You have to trust yourself in front of a Twombly. The critics won't help. They're worried about naivety - Twombly's, or possibly their own - and tend to overcompensate for it. Here's Simon Schama in his introduction to the catalogue for Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper: 'Twombly's Apollo is not the fine-limbed hunk of the Belvedere, but the pitiless flayer of Marsyas . . . what Twombly draws from archaic mythology is its poetic emphasis on the consolations of metamorphosis; cruelty, rape and death . . . transformed into the irrepressible burgeoning of nature.'[*] Maybe. But if you look at Twombly's Apollo (1975), what you'll see is a generous expanse of white paper, with somewhere towards the top of it an angry oil-stick scrawl of the god's name in indigo and black capitals, and below that two columns of hurried pencil graffiti, the first a list of classical Greek names, the other of plants and animals: 'laurel, palm tree, swan, hawk, raven, snake, mouse, grasshopper'.

LRB 20 May 2004 | PDF Download