Albert Sonntag’s Legal Blog

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1970 (Menil Collections, Houston)

The practice of law requires the frequent use of reason, and I say frequent because it is not necessarily a constant. There are times when empathy and intuitive understanding become more useful than the steel trap of reason. I can think of many examples, but I leave them for a future blog article. However, I felt the lure of unreason when I first saw the Cy Twombly painting shown above in Houston, in 2005.

The painting is part of the Menil collection near the Rice University campus. The collection has dedicated a whole building exclusively to the work of Cy Twombly. I think that he will soon be considered to be one of the two or three greatest artists of the second half of the twentieth century, rivaling Mark Rothko and Robert Rauschenberg. He will loom above the other artists as Paul Klee and Picasso loomed over the artists of the first half of the century. The reason I think so is because, being a very conservative painter, he kept alive the tradition of the great American movement of Abstract Expressionism while at the same time addressing the Post-Modern school of Conceptual Art. He tried to keep alive Abstract Expressionism in the sixties, when it was under attack by both post-Modernism and the red hot images of Pop Art. By spanning the entire period, he hovers above history and style.

I think you can see this in the painting I attach, which, of course, is only one instance of his voluminous and ever changing work. This painting is acerbic in its austerity and dryness, and has none of the sensuality of some of his other paintings. It’s a huge canvas. The more you look at it, the more spooky it becomes. At first I thought I was seeing the kind of mad scribblings that kids do on blackboards with chalk. It looked like a blackboard in school that needs to be erased before the teacher walks in. But then I began to see the black background with the flecks of white and the occasional outbursts of nebulous white that resemble the outer galaxies in space. I felt like the whole night sky was behind the scribblings. The three lines of scribbling began to be visible against a background of infinite outer space. And at that point I began to see the scribbles as the outburst of human culture in its pretentious being, against the endless expanse of the dark and mysterious universe which is all around us and overwhelms us, not only in space but in time as well. If you look at the top left hand corner, the first line of scribbling almost seems to be an effort to write something in human letters (I can read an a-e-e), in the calligraphy of human childhood, the beginnings of a sentence. But then as you follow the lines, it all becomes madness, the second band of scribbling being larger and more inchoate than the first, and the bottom band of scribbling, larger than the others and more irrational and even more meaningless. And then, the human lines, the human cultural outburst, the mad scribbling, begins to look ridiculous against the background of an infinite unknown immensity.

It is an abstract painting, but it addresses some of the concerns of post-modernism and its notions about the end of Meaning in art and life. It is the dialogue with Mr. Natural in the R. Cobb comic strips of the sixties: “‘What does it all mean, Mr. Natural?’ - ‘It don’t mean shit!’”

To a being from outer space, an alien, that is probably what human culture would look like. A busy signal, signifying nothing, meaning nothing, and getting ever more out of control.