Word: nostalgia
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...nostalgia is the sentiment at the heart of "Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons," the career-spanning survey that runs at London's Tate Modern through Sept. 14, it's not the kind limned in gentle twilight. The best pictures and sculptures in this confounding, mostly captivating show - which moves later to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and from there to Rome - are as tough-minded as any art of the last half-century...
Twombly, now 80 years old, was born into nostalgia, in central Virginia, amid the faded glories of America's pre-Civil War South. But in Italy, another old world still coming back to life after World War II, he sifted the rubble for a pictorial language that could reach back much farther, past civilization itself. Like the French artist Jean Dubuffet, he found it in graffiti, a scrawl that felt older and wilder than antiquity. In Twombly's paintings hectic scribbles and smudges of color might share the canvas with a crudely drawn word or phrase that harks back...
...that's almost beside the point. It looks as if every generation is going to get an adaptation in another medium of Brideshead, so rich in nostalgia for the interwar spirit of Britain, so arustle with swell clothes and the (largely) frustrated longings of both the homo- and heterosexual varieties. Even if you never read the book, you will recall from the 11-part TV version of the 1980s how the infinitely sad young men and women of the story are bedeviled by the conservative Catholicism of the Marchmain family tradition, while we passionately wish for them to shake...
...learned the gestures. Yet looking at his compromised memories, he wells up, and so do we, even as we know we're being sold. The Kodak suits want to focus on their machine's technology. Don argues that its true pull is emotional. "In Greek," Don says, "nostalgia literally means 'the pain from an old wound...
...Nostalgia is tricky for TV, which tends to render it as camp, sap or clichéd commentary. Mad Men could have been another index item in the boomer-centric '60s-history textbook that includes We Didn't Start the Fire and The Wonder Years. The New Frontier. The social upheaval. The same old times a-changin' again...