| Cy Twombly and the Ethics of Painting investigates the formal and thematic relationships of Twombly's painting to Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem De Kooning. The scholarship on Twombly focused mainly on his differences from these artists and tends to deny any self-expressive purpose in his work, basing the claim on an underestimation of the complexities of self-expression and a mistaken understanding of the painterly forms which enable it. This dissertation analyzes the historical development of these forms, and compares them to various theories of selfhood from the earlier part of the twentieth century, to gauge the different possibilities of painterly and verbal media for self-reflection. Theorists as diverse as John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Alfred North Whitehead, who reacted to the prevailing idealism of the previous century's thought, came to the conclusions that the self was only truly knowable when seen in its various social and environmental engagements. The central thesis of the dissertation is that Twombly's work, as well as his artistic forebears', was predicated on such an idea---that only in the interaction between viewer and work could the individuality of the artistic self be made visible, because only in its products was it truly knowable.;My work takes its cues from an observation made by Aristotle in the first chapter of his Nicomachean Ethics. Here he noted that there was an intimate connection between the Greek words "ethos," or moral excellence, and "ithiki," or habit, such that a person's habits of behavior demonstrated his or her characteristic virtues. This idea is the basis of what is commonly called "Abstract Expressionist" painting, or what I will call "gestural abstraction," to distinguish it from color field painting. The way Aristotle's insight can be used to explain this idiom, and Twombly's work in particular, is the subject of my first chapter. Gestural abstractionists sought to compose their paintings so that their characteristic ways of applying paint, the product of a lifetime of artistic education so fully absorbed that it became second nature, would be directly present to the viewer. They removed intermediary forms like pictures or shapes, which would prevent the gesture's immediacy by submitting it to a larger compositional function. It was presumed that, in the course of the recipients' reconstruction of the paintings, they would recognize their own ideas about the relationship between product and agent.;The second chapter discusses the problems faced by the second generation of gestural abstractionists. The younger artists had to discover new methods of self-expression within a field that had fewer capacities for formal novelty and seemed progressively academic in aspiration. The initial problem, to discover means for the painterly expression of a personal ethos, was reframed as the problem of revealing a private experience through public forms. Twombly succeeded where other artists failed by abandoning the more valorous gestures of artists like de Kooning and Pollock, instead manipulating established compositional structures to accommodate more public signs like place names, geometrical shapes, and a style of gesture and script that Arthur Danto has aptly called "demotic writing." He would use a modified version of Pollock's "allover composition," placing a variety of discrete marks in seemingly haphazard arrangements, thus breaking the syntactical connections that would ordinarily make the explicit reason for the choice and relation among these elements intelligible. This compositional order served to render his personal reasons inexplicable while simultaneously revealing the many connections of his work to its artistic forebears.;However, the level of Twombly's success is also a main reason why his work is so often dissociated from its artistic forebears. So, in addition to the aforementioned revisions to the project of self-expressive painting, the second chapter explains the peculiar hermeneutic problems this work poses, surveys the variety of models of agency and selfhood developed in the earlier twentieth century, and argues that a misconception of these has often led to gestural abstraction's critical dismissal and historiographical misapprehension. The idea of form defended by Clement Greenberg has separated it decisively from content, so the earlier understanding of gestural abstraction has fallen by the wayside, resulting in the failure to see its significance for later artists. Harold Rosenberg saw it as a kind of self-expression, but did not account for the means it used for this purpose, instead ending his influential article by enjoining its critics to develop a new language for its explication. The result of this kind of critical inattention is that the idiom's main innovation, the allover composition, is not seen as a device for enabling the project of self-presentation. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
