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Top marks for handwriting

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Cy Twombly has been treading a fine line between elegance and chaos for 50 years, as a terrific retrospective shows. His is a strange, skittering music...

Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons

Tate Modern, London SE1, until 14 September

The American painter Cy Twombly was christened Edwin but nicknamed Cy after the baseball pitcher Cyclone Young. It is worth remembering this down-home fact at Tate Modern. For Twombly's reputation is carried on such clouds of hype, and his paintings appear so transcendently arcane on the one hand, yet so peculiarly illiterate on the other, that it may be good to know one humble detail about him to help keep one's feet on the ground.

This is a tremendous retrospective, let it be said straight away - brilliantly selected from a 50-year career to show Twombly as a painter of passion, humour and lyrical sensuality, as well as uncommon intellect. That much is known, but there are surprises to come. If all you have seen of him are the edgy scribbles and the quotations from Virgil then you may be surprised by the hard-hitting strength of this show, all the way from its funereal depths to its latest ecstatic climax.

Born in Virginia in 1928, Twombly belongs to the same generation as his friends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, painters who had to contend with the old masters of Abstract Expressionism. His frail scrawls and skittering doodles have even been described as an irritable version of Ab-Ex gesture, a great drama reprised as anxious - if stylish - graffiti. But Twombly left America for Italy in 1957 and has lived around the Mediterranean ever since. His paintings, or painted drawings, have absorbed the legends of the European past: Leda and the Swan, the fall of Commodus, the myths of Apollo and Eros. To his detractors, Twombly became a name-dropper, bumping up his spindly decorations with classical tags. To his admirers, he is an epic visual poet, steeped in classical literature, making it new with his painting.

It seems, on the basis of this show, that the last is true but narrow. Take Olympia, from the breakthrough year of 1957 when Twombly really comes out from the shadows of de Kooning. Sure enough, the classical name is there, but scrawled across the picture as if by someone awestruck or not quite old enough to manage capital letters. Around it teem all sorts of little images - hearts, butterflies, breasts, what appear to be insects lifting skywards out of long grass, just as we might draw them for simple recognition by children.

Bottom left to top right, an italic bias, optimistic, the whole surface resembles some kind of excitable handwriting made without looking (Twombly taught himself to draw in the dark during National Service); and it certainly feels heady enough for Greek gods and their mountain tops. But something strange is going on here, too: writing is mutating into drawing, drawing into doodling and back to writing in a free-floating panorama. The marks give a pure and primitive pleasure; the canvas itself feels airy.

Pencilled on crude undercoat, these works must have seemed unprecedented in the 1950s, and they still have the provisional look of builder's scribbles. Given the extravagantly recherché interpretations put upon Twombly ever since, however, there is a tendency to mistrust what one sees. It should be resisted. A sketchy net really can be a goal, a sheaf of verticals a Greek temple. The rudimentary stair is just that; stair is even written alongside it.

The milky surfaces get thicker and more clotted, Twombly begins using chalk and crayon and even oil paint itself. Pale elegance yields to saturated colours: tides of bottomless green, raspberry ripple, crimson lake seeping into the canvas. And each picture seems to have its own micro-climate. Apollo, made during the moon-landings, has an icy coldness; Crimes of Passion II is claustrophobically overcast. Writing, drawing - they are never completely decoupled. Numbers and letters are like pictograms; lines rippling across a page appear purely abstract, except they resemble waves, and what do waves resemble, Twombly delicately implies, but lines of writing? Poems to the Sea is the title of this series, and what are Twombly's paintings but hand-drawn poems?

'Cycles and Seasons' is the show's subtitle, and it is startling to see how they accumulate, over the decades, without any repetition. He paints the four seasons, ringing with intensity, colour as pure music; nose-deep, he scents the changes in his lush Italian garden. Above all he evokes Rome in August (in the Ferragosto series), the city suffocating in the silent heat; sex in shuttered rooms, fruit decaying on the street: the paintings are sticky with ripe and rotten colour.

People talk of Twombly's complex music, and that's right; the series made after a friend's sudden death run all the way from hymn to fugue, variations upon a single theme of cursive gray lines. But Twombly also goes for unashamed melody. The Green Paintings - otherwise known as A Painting in Nine Parts - are Venetian seascapes almost kitsch in their tunefulness, deep green washes, tidal currents, water rippling with lagoon light. He has been looking at Tiepolo, and the canvases have those fancy rococo shapes, but also at picturesque Monet. Still, you see the passage of the artist's fingers dragging and stroking the paint; no matter how charming, his pictures aspire to the primitive.

The show includes many sculptures, inventive, streamlined, painted white - 'white paint is my marble' - that show an attic wit. Two palm stems rising from a slim box, white as ghosts, immediately make both a hieroglyph and a monument; and sure enough the piece has the comic title Funerary Box for a Lime Green Python. But Twombly in three dimensions is almost always too refined. What makes his paintings so distinctive, and he has no equals, only imitators, is the way they steer their improvisations between elegance and outright chaos.

And that is not susceptible, thankfully, to very much analysis. You can characterise Twombly's marks - hesitant, agile, subtle, quick-tempered, awkward - but not the way they work together to give off music or mood. In this respect, the experience of seeing them is deep but wordless. The enormous Bacchus paintings with which the show concludes look deceptively articulate because they so nearly resemble some kind of Japanese calligraphy. Yet even as they mount up in scarlet whirls, floor to ceiling, they appear to be dying away. The action is something like a fountain, rising even as it falls, yet that doesn't explain the full effect. They are, like the show itself, running a fine line between celebration and grief.

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