Cy Twomblys Heroes of the Achaeans (1978), from his Trojan War series, all ten of them housed in a single monumental white room at my hometown museum (the one Rocky triumphantly runs up to in the movie). This is one of those paintings that properly piss people off. How in the world does a second-grade-level handwriting exercise—misspellings and all—qualify as great art?! I dont know. I just know that it does. Smarter observers than I have made the case. Twombly has no words to reflect on the enormity of Homers vision. Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff do have words—many superb ones—in their scary essays, brought together into one volume. I cannot recommend it too highly. The book will drag you rolling in the Anatolian dust back to The Iliad itself. Twombly has no such words. He only has names—only Greek ones, letting alone the Trojan ones. Cy renounces the power even to figure those gods and heroes without his typography collapsing Alphas into Deltas, the scrawls debouching at last into a sea of empty canvas, then the white walls of a Philadelphia gallery, then a blankness of imagination: our incapacity to live up to, into, and out from the relentless warnings of ancient myth, which whisper again to us this week, as the soul of our nation bows its head, shamed again and again by its original sin.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 13:26:27 +0000
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