NOTES

INTRODUCTION: TWOMBLY’S BOOKS

1. Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 366. Twombly adapted the title of Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans (1650) for a work of his own (1981–82).

2. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 52.

3. Relevant books in Twombly’s collection are asterisked in the bibliography. For quotation as a literary practice, see Antoine Compagnon, La Seconde Main (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979), especially 15–43, and Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotation to Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

4. Cf. Twombly’s note, “Ariel [sic] space without gravitation … freed in an endless space” (Archives Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, 18.22.06). See also Twombly’s 1968 Orion series and 1969 Bolsena paintings coinciding with the Apollo moon landing; Bastian, CTP III: 119–23, #47–50 and 186–213, #83–96.

5. See Peter D. McDonald, “Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory?” Special Topic: The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature, PMLA 121.1 (2006): 214–28.

6. See Gregor Stemmrich, “‘Talking about the Essence of Something’: History, Discourse, and Myth in Cy Twombly’s Work,” in Cy Twombly: States of Mind, Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Drawing, ed. Achim Hochdörfer (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2009), 60–85.

7. On Pound’s never-to-be unpublished “Anthology,” see John G. Nichols, “Ezra Pound’s Poetic Anthologies and the Architecture of Reading,” PMLA 121.1 (2006): 170–85.

8. Twombly’s library includes The Songs of Sappho in English Translation by Many Poets (1942); inscribed “Betty Stokes, 1951.” Pound’s disclaimer in “How to Read” (1929)—“I do not suggest a ‘course’ in Greek or Latin literature”—includes “five or six pages of Sappho” (Eliot, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 28).

9. “And now I have a nice collection of books—a first edition of The Wasteland, little volumes of the first of the Four Quartets, and I also have a facsimile of The Wasteland”; see Serota, “History behind the Thought,” in Cycles and Seasons, 50. Twombly’s collection included a first edition of Pound’s Pisan Cantos (1949); the 1698 edition of Dryden’s Virgil; the 1720 (2nd ed.) of Pope’s Iliad; and a second edition of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1624).

10. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 50. Serota: “… you’re in the studio.” Twombly: “No, no, I’m not in the studio—I read at night.”

11. Notable exceptions include Richard Leeman’s 2005 monograph; Nicholas Cullinan’s catalogue essays in Cycles and Seasons; and Nicholas Cullinan, Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery/Paul Holberton Publishers, 2011). Among essays emphasizing the role of the written word in Twombly’s work, see Marcelin Pleynet, “Designs in Letters, Numbers and Words or Painting by Ear” (1976), WCT 74–87; Roland Barthes, “Non Multa Sed Multum” (1979), WCT 88–101, and “The Wisdom of Art” (1979), WCT 102–13; Katharina Schmidt, “The Way to Arcadia: Thoughts on Myth and Image in Cy Twombly’s Painting” (1984), WCT 143–73; Stephen Bann, “Wilder Shores of Love: Cy Twombly’s Straying Signs,” in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) 198–213; and Jon Bird, “Indeterminacy and (Dis)order in the Work of Cy Twombly,” Oxford Art Journal 30.3 (2007): 484–504. See also recent essays included in Cy Twombly. Bild, Text, Paratext, ed. Thierry Greub, Morphomata, Bd. 13 (Munich: Fink Verlag, 2014), and Thierry Greub, “Cy Twombly’s ‘Inverted Archeology,’” in The Essential Cy Twombly, ed. Nicola Del Roscio (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2014), 227–36.

12. For Twombly’s revisions to Untitled Painting (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor), completed in 1994, see Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, “Cues from Cy Twombly,” in Cy Twombly Gallery: The Menil Collection, Houston, ed. Julie Sylvester and Nicola Del Roscio (New York and Houston: Cy Twombly Foundation and Menil Foundation, 2013), 69.

13. See the 1994 eyewitness account by Dodie Kazanjian, “A Painted Word,” Vogue (New York) 184.9 (September 1994): 546–57, 617; repr. Vogue (July 2011), available at http://www.vogue.com/873844/from-the-archives-cy-twombly-a-painted-word/ (accessed 4 November 2015).

