Cy Twombly's portraits
The small show at London's National Portrait Gallery opens up Twombly's oeuvre by focusing on his portraiture, a feature seldom discussed among critics, whose popular themes touch on history, mythology, abstraction and, more recently, the artist's lifelong interest in and use of photography. What stood out for me among the 23 pieces on view--works on paper, photographs and paintings--were the absence of writing in the majority of them, the favouring of portraying sitters with a sideways turn and the vitality of both his sculptural photograph Domitilla (no. 3, 1991) and the portrait painting of Paul Getty Jr (1967). Domitilla seems almost to be turning out of the darkness to look at the beholder, her stony eye in just enough shadow to render her sculptural reality questionable. It is as if the angle of the Sun is just right to have blanched all colour from her appearance so one reads the photograph as of a Domitilla incarnate rather than of an artist's three-dimens