Cy Twombly’s Lepanto at Gagosian Gallery

A panorama of paint. An intensely rich physicality of impasto. Divinely layered and subtle washes and drips. Incandescent hues and gripping explosions of color forms. Images breathtaking and inspiring, immediate and infused with depth of meaning.

Cy Twombly’s latest painting series, “Lepanto,” is a twelve-panel suite of paintings created in the early months of 2001 for exhibition at the Venice Biennale, where he received the prized Leone d’Oro award. The series is principally a contemplation and revival of the legendary Lepanto battle of 1571 where a combined Spanish, Venetian and Papal armada fought and defeated the imposing fleet of the Ottoman Empire. The battle of Lepanto was celebrated widely as a decisive turning point in the struggle between East and West.

Twombly is a towering force in contemporary painting. This recent series is a testament to his sophisticated innovation and, more specifically, a stunning culmination of his continuous love of antiquity and his obsession of sorts with the making of boats. Born in Virginia in 1928, Twombly soon immersed himself in the rich histories, particularly in themes of warfare, of the Mediterranean cultures in his 1957 move to Italy.

The classical component has been a pervading thread through much of his painting and sculpture, perhaps most notably in the 1964 triptych Iliam (One Morning Ten Years Later), the 1991 sculpture Thermopylae, and, especially, the ten-part 1979 painting Fifty Days at Iliam.

Lepanto is a synthesis of Twombly’s artistic experience and exploration of this line of thought. He deals with the famous sea battle through an investigation of carnage, destruction, tragedy, valor, victory, vulnerability, blood, physicality and even sexuality and eroticism.

The twelve paintings are arranged in a narrative sequence, reading from left to right, that engulfs the viewer in a virtually full circle. In eight of the panels, the canvas is filled like the sea, with varying washes of aqua and occupied with skeletal and archaic linear motifs of ships that are often obscured by explosions of saturated and fiery color. The exploding forms that litter these canvases surge with textured layers of gold, yellow, orange, magenta, crimson and deep purple that seem to leak and drip like rivulets of blood trickling down the painting’s surface. Many of the elemental ship symbols are pushed into the depths of the scene, behind thick blankets of foggy washes, to imply deep space and distance while also signifying depth time where these ships are only ghosts and imagined remembrances of what they once were.

The other four panels are less overt figurative references to the battle. They are canvases scattered with many vibrant ovular epicenters of paint ablaze with yellow and scarlet. These forms could represent the burning ships viewed from above, but their visceral power is that of erotic and sexual implication. Among the blots of solid paint are red linear shapes of double-pointed ovals, the universal symbol for the vagina and sexuality. With the inclusion of prominent erotic symbols among his narrative of warfare, Twombly constructs a inexorable link between violence, destruction and aggression, on the one hand, and sexuality, sensuality and love-making, on the other.

The suite is a passionate outburst that is moving and poignant when considering individual panels and overwhelming when experienced in its entirety. While each concentrated gathering of paint and drips is reference to the violence and destruction of Lepanto, they are also a string of erotic encounters, an invocation of sexual climax and release. Twombly brilliantly makes us see the aggression in love and the eroticism in violence.

Yet he also appears to be painting about a metaphorical battle: the artist’s internal struggle to create. The suite’s unspoken and hidden theme is that of creation and making art both erotic and violent. Art is an act of courage, aggression, creation, destruction and embattlement. With freshness and exuberance, wisdom and subtlety, Twombly has created a definitive painting about painting.

The Armory Show 2002: The International Fair of New Art

Begun in 1994 as a 30-gallery event in the Gramercy Park Hotel, the Armory Show has blossomed into a world-renowned art fair hosting 168 galleries from around the world and drawing enormous crowds to witness the art of today. The Armory Show 2002 took place on Piers 88 and 90—two enormous exhibition spaces by the Hudson River. Galleries are arranged in several long rows of booths that span the length of each pier.

The show is an exciting and crucial annual event in the art world where the hippest galleries display the works of their brightest art-stars, all vying to outshine the rest and attract art collector’s eyes and checkbooks. It is an international gathering with a wide range, though overwhelmingly dominated by New York with its imposing presence of 69 galleries. Other galleries represent all the major, and not-so-major, hotbeds of contemporary art, including Berlin to Chicago to London to Osaka.

Coloring the eclectic collection of art was a general exuberance and youthful sense of experimentation. Yet the general barrage of hip and trendy art devolved into a sensory overload where innovation and freshness in particular works merged into an indistinguishable muddle—a kind of visual white noise. In their seemingly desperate efforts not to blend in, many did.