CY TWOMBLY (1928–2011) is an artist who does not so much divide as violently cleave opinions. For many years, I have tried to understand the loops, swirls and splashes for which he was best known and I have failed almost entirely, but many judges whose opinions are to be respected, including David Sylvester, Nicholas Cullinan and Tacita Dean, rate them highly.
Twombly liked to place himself with Poussin as an interpreter of classical mythology, but it at Christie’s New York , it ‘might track the upward flight-path of spirit in rapture, or a cataclysm of debauched violence’ and the vivid crimson could, indeed, bring blood-frenzied bacchanals or the pavement afterlife of a chicken tikka masala to mind, but without the inscription—not a title, of course—would one really get it? That did not trouble the buyer, who paid a low-estimate $19.96 million (about £16.25 million) for it in Christie’s evening 21st-century sale last month.
