Like the artist it celebrates, “Cy Twombly: Morocco 1952/1953” does a lot with very little. This clever little exhibit offers insight into the nearly five months the artist spent exploring Morocco with Robert Rauschenberg in the winter of 1952 and spring of 1953. Physical evidence of these adventures is scarce. Both artists traveled light, abandoning large canvases of New York for an aesthetic of snapshots and sketches, but minimal traces coalesce to form a compelling portrayal of a turning point in Twombly’s career.
The letters and documents on display provide context for the three visual elements of the exhibition: photographs, drawings and a single large canvas Volubilis, on loan from the Menil Collection. This work was completed in 1953, shortly after Twombly returned from his stay in Africa. Titled after an ancient Roman-Berber archaeological site, the painting depicts two abstract mounds radiating with frantic filigree lines, suggesting both a fortress and a phallus. Marks are scratched and dented as well as painted. The use of cheap materials such as wax, paint and chalk implies the urgency of creation as well as the chaos of impending collapse. This frantic and anxious marking vocabulary marked a departure from the relatively meditative compositions that Twombly favored under the tutelage of Franz Klein at Black Mountain College.
Photographs of symbols carved deep into stone foreshadow the raw power of this painting. But such explosive bravado was also produced against a backdrop of private tenderness, expressed in Twombly’s lyrical photographic portraits of his companion. One image shows Rauschenberg contemplating a leaf. His right hand is wrapped around a tree trunk with the delicacy of a sparrow perched on a twig. Such images indicate an affection never fully excavated, just as the ancient site of Volubilis is partially obscured by ruins and dust to this day.