14. Mancusi-Ungaro, “Cues from Cy Twombly,” 69 (conversation with the artist, 1993). Twombly noted: “Paint (all over) as an eraser of time—Memory or creating layers of memory” (Archives Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio).

15. See, for instance, Katharina Schmidt, “Immortal—and Eternally Young: Figures from Classical Mythology in the Work of Nicholas Poussin and Cy Twombly,” in Cullinan, Twombly and Poussin, 80.

16. See Rosalind E. Krauss, “Cy Was Here, Cy’s Up,” in Artforum International 33.1 (September 1994): 70–75, 118; repr. as “The Latin Class,” in Rosalind E. Krauss, Perpetual Inventory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 193–203. Critiquing Leeman’s elevation of the individual artist, see also Benjamin Buchloh, “Ego in Arcadia,” Critique d’art 25 (2005): 17–26.

17. In a 1957 letter from Rome, Twombly wrote: “I’ve been reading seriously Mallarmé and Pound’s essays”; Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” in Cy Twombly: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 62, n. 116. For Pound’s influence, see Christopher Beach, ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), esp. 17–41; for Pound and Olson, see ibid., 84–109, 110–35.

18. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1934), 61.

19. While at Black Mountain, Twombly illustrated the cover for a chapbook version of Pound’s “Lament of the Frontier Guard” (“By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand …”); see Vincent Katz, ed., Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 198. Olson’s literature curriculum included Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (1938); see Francine Du Plessix Gray, “‘Black Mountain’: The Breaking (Making) of a Writer,” in Black Mountain College: Sprouted Seeds: An Anthology of Personal Accounts, ed. Marvin Lane (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 303.

20. See Ralph Maud, Charles Olson’s Reading: A Biography (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), esp. 96–105. For links between avant-garde poetry and pedagogy, see Alan Golding, “From Pound to Olson: The Avant-Garde Poet as Pedagogue,” in Ezra Pound and Education, ed. Steven G. Yao and Michael Coyle (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2012), 183–210.

21. See Pound, “Notes on Elizabethan Classicists” (1917), “Translators of Greek: Early Translators of Homer” (1920), and “Arnaut Daniel” (1920), in Eliot, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 227–48, 249–75, 109–48. For Pound’s “translations” of Chinese poetry, see Ezra Pound, New Selected Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 2010), 55–68; for his legacy to Modernist translation, see Lawrence Venuti, A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995), 172–87.

22. To Sarah Perkins Cope, 15 January 1934; D. D. Paige, ed., The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–41 (London: Faber & Faber 1951), 335; see Nichols, “Ezra Pound’s Poetic Anthologies,” 174.

23. “The Renaissance” (1914), in Eliot, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 216.

24. On the entanglement of drawing, line-making, and writing, see Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2007), esp. 120–51.

25. Pound, ABC of Reading, 198.

26. See “Projective Verse” (1950), in Charles Olson: Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 240. Cf. “In Cold Hell, in Thicket” (1950; published 1951), in The Collected Poems of Charles Olson, ed. George F. Butterick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 155–60.

27. For Motherwell’s midcentury relation to Dada, see Catherine Craft, An Audience of Artists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 43–57, 105–20; Motherwell’s advocacy of automatic writing was based on personal experience (see ibid., 46). Craft identifies neo-Dada elements in Twombly’s and Rauschenberg’s joint 1953 Stable Gallery exhibition (ibid., 225–32).

28. Motherwell’s 1951 anthology of the Dada movement, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1951), documents Dada writings, manifestos, printed works, and musical compositions, including poems by Paul Eluard and Kurt Schwitters.

29. For the “tendency to designate Twombly a poet, his work poetic,” and for the etymological link with poiesis, or making, see Kate Nesin, Cy Twombly’s Things (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 13, 29–31.

30. See Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 27; the manifesto appeared in L’Esperienza moderna 2 (August–September 1957), 32. Cf. Olson’s emphasis on “the job in hand, the push of the line under hand at the moment, under the reader’s eye, in his moment” (Allen and Friedlander, Charles Olson: Collected Prose, 340).

31. Paul Winkler, “Just About Perfect: A Recollection,” in Sylvester and Del Roscio, Cy Twombly Gallery, 26.

32. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 45, 49. Cf. Cullinan on abstraction versus figuration (Twombly and Poussin, 15).

