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He saw the mythic power of the past

Cy Twombly's fresh vision of antiquity

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‘Shades of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector’: Wrestling with ancient history, in his own idiosyncratic way.
‘Shades of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector’: Wrestling with ancient history, in his own idiosyncratic way.
Cy Twombly, the great contemporary master of line and space, died on July 5, but fortunately for Philadelphians he'll always be close by at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Twombly's ten-painting series, "Fifty Days at Iliam," is a superb treasure of contemporary art and a clear statement about what he did best: engage with the narratives of history, especially those of ancient Greece and Rome.

Twombly was born in Virginia, but after attending Black Mountain College and spending time in New York with his friend Robert Rauschenberg and others of note, he spent the rest of his life in Italy. As a result"“ or perhaps due to an inclination that helps explain his move"“ Twombly's work is simultaneously contemporary and anachronistic. He draws deeply on the foundations of Western culture, yet his wide-ranging freedom represents a complete break with all precedents in handling that type of subject matter.

Slavish celebration


From the 18th Century until the late 19th Century, European painters slavishly celebrated the glories of Greece and Rome in enormous paintings crammed with Classical detail. These grand history paintings ranked at the very top of Academy scales and consequently brought the greatest prestige (as well as the best financial return) to the artist. Often such works contained complex allegorical codes and meanings, equating behavior of the revered Classical past with desired behavior for the present.

But once the move toward Realism began in the mid-19th Century, history as a subject, especially with any celebratory narrative, became decidedly non grata. Historical narratives can still be found in contemporary art, but almost by cultural decree they must be ironical, satirical or critical, as in the work of Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker or Kerry James Marshall.

In Twombly's work, however, history retains its mythic power; human awe is intact. In "Fifty Days at Iliam," the heroics of Homer's Iliad play out in battles of scribbled bursts and attacks of line and color, here fading to shadows behind divinely ordered clouds, over there screaming in dark reds and purples of spilt blood.

Divine favor


Ilians in Battle (fifth in the series) is a diagram of sorts, but the prized geometry of the Greek culture appears dashed on casually against strict rules of order, skewed to the vagaries of divine favor and human chance.

Stark but poetic, Shades of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector is enormous in scale like those earlier academic historical paintings. Three cloudlike medallions hover side by side in the Elysian ether, one deep red, one dark grey, one fading to white. They are the fallen heroes united by their courage but seem equally emblems of the loss of good young men in an awful war.

Twombly often seems the most playful of artists with his looping scrawls, patches of splashed-on color, the instinctive way he jockeyed around a canvas or sheet of paper, bouncing across the surface like a mad pinball, scrawling words and letters. Such confident mastery could be enough now, but in "Fifty Days at Iliam" he lets us know that an artist"“ and his audience"“ still must wrestle with the deep foundations of what makes art and humanity.






What, When, Where

“Fifty Days at Iliamâ€: Works by Cy Twombly (1928-2011). Permanent exhibition at Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th St. and Benjamin Franklin Parkway. (215) 763-8100 or www.philamuseum.org.

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