Vital records - Cy Twombly, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York

WHEN THE enemies of abstraction, often referred to as the Philistines, think of Crazy Modern Painting, the kind a six-year-old could make, the kind created by hirsute, semi-naked beatniks intoning mantras and pitching buckets of pigment at a wall, they are envisaging the works of Cy Twombly. Mr. Twombly's art, currently enjoying full-dress treatment at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is part of a long modernist tradition--including Van Gogh, Klee, and Pollock--that rebels against the glinty, digitalized accuracy of modern times by courting randomness and spontaneity of the "everything but the kitchen sink" variety.

Art critics have never quite known what to make of Mr. Twombly. Though always appreciated--despite curator Kirk Varnedoe's predictable efforts to romanticize him as an outcast--Mr. Twombly seems to have missed every stylistic boat that came his way. Too jazzy and allusive to be a true partner in the New York School, he was too serious for Pop Art, too impassioned for Minimalism, and too old-fashioned for Postmodernism.

As a young man Cy Twombly decided to leave America for Italy, where he has been living for almost forty years. Like Whistler a hundred years before him, he has been the typical American abroad, imbibing the culture of the Old World. At the same time, as an American painter in Europe in the postwar era, he might be cowed by the achievements of the Old Masters, but he could be confident that, at least among the living, his culture, the culture of Pollock and de Kooning, was the most powerful on the planet.

In his earliest work, Mr. Twombly, a friend of Robert Rauschenberg and a fellow student at Black Mountain College, seems quite mainstream. Minoe from 1951 reveals, against a black field, some crude off-white figures that possess the gestural rawness of Franz Kline. Yet somehow the painting never quite lifts off. One is uneasily conscious of a painter straining for some grand gestures, but walled in by the tradition that precedes him. The title as well attests to a pretension, which the artist never outgrew, of supplying his abstractions with classy but entirely irrelevant, foreign-sounding names.

Mr. Twombly's best and most typical works date from the early Sixties. They stand in the same relation to the paintings of the New York School as Ravel's operas stand to those of Richard Wagner: though they use many of the same tropes and though they have an undeniable emotional charge, still the result is infallibly lighthearted and urbane. Mr. Twombly is as much a gestural artist as Pollock or de Kooning; but instead of broad, impassioned strokes, he is given to minute, fragile, fidgety marks that recall the pencil and Crayola scribblings of children. Thus Untitled from 1959 is a blank wall of off-white house paint over which are scattered a few shy twists of a pencil. Like Pollock and Newman, Mr. Twombly makes big paintings, though even here his thin, nervous marks insufficiently occupy their huge spaces, leaving many pockets of emptiness. And whereas the testaments of the New York School presumed to project raw personality onto the canvas, Twombly's works have all the chattering insincerity of small talk.

In one of his best works, The Triumph of Galatea, this random, scattershot approach works to most impressive effect: blood reds, flesh tones, and bluish greys seem to spill from the top right into the bottom left of the canvas like the incontinent effusions of Pandora's box. This image succeeds in generating a sense of joyous, uncorseted, ecstatic vitality overcoming everything in its path. It dates from 1961, the artist's annus mirabilis, for it was then that he painted some of his finest and most typical works: The School of Athens, Empire of Flora, The Bay of Naples.

Unfortunately, that level of intensity was not maintained. All the weaknesses inherent in his art--lack of structure, arbitrariness of execution, pretentious allusions to high culture--having lost their original emotional force, become all too apparent in his later work. Toward the end of the Sixties, we find Mr. Twombly groping for a stronger sense of structure, as in such "blackboard" paintings as Night Watch, which look like white chalk etched against a grey or black ground.

After this the artist seems not to have known where to go next. By the Eighties he has been reduced to making the blandest kind of Bank or Lobby Art, cruel parodies of his earlier style. And his most recent works, straining towards crude figuration, almost suggest that the artist, succumbing to pressure from his dealers, has resolved to "get with the ticket" and create something new and up-to-date. These works will ultimately do nothing to enhance his fame. But neither can they conceal the fact, demonstrated by the Modern's retrospective, that once, about a generation ago, Cy Twombly was making some of the finest abstract art ever painted by an American.

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