
The Best Painting in London Right Now
The last painting I wrote about here was Miro’s The Hope of a Condemned Man, a stark triptych composed of snaking lines, wild drips and glowing patches of colour. Looking at Cy Twombly’s The Four Seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, I can see a possible theme emerging, at least within my own taste. These four goliaths are currently holed up in the final room of the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Arcadian Painters exhibition, which pairs the Canadian with seventeenth century master Nicolas Poussin.
The show follows the various similarities between the two artists, both thematically and stylistically, and focuses too on Twombly’s adulation of Poussin. The classicist’s clear, graphic style is thrown into sharp relief when stationed next to Twombly’s gestural paintings. Where Poussin was obsessed with disegno, or the triumph of logic and design over colour and excess, Twombly applies colour architecturally, building thick, porous layers, or scratching spindly spider-web designs into his delicate pinks and yellows.
The show pitches the two men against each other, subject by subject, room by room, but for me, it’s Twombly who emerges victorious. Though they both made a ‘painting in four parts’ of the four different seasons, it’s Twombly’s that is on show here, Poussin’s are tragically absent, represented instead by a small reproduction, completely dwarfed by Twombly’s four enormous canvasses. Each one is scrawled with clues to the season it represents, obscured writing in different languages, hiding amongst ferns, lifting clouds and birds. Look and see a raw sun pierce the canvas, a pillar of dappled light shimmering on the surface of a wide lake, snow bending the branches of trees. Much of the other work in the exhibition references classical mythology; epic poems, Greek and Roman Gods, ancient legend. The Four Seasons however, seem to me to be just about getting up in the morning, and going outside.
It finishes soon, on Septber 25th, go and see it.