The great upstager: how monet made turner and twombly look ordinary

The American painter Cy Twombly died last year at the height of his fame. He was 83, but recognition had come late; it was in his 60s and 70s that he reaped the rewards of a lifetime of

making art, and, as the glory grew, created many of his most ambitious works. The comparisons grew more lavish until, by the end of his life, he was exhibiting alongside the classical master

Nicolas Poussin. In Tate Liverpool's new exhibition, it is JMW Turner and Claude Monet who are lucky enough to share the honours. Is it wise to short-circuit art history like this,

blithely assuming that a famous name of our own time can hang alongside hallowed giants? It does not help that Tate Liverpool has made a slightly stale selection of Twombly's works. It

seems like only yesterday that I was moved by one of his epic paintings about the lovers Hero and Leander, at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Now I'm having to weep for Leander by

the Mersey, too. Twombly's paintings, inspired by the myth about a young man who drowns while swimming to his love across the Hellespont, are here juxtaposed with Turner's 1837

painting of the same story. In Turner's treatment, lofty temples and impassioned figures are eclipsed by a boiling, glistening sea. This has an honesty and rugged complexity that makes

Twombly's misty colours seem sentimental. Twombly's finest painting here is Orpheus, from 1979, which raises the troubling possibility that his famous late years were in fact a

period of decline. On a white canvas, a huge handwritten O makes an eerily beautiful black drawing. Each letter of the name Orpheus shrinks in size: as you read the name, it is as if Orpheus

fades away into his own song. Twombly died with the reputation of a living Old Master. This exhibition releases him from that burden by revealing some massive flaws, especially when you set

him beside Monet. The curator has hung some splashy, multicoloured splurges next to ravishing Monet garden scenes. Never work with children, animals, or Claude Monet. The quiet Frenchman is

a great upstager. If he makes you worry about Twombly's sincerity, he can also make the marvellous Turner look like a man who painted with tobacco juice and custard. The two Ts are

theatrical and self-consciously grand, painting for history. Then along comes Monet, with a painting of water lilies in a reflected glowing void – and his simple beauty seems more profound

and suggestive than any amount of mythology. Twombly remains a fascinating artist, but this show makes too many assumptions about his claim to greatness. (It also misses something about him

– humour, perhaps, or sex.) Near Twombly's Four Seasons hangs an utterly scintillating flower painting by Monet. It seems to have more colours in one spot of its surface than Twombly

can muster across an entire epic. You do not need the Hellespont to drown in: Monet's pond is deep enough.