Nicholas serota cy twombly blackboard

It would be useless to try to recreate the moments in this exhibition when it feels as if the god is about to arrive or has just left the building: when, for example, 'Herodiade' (1960) calls from across the room with its red 'haptic smear',³ as if only a moment ago something dragged its crimson fingers across the space of the canvas and is perhaps even now just in the next room.

Criticism cannot substitute for presence; the best its words can hope for is the masterful negative stroke. Callimachus, the critic, and Cy Twombly: each fails to produce the untouchable thing in their work - the god, the painting, the world.

But Twombly, and this is why his works consistently evoke pleasure and yearning, is always working towards that moment, engaged with what is becoming, and refusing the stasis of what is completed.

But to start at the art-historical beginning, lest we be guilty, like Roland Barthes, of taking the 'synchronic approach to Twombly's sty