33. See Pound, ABC of Reading, 36, 92.

34. For geographical displacement in Francophone literary Modernism, see David Scott, Semiologies of Travel: From Gautier to Baudrillard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

35. M. Byron Raizis, Greek Poetry Translations: Views, Texts, Reviews (Athens: Efstathiadis, 1983). Twombly also owned the paperback edition of George Seferis, Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sherrard, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), which did not include Three Secret Poems.

36. See Raizis, Greek Poetry Translations, 165; for a fuller discussion, see chapter 1.

37. Raizis, Greek Poetry Translations, 23.

38. Ibid., 16. For Cavafy’s combination of literary and demotic language, see Raizis on translations by Keeley, Sherrard, and Savidis (ibid., 204–11).

39. Cf. Twombly’s edited version of Patricia Waters’s “Now Is the Drinking” (from The Ordinary Sublime, 2006), on the central canvas of Coronation of Sesostris (2000); see Mary Jacobus, “Time-Lines: Rilke and Twombly on the Nile,” Tate Papers 10 (2008), available at http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/10/time-lines-rilke-and-twombly-on-the-nile (accessed 4 November 2015).

40. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 48.

41. Raizis, Greek Poetry Translations, 169.

42. Ibid., 163. Twombly’s transcript reads: “Yet there on the other shore / under the black glance, / suns in your eyes, / you were there; / of the other labor, / the other dawn, / the other birth. / yet there you were / in time’s excessive [sic] / Moment by Moment / like—.” I am indebted to Nicola Del Roscio for the Rubik’s cube analogy.

43. For the charged biographical context of Three Secret Poems, see Roderick Beaton, George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 370–71, 386–90.

44. Raizis, Greek Poetry Translations, 158, 169; the first passage comes from “On a Ray of Winter Sun,” the second from “Summer Solstice.” The eve of the Feast of St. John (24 June) is celebrated in Greek communities by bonfires and divinatory folk-rituals; see Beaton, George Seferis, 388.

45. Cf. Derrida’s elegy for Roland Barthes (alluding to Camera Lucida): “here too it is a matter of light”; Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 35.

46. Twombly’s transcription of the passage in Say Goodbye reads: “and yet there on / the other shore / under the dark gaze / suns in your eyes / you were there / the other side / the other dawn / the other birth / & yet there you were / in the Vast / time.”

47. C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, ed. George Savidis, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). Twombly’s library also included the 1975 edition, along with John Mavrogordato and Rex Warner’s Poems of C. P. Cavafy (1974), and Rae Dalven’s The Complete Poems of Cavafy (1976).

48. See Cavafy, Collected Poems, 15. Twombly also marked “Monotony,” “Ionic,” “The Glory of the Ptolomies,” “Ithaka,” and “Morning Sea.”

49. Ibid., 63.

50. Reviewing Keeley and Sherrard, Raizis compares two translations of Cavafy’s “Concealed,” or “Hidden Things;” the poem envisages a future when “someone else made just like me / is certain to appear and act freely” (see Greek Poetry Translations, 206–7).

51. For Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and Twombly’s Hero and Leandro (1981–86), see chapter 5.

52. Twombly notes: “the heart shape is also actually a tooth or symbol for Animism” (Archives Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, 18.20.27).

53. Lambert, CTOP VII: 50, #27. Cullinan notes: “body parts … are … caught in a constant state of slippage, transformation, and perpetual becoming” (Twombly and Poussin, 120).

54. See Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 240–46. As Greenblatt observes, the plot of Shakespeare’s poem contains a warning: “‘Fair flowers that are not gathered in their prime / Rot and consume themselves in little time’”; see also Katherine Duncan Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen, eds., Shakespeare’s Poems: Venus and Adonis, the Rape of Lucrece and the Shorter Poems (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2007), ll. 131–32. Subsequent references are to this edition. On the ambiguities of Ovid’s narrative, see also Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 48–65.

55. See Lambert, CTOP VII: 52–53, #29, #30, #31.

56. Shakespeare contrasts Adonis’s shortcomings with equine coupling: “Now is she in the very lists of love, / Her champion mounted for the hot encounter”—but “He will not manage her, although he mount her” (ll. 595–98).

