Cy Twombly's Iliad
- cmil1167
- Aug 11, 2024
- 9 min read
Updated: Mar 24
“For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, could soon be a thing of the past, The Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, as at the very centre of human history, The Iliad is the purest and loveliest of mirrors”.
Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force
Western literature begins with a song of savagery and gore. It is this bloody epic poem, the Iliad, specifically Alexander Pope’s 1720 translation of it, that Cy Twombly illustrates and interprets in his series of ten paintings Fifty Days at Iliam. Nicola del Roscio, Twombly’s long-time assistant, recounts that Twombly was “fixated for some time on Pope’s translation, almost in a fanatical way”. That he is illustrating a text is made clear by the incorporation of the titles within the body of the paintings, a reference to the captioned illustrations in a book. Twombly had already treated the subject of the Iliad and the Trojan war more than 10 years earlier in 1962, in the paintings Vengeance of Achilles and Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus, and again in the triptych Ilium, 1964.
The ten paintings that make up Fifty Days at Iliam are now housed in their own room, as Twombly wished, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’s likely that Twombly, who lived in Italy from the late 1950s, had seen the Hall of the Iliad in the Pitte Palace in Florence, and the idea of his own ‘Hall of the Iliad’ may have been inspired by it. Although he would have been familiar with art relating specifically to The Iliad, including amphorae at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, paintings and vases at various sites in Italy, and the Flaxman illustrations to his edition of Pope’s translation, it was to the literary text to which Twombly was responding. Cy Twombly was one of the Twentieth Century’s most literary painters, obsessed enough by his favourite poets not only to include snippets of their verse in his paintings, and create paintings as a response to them, but also to rewrite or ‘correct’ their poems in his copies of their books.
The ten paintings follow each other like a loose, discrete narrative based on the slaughter-filled books XIX and XX of the Iliad, beginning with the decision of Achilles to re-join the war, following the death of Patroclus. Paintings focusing on the Trojans face those dealing with the Ilians across the gallery, with the painting Shield of Achilles displayed alone in a separate room. Twombly explained his decision to replace the ‘u’ of Iliam with an ‘a’ to David Sylvester, relating the series to his earlier Achilles painting:
“I spelt it I-L-I-A-M which is not correct. It’s U_M … Because I did that Vengeance of Achilles with the A shape. Also, it’s the Achilles thing and the shape of the A has a phallic aggression – more like a rocket. The Vengeance of Achilles is very aggressive. My whole energy, will, work … [has] a very definite male thrust. The male thing is the phallus."
Critic Mary Jacobus described this series as a “meditation on the aesthetics of violence” and Twombly was ambivalent about violence - not only is his style violent and barbaric, but he illustrated a poem that glorifies war. Del Roscio, noting that Twombly was “a convinced anti-war person who was against any kind of violence” describes the alarming genesis of the Fifty Days at Iliam series, showing Twombly’s identification with Achilles, and how the motivation for the paintings lay partly in vengeful aggressiveness and domestic strife:
“The fury of Achilles and the other warriors [in the paintings] was the result of the irritation and rage that Cy’s wife Tatiana, in a domestic mixture of familiar contempt, caused in daily episodes, emotionally overpowering him … He carried with him a halo of anger and rage, cigarettes and Pinot Grigio."
The 1962 Vengeance of Achilles is three metres high, and Twombly uses scale to intimidate. Achilles does not face, but confronts us, the air of menace enhanced as the figure is hooded, level with the picture plane, and as close to being in the viewers space as is possible without resorting to trompe d’oeil. The flurries of graphite and red oil paint are contained within the A shape, connoting the disciplined ‘cold fury of the warrior’ rather than an intemperate frenzy, allegorising both war and warmaking, art and artmaking, the A standing for Apollo and the Apollonian, that which structures and makes coherent passionate Dionysiac frenzy.
