‘Cy Twombly: The Rose’, Gagosian Gallery, London

The exemplary catalogue of last year’s landmark Cy Twombly retrospective at Tate Modern contained a longing coda, “Between Roses and Shadows”, in which co-curator Nicholas Cullinan described the contents of the US artist’s studio in the Italian city of Gaeta, with roses tacked on the wall and tantalising work in progress. A photograph was yet more wistful: it showed Twombly examining the drips flowing down a massive unfinished painting of a densely saturated purple and lemon-yellow rose which seemed to open, unfold, blossom, flutter, fade and die all at once as you looked.

What a conclusion that painting would have been to the Tate’s show, in which it was the late-flowering work especially that established 80-year-old Twombly’s greatness.Well, now “The Rose”, a quintet of monumental paintings, each comprised of four bright turquoise panels depicting three roses in full bloom in punchy, pulsating colours – burgundy, crimson, gold, violet, tangerine and, astonishingly, a black which shimmers into midnight blue and deep green – is in London.

Inscribed with fragments from Rilke’s poem cycle “The Roses” in Twombly’s characteristic mock-elegant graffiti scrawl, the five parts hang on Gagosian Gallery’s towering white walls as a complete installation and look as sensational, vibrant and historically significant as any new paintings this century.

Although no 20th century American painter has been more influenced by European art, Twombly remains surprisingly little known outside the US. It is a truism that he balances American expansiveness of gesture with European archaic, classicising allusion: self-consciously a museum work, “The Rose” follows on grandiloquently from Tate Modern’s “Four Seasons” quartet, while recalling too Houston’s 1985 polyptych “Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair”, and the soaring, seeping blood-and-wine “Bacchus” (2005). But as a symbol, the rose, replete with connotations of sweetness, perfume, beauty, love, is the most daring of these for a contemporary painter.

That Twombly has risked the subject and pulled it off with complete conviction confirms last year’s revelation at Tate Modern: uniquely, he is a painter who condensed and enriched the major paths of American postwar art – Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, the use of text and language – in an individualistic oeuvre, drenched in myth, that only really came into its own in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

As usual with Twombly, life, death, time, nature, transience, the flamboyance and exquisiteness and resignation of European pastoral, are the subject matter of “The Rose”, materialised in broad brushstrokes which clot and concentrate paint into almost sculptural images of bursting petals. But they also express movement, looping and unfurling, sending colour into a spiralling descent with confident, sensual abandon. Cullinan, watching these works in progress, thought they answered the influence of Jackson Pollock, with Twombly’s splatters and drips, rather than being frozen in a horizontal execution, descending the panels “so that liquidity and gravity combine to re-establish the painting’s verticality”.

Certainly, Twombly manages to overlay the ardour and boldness of Abstract Expressionist painterliness not only with postmodern sophistication of reference – Warhol’s flower paintings, Matisse’s cut-outs, 1940s fragmented Bonnards, late Renoir – but also with a sense of man’s epic, embattled engagement with the natural world that feels contemporary. Yet these are timelessly late works in their intense expression of last-chance beauty, calling to mind Beethoven’s late quartets, Strauss’s “Four Last Songs”, above all T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” – whose ending “All manner of things shall be well/When the tongues of flames are infolded/Into the crowned knot of fire/And the fire and the rose are one” inspired Twombly and resonates across the gallery.

In the current economic climate, the ideal scenario – of a leading museum being able to consider acquiring all five works together – looks fantastical. See “The Rose” now: no current show of contemporary art in a public space can match it.

Exhibition continues until May 9
www.gagosian.com