57. “Here … the wound gives Adonis the appearance of a woman’s sexual parts” (Duncan Jones and Woudhuysen, Shakespeare’s Poems, 219).

58. Lambert, CTOP VII: 53, #30. The multifoliate “shade” is floral, as befits Adonis’s metamorphosis, but like the “shades” of Fifty Days at Iliam, it signals death and immortality (see chapter 4).

59. Eliot, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 54.

60. Sappho’s “Eros, sweet and bitter, / Eros, bringer of pain” reappears in Twombly’s Coronation of Sesostris (2000) and Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves (2009); see Guy Davenport, trans., Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman: Three Lyric Poets of the Late Greek Bronze Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 108, #100.

61. Ibid., 32, #49; Twomby’s fair copies omit the word “side” (“Left side, right side”) from Davenport’s version. Nicola Del Roscio terms such textual items “Mirabilia” (personal communication). Davenport calls Archilochos “a man who took pride in his hard profession of mercenary,” but also a poet of “studied lyrical eroticism” (ibid., 4–5).

62. Ibid., 2.

63. Ezra Pound, New Selected Poems, 44; Pound’s poem is based on a papyrus scrap published in 1902 (see ibid., 290). On Pound’s lacunae, see Craig Dworkin, Reading the Illegible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 112–13.

64. Davenport, Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman, 2.

65. See Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 1–40.

66. See Allen and Friedlander, Charles Olson: Collected Prose, 244, and Eliot, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 39.

67. Fenollosa and Pound, Chinese Written Character, 43, 45.

68. Ibid., 46–47. Cf. Olson on the verb as action in “Projective Verse”: “what Fenollosa is so right about, in syntax, the sentence as first act of nature, as lightening, as passage of force from subject to object, quick … from me to you, the VERB, between two nouns”; Allen and Friedlander, Charles Olson: Collected Prose, 244.

69. Fenollosa and Pound, Chinese Written Character, 54, 57–58.

70. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 50.

71. Fenollosa and Pound, Chinese Written Character, 58.

72. Ibid., 48, 49.

73. See Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 61, n. 99. Varnedoe comments on Twombly’s “attraction to aged surfaces” and “cultural residues” (ibid., 30).

74. Apropos of the “already dirtied” paper, Barthes writes: “The essence of graffiti is the wall, the background, the table-top”; “Non Multa Sed Multum,” WCT 95 (Barthes’s emphasis). Cf. Rosalind Krauss on Twombly’s mark-making in The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 256–67.

75. See Catherine Craft, “‘Cut, Tear Scrape, Erase’: Notes on Paper in Twentieth-century Drawing,” Master Drawings 50.2 (2012): 161–86; Craft’s title comes from a 1964 Jasper Johns drawing; but “no one had become more thoroughly associated with erasure than De Kooning himself” (ibid., 181).

76. For exemplary light-touch reading, see Yve-Alain Bois, “Der Liebe Gott Steckt im Detail,” in Abstraction, Gesture, Écriture: Paintings from the Daros Collection (Zurich: Scalo, 1999), 61–78.

77. For the opposition between “scriptible” and “lisible,” see Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay (1970) and The Pleasure of the Text (1973); for Barthes’s “writerly” reading of Twombly, see chapter 2.

78. John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941) gave its name to the dominant mode of teaching poetry in midcentury America; see Mark Jancovich, The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 81–89. For Ransom, image mattered more than idea; cf. Twombly’s scribbled quotation from Ransom: “The Image cannot / be dis possessed of a / priMORdial / freshness / which IDEAS / CAN NEVER CLAIM” (Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 52, and 64, n. 182); see John Crowe Ransom, “Poetry: A Note on Ontology,” in The World’s Body (New York: Scribner’s, 1938), 112, 115.

79. “Brancusi” (1921), in Eliot, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 441.

