Joseph Cannon: 2011

                                                                       Cy Twombly
                                                              Fifty Days at Iliam
                                                                             1978


Cy Twombly

     Edwin Parker “Cy” Twombly, Jr. was an American artist born in Virginia in 1928, married and relocated to Rome, Italy in 1959 with his wife until his death later this year. He is best known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings. Towards the late 1960s he discarded painting figurative and representational subject-matter, citing the line or smudge - each mark with its own history - as its proper subject. In the summer of 1977, Cy Twombly began working on a painting in ten parts based on Alexander Pope's translation of Homer's Iliad. Completed in 1978 and collectively titled Fifty Days at Iliam, the works evoke incidents from Homer's epic poem in Twombly's characteristic synthesis of words and images. The ten large canvases follow one another much like a developing narrative. Homer’s poem depicts the tragic story of the last fifty days of the Trojan War, written roughly before 700 B.C. “Twombly’s series in ten parts progresses from the fiery moment when the Greek warrior Achilles is inspired to join the fight against Troy (Iliam).” (Ann Temkin, p.340)     When I enter the room dedicated to Twombly’s ten piece installation, I feel that what I see before me is a joke. I do not take the “art” hanging on the walls seriously any more then I would seriously consider hanging my youngest nephew’s mark making from his kindergarten class in a gallery. These pieces have to be the most wasteful use of space. The fact that the museum has dedicated an entire room to this artist for the last ump-teen years is anyone’s guess. The worst part is I do not care of its intention, representation or each mark having its own history. The bottom line is, it looks like my nephews stole a box of my oil crayons and went to town on expensively massive canvases. I do not like this piece because I do not classify it as art. Had I known work like this would be put in museums and fetching for millions of dollars at Christie’s, I would have excavated my mother’s living room walls in which I had covered from three feet high, all the way around the room in her lipsticks and eyeliners at the age of five. Art, to me, is something not everyone can achieve. For example, Frits Thalow’s Water Mill is a photorealistic painting. Not every one can paint like that so that, to me, is a form of art.
     Here is where I am supposed to put aside my opinion and judge the piece critically and artistically instead of judgmentally and aesthetically. Starting with the massive canvases that take up much of the walls in the room, nine are strategically placed on the wall frameless, while one hangs in a niche outside the room. The materials are made up of oil, oil crayons and graphite on canvas.
I am assuming the canvases are hung chronologically in sync with the telling of Homer’s poem, each canvas entailing a chapter. With that said, the canvases on the left are passionate and rich in color, perhaps symbolizing the emotion of the Greeks which follows the storyline of the poem’s portrayal. The opposite wall is more cool in color and tone, possibly symbolizing the cool and calculating response of the Trojans. And the facing wall I am sure pays tribute to the three fallen war heroes in the story Achilles, Patroclus, and Hector.
     Twombly uses the visual language found in other pieces of his, the scrawl marks, random brushstrokes, sometimes legible numbers, letters and words, to create the basic form of symbol making. A form that embarks in Western culture a sense of primitive human language and understanding.
Perhaps I am over thinking the entire thing and should really concentrate on the fact that this is art because it is. The artist put his expressional mark and emotion to canvas with an intention in mind. It is not of Classical proportion even though it is a Classical subject matter. The artist in his own primitive interpretation, creates a sense of emotion in his colors and careful use of text in certain canvases to point out and carry the narrative on to the next canvas. The heroics of Homer’s Iliad play out in battles of scribbled bursts and attacks of line and color, here fading to shadows behind decisively ordered clouds, over there screaming in dark reds and purples of suggested spilt blood.
     Whether I think the piece is art or not is irrelevant; it is evident that some one does, otherwise it would not be hanging in a museum. I understand art is subjective and I can sometimes, not all the time, understand where an artist is going or trying to convey in a piece I find unfavorable. I suppose the main reason why I am against this piece so strongly is because I, as an artist, strive for perfection. I draw or paint what I see attempting with everything I have at realism because that is what art is in my opinion. I do not draw a grey elephant in pink or abstract shapes for facial features or splatter blobs of paint on a canvas. That is not how I was taught formally and that is not how I conduct my own art. I am very literal and structural in my artwork with my moods and current events shaping my subject matter. What is relevant is that Twombly and I have a point of view that is very much our own regardless of style or how we approach and/or define that point of view. In the end we both strive for one thing, and that is to create art via our own interpretations.

Bibliography:1. Wikipedia. “Cy Twombly.” Last modified October 22, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cy_Twombly
2. Cy Twombly, Fifty Days at Iliam, 1978, information placard (ID#1989-90-1--10), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. 2011
3. Ann Temkin, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 340.