Yes to Cy Twombly, but not forever.

Since the 1970s, Cy Twombly’s elegant mark making has been assumed by the artworld to be a conduit of profound meaning: the paintings are about psychology, poetry, and history. And yet a typical Twombly from the ’70s to the present tends to be visually nothing much. I always thought he was a Great but also a bit boring, and I got used to putting the contradiction aside to worry about another day.

I came away from the new Tate Modern retrospective (on view through September 14) not so much concluding that Twombly went off after the ’60s as marveling at the stamina of those who have kept him so thoroughly “on” since then.

I saw early paintings of the ’50s, powerful and beautiful, with Robert Motherwell–influenced black-and-white divisions. They showed Twombly’s talent immediately. Then he formed his own style in answer to a question: How can you be classical but still have an edge of contemporaneity, but not be Pop? Still tied to Abstract Expressionism, he knew he must be spontaneous—there was no other way. The resulting paintings are about rhythm and placement and frenzied invention.

Twombly’s original take on Abstract Expressionism was to emphasize primitive rudeness instead of distanced monumental emotion, and to come up with a kind of visual correlate for the movement’s pretentious thought-streaming that Clement Greenberg tried to get rid of but which Harold Rosenberg thought was the essence. (Greenberg told artists to maintain Old Master standards under new modern conditions, create form, go for pleasure, while Rosenberg said to heat up the situation, destroy all barriers, self-create, act out, nuts to form. Greenberg won, but then was killed anyway.)

The paintings look like crossed-out poems. Marks and erased marks, with the leftovers of the erasures forming new marks, make up structures of different pulsating energies. As with Abstract Expressionism, the edges of the canvas become poignant and electric. One painting in the show from this early period (Herodiade, 1960) says “herodiade” and “overture” & “scene.” It also says, “Incantation abolished other frightful ways in the tears.” I think. Then it definitely says “of the pool” and “i have known the nakedness of my scattering dreams.” But it also says “1234567” and “12345.” It’s clear the writing has to be there, but it’s hard to say why, except that it’s part of an overall visual pulse.

A gray room gives way to a red and brown one, with the paint handled thickly in all the works. The feel is sticky and scratchy, the mood incredibly buoyant. These paintings (from the series “The Ferragosto,” 1961) deserve all the praise Twombly has ever received. The highest compliment one can pay is that he is a king of Scruffy-Beautiful, a king like Rauschenberg, but with an angle entirely his own. A wavering pencil line full of life, scrawled boxes with splodges exploding out of them, hand-wiped thick-paint smearing, streaming scribbly loops, and a totally dynamic overall rippling form contained within the rectangle of the canvas with constantly delightful quirky design originality.

Within a few years it’s over, and I think of the Twombly story from the end of the ’60s on as watery visuals accompanied by strangulated commentary by heavyweight minds arguing over whether penciled names of heroes and gods are Barthesian signs that reflect reflections of reflections or if Twombly is actually a new Homer. In Room 5, boredom kicked in with a 1969 series called “Summer and Autumn.” The look became a formula. Thereafter, room after room offered variations on the original style, none particularly adding anything. Time went by. Distressed surfaces, vastness, mystification, and woo-woo critical acclaim—the Twombly ship sailed far out to sea. Now moored on the Island of Immense Wealth.

It’s hard to imagine oneself in the Twombly cult, this take-it-easy guy, feeding lightweight puffs of elegant harmless low-ambition graphic pleasantness to the hardest-core bullshitters high culture has yet produced. (They make Gertrude Stein seem like Peter Plagens.) Headed “A Panagyric,” an homage to Twombly in the catalogue by the artist Tacita Dean perfectly encapsulates the look and feel of an art that itself encapsulates the exquisite emotions of an audience to whom nothing has ever happened. Subheaded with such words of automatic greatness as “James Joyce,” “Pan,” and “Pentimenti,” this poetic work is replete with fey and faux atmospheres and obedient structuralist references to the colored-pencil underlining in Joyce’s manuscripts.