80. “R. B. Kitaj” (1979), in Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957–1987, ed. David Bergman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 299–300; Ashbery contrasts Twombly with previous transatlantic artists and writers (Whistler, Sargent, James, Stein, Pound, and Eliot). Like Frank O’Hara, who reviewed Twombly’s early work appreciatively (see “Cy Twombly” [1955], WCT 34), Ashbery was an accomplished art critic. Twombly’s work has affinities with Ashbery’s opaque confessionalism as well as O’Hara’s “Personism;” see Helen Vendler, “John Ashbery and the Artist of the Past,” in Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 57–78, and Marjorie Perloff, Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), esp. 75–112.

81. Twombly owned other Rilke translations besides Robert Bly’s Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Harper, 1981), including J. B. Leishman (1981, 1988), Stephen Mitchell (1995), and a recent presentation copy by Edward Snow (2009).

82. Twombly’s copy of Perse, poet of space and exile, bookmarks Anabasis, trans. T. S. Eliot, in Saint-John Perse, Selected Poems, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions, 1982), 28–43. For Twombly’s collaboration with Paz, see postscript.

83. See Steven G. Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism (London: Palgrave, 2002), esp. 209–33. Cf. Twombly’s visual “translation” of Horace’s odes in 8 Odi di Orazio (1968) as scansion-marks and scribble and Louis and Celia Zukofsky’s experimental Catullus translations (ibid., 220–33).

84. Clive Scott, Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15. Cf. also Clive Scott, Translating the Perception of Text: Literary Translation and Phenomenology (London: Legenda, 2012), esp. 62–89, and, for the temporality and geography of the text, ibid., 154–77.

85. Scott, Literary Translation, 10, 30.

86. For Schwitters’s collages, see Leah Dickerman, “Schwitters Fec.,” in Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage, ed. Isabel Schultz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press/Menil Collection, 2010), 87–97; for his “abstract” poems and performance pieces, see Kurt Schwitters, Poems, Performances, Pieces, Proses, Plays, Poetics, trans. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). Cage’s experimental music scores include colored pencils, drawing, and calligraphy and “I-Ching chance operations”; see John Cage, “Preface,” Notations (New York: Something Else Press, 1969).

87. See Scott, Literary Translation, 47. On poetic practices analogous to erasure, cf. Dworkin, Reading the Illegible, esp. 138–55.

88. Scott, Literary Translation, 80.

CHAPTER ONE | MEDITERRANEAN PASSAGES: RETROSPECT

1. Cycles and Seasons, 59, n. 18; cf. Kirk Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 61, n. 99.

2. Memory and the Mediterranean, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Random House, 2001), 3.

3. “…de Kooning said: ‘Are you going to Tangiers? Look up Paul Bowles’”; Ralph Blumenthal, “A Celebratory Splash for an Enigmatic Figure,” New York Times, 4 June 2005. Evidently, Rauschenberg always intended to visit Morocco; see Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 79.

4. On Twombly’s and Rauschenberg’s 1952–53 trip to Italy, Morocco, and Spain, see Nicholas Cullinan, “Double Exposure: Robert Rauschenberg’s and Cy Twombly’s Roman Holiday,” Burlington Magazine 150 (July 2008): 460–70. Twombly also planned to visit Greece, Crete, and Egypt; see undated letter of ca. December 1952 (Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 57, n. 56).

5. See ibid., 57, n. 56, and cf. Cycles and Seasons, 59, n. 11.

6. Twombly told Varnedoe that Casablanca was “tense with hostility” on account of French conscription and severity toward Moroccan nationalism (“Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 16). For modern Morocco in transition, see Paul Rabinow, Symbolic Domination: Cultural Form and Historical Change in Morocco (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), esp. 85–97.

7. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 50.

8. For Twombly’s Sahara (1960), see Bastian, CTP I: 238–39, #146. He journeyed up the Nile to Sudan in 1962, again visiting Egypt during the 1980s, as well as Yemen and other Middle Eastern countries.

9. According to Bowles,”Magic, incantations, the casting of spells, love potions and even death- potions, are still … part of the fabric of Tangier’s life”; see “Letter from Tangier,” (1954), in Paul Bowles, Travels: Collected Writings, 1950–93 (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), 95.

10. Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky (later filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci) depicts a couple’s emotional collapse in the sub-Saharan desert; during the 1950s, his novels address the Moroccan independence movement. For American attitudes to Morocco, see Brian T. Edwards, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 78–117.

