Pac Pobric reviews the exhibition Cy Twombly and the School of the Fontainebleau at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin, on view through October 7, 2012.

Pobric writes: "If saying that Twombly was an artist and not a historian seems obvious, the implications of that probably aren’t. When we say that Twombly was a painter interested in art history, all that means is that his working through the history of art was material and not theoretical. Whatever affinity he had for the School of the Fontainebleau is therefore going to be mediated through the material practice of his painting. That filter—the process of making work with influences in mind—therefore obscures the connection between the final picture and the influence, making the connection highly tenuous."