Having pledged at least a year ago that I would stop buying photography and art monographs I somehow lost concentration two nights ago and found myself splurging all over my chromebook. I don't even know how I came to be on eBay looking at a fine copy of the Cy Twombly 2016-17 Pompidou show book, let alone why I started reading reviews and becoming aware that this was already a fairly rare book. Softcover copies are still out there, being pumped out for the masses and Amazon even brightly informs that there are, 9 left in stock (more on the way). They are silent on the hardcover version, almost as if embarrassed. None left, no more on the way, IMO.
I can identify the critical moment when I crumbled and paid up for the eBay one. It was immediately after reading a line in a review by an Amazon buyer who talked like he knew what he was talking about, with words that rang clear and true:
Twombly is the best maker of free marks in the history of art, in my opinion. Beside him, Basquiat, who acknowledged his influence, looks stiff. - Pocket Satire
That resonated, as I already knew I'd like exactly some of that, for real. I've lately been trying to nudge/annoy a painter I know to get to work on a large panoramic of North Sea oil wells, done in oil (oh yeah, oil, or, ok, acrylic). My brief brief consists of hugeness, a vast field filling the canvas of off-white-ish cloud sky, with texture, and loosely figurative are the towers in their tight groups with a rhythm created by the wide separation between them. The quality of the free line in putting these down being the most difficult bit. I'm sure Cy Twombly would have knocked it out for me in an hour and a half. How hard can it be? Oil rigs as a subject may not be a natural art world fit right now but there are the boardrooms of Chevron and Shell to consider, as it would have to go somewhere.