11. “Twombly with musical instrument, Rome” (1953); see Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 57, fig. 51; also visible are raw materials for Rauschenberg’s hanging fetishes—hemp, batons, bones—as well as a small tagine and bottle reminiscent of Morandi’s still lives.

12. “The Route to Tassemsit” (1963), in Bowles, Travels: Collected Writings, 341–42. For the bus trip to Quarzazate through the High Atlas (the route taken by Rauschenberg and Twombly), see Robin Bryans, Morocco: Land of the Farthest West (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), 178–95.

13. Rauschenberg photographed a squat ruin resembling a primitive fortress-house; see “North Africa (I)” (1952), in Robert Rauschenberg, Photography 1949–1962, ed. Susan Davidson and David White (New York: Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, 2011), 153, #67. See also Walter Hopps, Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s (Houston: Menil Foundation and Houston Fine Arts Press, 1991), 114, figs. 42 and 43, and for incised Moroccan tombstones, Rauschenberg, Photography, 154–55, #68, #69.

14. “Robert Rauschenberg, Tetuan, Morocco” (1952); see Le Temps Retrouvé: Cy Twombly photographe & artistes invités, ed. Éric Mézil, 2 vols. (Avignon: Collection Lambert/Actes Sud, 2011), 1: [69]. On Twombly’s Morandi-like still life studies, see Nicholas Cullinan, “Camera Obscura: Cy Twombly’s photographic subjects and objects,” ibid., 1: 45–50, [55–59]. Rauschenberg and Twombly took Hazel-Frieda Larsen’s photography course at Black Mountain College; see also Katz, Black Mountain College, 168–81, for the importance of photography.

15. “Table, Chair, and Cloth” (Tetuan, 1952 [misdated 1951]), set of five photographs; see Cy Twombly: Photographs III 1951–2010 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2011), #2–6.

16. Rauschenberg, “Untitled [Cy, North Africa (I)],” in Rauschenberg, Photography, 151, #65; Rauschenberg also photographed Twombly bathing in a pool beneath a sculptural rock-pile (ibid., 152, #66).

17. For the Moroccan drawings, see North African Sketchbook in Del Roscio, CTD 1: 34–43, #14, I–XXXII.

18. The same fringed, frayed, and fretted outlines reappear in Study for Tiznit (1953); see Del Roscio, CTD 1: 31, #11. Bastian notes the importance of these early drawings for Twombly’s evolving pictorial language (Bastian, CTP I: 21–22).

19. See Del Roscio, CTD 1: 54, #17, XXVII–XXIX.

20. For the Pigorini drawings, see ibid., 1: 68–75, #20, I–XII.

21. See Cy Twombly, “Robert Rauschenberg Working with Feticci Personali” (Rome, ca. 1953), reproduced in Hopps, Robert Rauschenberg, 112, fig. 40. Rauschenberg took Anni Albers’s weaving class at Black Mountain College during 1948 and knew how to use a back-strap loom; for her focus on the use of materials, see Katz, Black Mountain College, 24–32, esp. 31–32.

22. “Rome Relics” (1952); cf. “Cy + Relics” (Rome, 1952), in Rauschenberg, Photography, 133, #54, and 135, #55.

23. For Rauschenberg’s photographs of old cars, pictures, bicycle wheels, discarded boots, and second-hand eyeglasses, see “Rome Flea Market (I–VII)” (1952), ibid., 127–31, #49–53; for Moroccan market scenes, see ibid., 148–49, #63, #64.

24. Barbara Rose, Interview with Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 58.

25. Tomkins, Off the Wall, 118.

26. Charles Olson, “Cy Twombly” (1951), WCT 10. Olson’s epigraph comes from Mencius (translated by Pound): “What whiteness can one add to that whiteness, what candor?” (WCT 9).

27. Rose, An Interview with Robert Rauschenberg, 38; Rauschenberg photographed and mounted Twombly’s application portfolio for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He refers to raising money for his return ticket (“Cy had already spent absolutely the last of our ‘joint’ investment on a Roman emperor”; ibid., 40). The emperors’ heads achieved notoriety via a 1966 Vogue article (“Mr. and Mrs. Twombly: A Painter’s Life in Rome”); see Horst P. Horst and Valentine Lawford, Vogue’s Book of Houses, Gardens, People (New York: Viking Press, 1968).

