A Sensualist's Odd Ascetic Aesthetic (Published 2005)

Like a lot of Americans, Cy Twombly headed for the Piazza da Spagna -- the Spanish Steps -- on his first visit to Rome in 1952. The hotels were cheap and catered to foreigners. American Express was nearby. So were several of the city's contemporary art galleries, important to a 24-year-old painter looking to land a show.

And for a reader of poetry, which Mr. Twombly is, there might be a sentimental attraction. In 1820, John Keats, ravaged by tuberculosis and seeking a healing climate, settled into a small two-room apartment overlooking the piazza. Within months he was dead, at age 25. His grave, with its famous inscription "Here lies one whose name was writ in water," is still an Anglo-American pilgrimage site.

After more than a year abroad, Mr. Twombly returned to the United States. He did a stint in the Army as a cryptographer; taught at a prep school in Virginia, where he was born; and spent time in New York, sharing a studio with Robert Rauschenberg. In 1957, he returned to Rome. This time he would make Italy his primary home.

Unsurprisingly, Keats's name, shakily handwritten, turns up in a large drawing Mr. Twombly produced in Rome in 1961, and that piece, along with some 90 other drawings and collages, is in "Cy Twombly: 50 Years of Works on Paper," a stirring, in some ways puzzling show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Like the poet, he also began to incorporate references to Roman gods and goddesses in his work. Such Classicism was a cliché even in Keats's day, though he used it purposefully, as a kind of sugarcoating for the fibrous ideas and sometimes violent emotions that make his poetry both quintessentially Romantic and modern.

A particular brand of Romanticism -- sensational, pastoral, beauteous -- hangs heavy in the air in the second half of the chronologically arranged Whitney show, which has been organized by Julie Sylvester, associate curator of contemporary art at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, where it first appeared.

The work in this section dates from the mid-1980's to the present. And its opulently colored, lushly brushed images of flowers and abstract landscapes seem to exude a scent of organic life burgeoning and rotting. Taking cues from Turner, Moreau, Whistler and late Monet, this is the work of an old-fashioned elegiac-sensualist. And it is the kind of work that has earned Mr. Twombly, from 1960 onward, both passionate admiration and dismissive distain.