier he becomes:
The more pessimistic the book, the more pulsating energy, life energy, I felt beneath its surface – as if all of literature were only the praise of life’s beauty…
For me, Twombly’s big wobbly canvases have always been precisely this body electric, this unstoppably alive, grateful soul.