This painting, like many of Twombly’s works, hovers on the edge of figuration and abstraction, inducing a state of semiotic delirium. An important book for Twombly, one he studied closely, was William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, in which he discusses the ways that poets can create ambiguity, suggestion, ambivalence and multivalence with “one sentence, phrase or even [a] single word”, through “any verbal [or pictorial] nuance, however slight, that gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language”, producing a “richness and heightening of effect”. Vengeance of Achilles is thus simultaneously blood-tipped phallus, dagger, sword or spear-point, wraith, arm, artist, warhead, flame, Klansman, arrowhead, Ares, giant ‘A’, Apollo and Achaean. The letter ‘A’ also implies the orginary and elemental, and that the violence associated with this figure is fundamental to humankind, with the scribbled pencil lines' evocation of pubic hair compounding a sense of the phallic and the primary.
Rage is properly the title of Homer’s poem, and his contemporary audience probably knew it by that name. The rage depicted in the 1978 version of Vengeance of Achilles is specifically a testicular rage, and the hybrid shape is at once ball-sack and chariot wheel. A similar phallus shape to the one in this painting appears in both Achaeans in Battle and Ilians in Battle, though in these two paintings it more closely resembles a crude toilet wall graffito. The prick-chariot that is Agamemnon in Achaeans in Battle is the only one that Twombly has clearly delineated as a penis, rather than just a schematic penis shape, through the inclusion of a glans. Whatever Twombly may be implying about male violence and vengeance the image unavoidably amuses, and the childish pleasure of scrawling obscene graffiti – in effect straight onto a gallery wall – is not only one that Twombly alludes to, but also experienced.
His Achilles-related paintings can be compared with the writing of Jean Genet in their yoking of violence to beauty, its ambivalence towards both, and how they relate both to a valorised masculinity. Twombly has shown a consistent phallomania, yet the obvious homo-erotic implications of his work have elicited barely any critical comment. The viewer is pointed towards the next ‘episode’ clockwise by these phalli, and the general movement from left to right calls attention to the fact that we are ‘reading’, evoking the written text of the Iliad. I would suggest that how we are taught to read words affects how we read images, that is, from left to right, (including the cinema: all the long tracking shots in films that I can recall have moved from left to right) and so affects how we experience a painting.
Like those that dominate both versions of Vengeance of Achilles, the overdetermined form that is the Shield of Achilles presides over a tangled knot of significations and metaphors, some having in common qualities such as redness or roundness, and so on. What is a shield is also a sun, what is a sun is a ball of fire, what is a ball of fire is a wound, a scrotum or an anus, a blazing eye or a burning world. The circle is of course a symbol of eternity and, in this context, because of all the other violence-related connotations it calls forth, it expresses a fatalism about war – the eternal recurrence of the same barbarities. Which is not to say that Twombly necessarily laments this. The Iliad is a relentless catalogue of killings described with queasy, medically accurate detail, and it was a text that was dear to him.
In the 1975 Vengeance of Achilles, rather than just the tip, the whole of the penis-spear-missile is in red oil, whilst the scrotum-chariot-wheel is rendered in graphite. There is a predominance of red in all of Fifty Days Iliam, and the paintings in the cycle that have Achilles as a protagonist express his rage through red. The most obvious things that the reds used by Twombly call up are torn flesh, and blood, freshly spilt or in various stages of congealing and drying, and it has an archaising effect and archaic sources, both art-historically and psychologically
The preference for red has a genetic basis and it is possible that an attraction to red minerals was deeply ingrained in the biological behaviour of humans. According to anthropologist Ernst Wreschner in his paper Red Ochre and Human Evolution:
“Cognition is knowing or acquiring knowledge. The perception of red, the ability to discriminate colours, led to actions that resulted in new experiences and learning. Part of the cognitive process is the endowment of objects– in this case ochre – with meanings. The creation of relationships [between objects] resulted in cultural structures.”
The colour red was the first to be given meaning, to be used figuratively and to accrue symbolic associations, all pain, conflict or violence-related. The red-violence-representation nexus has been foundational for humankind’s cognitive development, and it is thought that the associative stimuli red ochre triggered contributed to the development of the brain and our very capacity for ideation. Red also acts directly on the nervous system and provokes an intense somatic response more effectively than any other colour.
