Tate Modern (Cy Twombly - Take 2)

I had a few hours before my flight Friday morning  to go to the Tate Modern.  Simply fantastic.  A wonderful collection of modern and contemporary art, as well as quite the visitor experience in looking at, thinking about, questioning, and creating one's own art.  I loved that it did not take itself too seriously. In fact, at times, seemed to question its own curation of the collection in mentioning how time, space and perspective can help shape and define, and even change, art's (a period, a genre, an artist) appreciation and significance.  Somewhat in the way history is also viewed and reviewed in perspective over time, place, and context, and of course, how history can be re-visited and reinterpreted.

The Tate Modern is housed in the formidable and re-adapted former Bankside Power Plant in Southwark along the Thames.  There were several wings I wanted to explore, as well as the rooftop restaurant, but I was only able to check out one.  The others will have to wait for my next visit.  Material Gestures, the third floor wing, I visited, is described thusly:

At the heart of this wing is a room devoted to painting and sculpture from the 1940s and 1950s, showing how new forms of abstraction and expressive figuration emerged in post-war Europe and America. The surrounding displays suggest affinities between the radical innovations of this era and the work of earlier artists, but also show the legacy of those ideas among contemporary practitioners who have continued to develop the language of art in new and unexpected ways.

Indeed, I saw some of my favorite art and artists, including some presented in completely new ways.  As I rounded the corner to the room pictured above, I was in awe.  Four great canvases were displayed in this room - one on each wall.  The vivid red strokes had such motion.  Yet the red on white canvas also suggested some austerity, as well as intensity.  The paintings were described as representing - at once- violence and ecstasy.  Indeed they were passionately violent, and violently passionate.  They fill the canvas end-to-end-to-center with a certain balance, and the size of the loops, while not uniform, are certainly consistent like sound waves or shock waves.  These are Cy Twombly paintings - the artist I profess to hate, the one I'm convinced has no talent, and has bewitched the art world.  But my reaction was strong and mostly positive (or at least engaged and provoked in a good way) when I saw these, and only a few moments later did I realize, I had be digging on Cy Twombly.  A man, an artist, I clearly need to revisit and reinterpret myself.