Twombly’s work generally has a primitive feel because it is pictographic, often with the violence of a scrawl, on a white ground with no concern for figure, depth or perspective, like cave art. As well as a cave wall, this white ground also evokes the marble of monument and statuary. Another literary figure that fascinated Twombly was Mallarme. In Fifty Days at Iliam there's a Mallarme-like use of white space to give more force to what inhabits it. Mallarme wanted to give his isolated words an explosive, aggressive force, and as in Mallarme's of Un Coup de Des Twombly places a word or phrase in isolation on the page/canvas, exploiting the resonance-giving power of white space. In the 1978 Vengeance of Achilles the expanse of white is a visual cognate of silence, and therefore of death and eternity, which makes its roar of red seem vainglorious. He also places words and proper names alongside non-linguistic elements, dissolving the barriers between the pictorial and linguistic, the canvas invoking both canvas and page.
In Cy Twombly’s paintings there is an automatic, aleatory element: not the planned, programmatic chance of the surrealists, but an unmediated transference of energy, something atavistic and aggressive surging urgently from the body itself, accounting for their feel of suppressed drives finding vicarious release. The similarity of Twombly’s technique to a toddler’s scribbling has often been noted, and the intoxication of paint that is Shield of Achilles is perhaps his most obviously ‘scribbled’ painting, with its heavily applied oil crayon over a ground of scumbled white oil with pinkish notes.
Twombly once commented that “the scribble is the artist’s fundamental rhythm”, and paintings such as Shield of Achilles gives the viewer a sense of the enjoyment of pure motor pleasure that toddlers are known to get from scribbling, an atavistic joy in pure mark-making being evident in much of Twombly’s work. Shield of Achilles is an example of what child psychologists have recently characterised as ‘onomatopoeic scribbling’, whereby scribbles are divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘fast’, ‘slow’, ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ lines, and the substrate is either ‘caressed’ or ‘hit’ (when painting his Nine Discourses on Commodus, Twombly used a whip to paint). If Twombly is attempting a kind of ontological portrait of Achilles, it’s fitting that he does so partly by replicating the typical expression of a toddler’s inchoate rage.
Cy Twombly replaced Picasso as the artist most subject to the derisory comment ‘my child could do that’, but the truth is that nobody could ‘do that’ without Twombly’s particular sensibility or artistic training. Conversely, no adult can achieve the nonchalant sprezzatural abandon of a child’s scribble because the child is coming from an irrecoverable, infantine subject position. When we are moved by our children’s scribbles it is partly because we experience nostalgia for a lost state of being, urs before we were time’s food or memory’s prey, and had barely nibbled the fruit of the tree of knowledge. When an artist such as Twombly tries to recover something akin to this infantile state it is a falling-back-into, not a going-beyond.
Although they can be discussed in in aesthetic terms regarding such matters as balance and colour relations, children’s scribbles exist in a temporal, emotional and intellectual vacuum. They can never become part of the ‘art world’, having no intellectual content, being uninflected by what psychologists call ‘useable memory’, or by any significant emotional history, and having no engagement with art history, or being informed by any awareness of mortality, and so on.
Despite the ostensibly avant-garde, neo-Abstract style of his paintings, according the thinking of TS Eliot, Twombly, with his lack of historical specificity, and the way he incorporates the whole of history in his works, is a traditional painter, having “the historical sense, which is a sense of timelessness as well as of the temporal … this is what makes the writer [read: painter] traditional”. In Eliot’s terms, Twombly is using the “mythical method” rather than the “narrative method”, “controlling, ordering, giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is … history.” Fifty Days at Ilium is Twombly’s most achieved work in this regard, the paintings calling forth simultaneously the prehistoric cave wall and the utmost contemporary artistic sophistication, the scribbling child and the slaying warrior, murderous, petty vengefulness and disinterested aesthetic distance, the birth of humankind and its final fatal flame.
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