28. Twombly confirms that he had seen Cornell’s boxes in New York; see Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 44. For Rauschenberg’s boxes “exhibiting” natural-historical objects, art reproductions, and bric-à-brac, see Hopps, Robert Rauschenberg, 114, and cf. Walter Hopps, ed., Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay Eterniday (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003).

29. Hopps, Robert Rauschenberg, 114–16, and 140–44, figs. 87–93. Rauschenberg describes choosing his materials for “the richness of their past” (bone, hair, photos) or “their vivid abstract reality” (mirrors, balls, shells).

30. Robert Rauschenberg, “Untitled [Scatole Personali]” (1953), in Rauschenberg, Photography, 163, #74. On magical practices as part of everyday Moroccan life, see Paul Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 37–39. For a contemporary account of a Moroccan “magician” (indigenous healer), see Rom Landau, Moroccan Journal (London: Robert Hale, 1952), 157–76; a ram’s horn like Rauschenberg’s (hung in orchards for good harvest) was one of the wares sold by market-place magicians (ibid., 170). Installation photographs of the joint Rauschenberg/Twombly exhibition show the horn hanging next to Twombly’s tapestry (see Cullinan, “Double Exposure,” 150, fig. 30).

31. For Rauschenberg’s “shirt board” collages and Scatole Personali see Hopps, Robert Rauschenberg, 124–33, #61–82, and 140–44, #87–93.

32. See ibid., 232. On Rauschenberg’s unappreciated gift of a personalized scatole to the artist Alberto Burri, see Cullinan, “Double Exposure,” 466–67, n. 50.

33. Rose, Interview with Robert Rauschenberg, 59.

34. Fiber-art by Arp and others provide Dadaist precursors for Rauschenberg’s hanging rope works; see Hopps, Robert Rauschenberg, 113–15. The French colonial regime encouraged weaving and other Moroccan indigenous crafts; see Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), esp. 200–217.

35. See “Untitled [nine Feticci Personali, Rome]” (1953), Rauschenberg, Photography, #75–77. Rauschenberg’s rope works and Scatole Personali were exhibited at the Galleria dell’Obelisco in March 1953.

36. One reviewer commented that Rauschenberg and Twombly made “signs and magical objects that echo mysterious and disconcerting ancestral cultures” (WCT 32, 33). Rauschenberg’s photograph of Twombly’s hangings is reproduced in Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 56, figs. 48–50.

37. See Cy Twombly, Untitled (1953) and Untitled (1955), in Katharina Schmidt, Cy Twombly: Die Skulpter / The Sculpture (Basel and Houston: Hatje Cantz Verlag/Menil Collection, 2000), 21, fig. 3, and 34, fig. 8. After returning, Rauschenberg photographed Twombly’s sculptures in his New York studio; see Rauschenberg, Photography, 181, #85. On the “primitive” and “fetish” elements in Twombly’s early sculptures, see Nesin, Twombly’s Things, 107–19.

38. See Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 56, n. 48. For twentieth-century art’s relation to the “primitive,” see William S. Rubin, ed., Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, 2 vols. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), esp. 2: 615–59; for the intertwining of primitivism and Surrealism in the New York School, see also Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (New York: Viking Press, 1972), esp. 85–98, 114–33.

39. See Leeman, 14–16; cf. Carol Nigro, “Cy Twombly’s Humanist Upbringing,” Tate Papers 10 (Autumn 2008), available at http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/10/cy-twombly-humanist-upbringing. (accessed 4 November 2015). Motherwell expands the New York School to include Louise Bourgeois, David Hare, and David Smith, along with William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and himself; see “The New York School” (1950), in The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Stephanie Terenzio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 76–81.

40. “The New York School” (1950), in Terenzio, Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, 80; “All ancient and prehistoric art is ‘Mediterranean’” (ibid., 110). William McGee, a fellow-student at Black Mountain College in 1952, recalls: “Cy was under the spell of Motherwell”; see Lane, Black Mountain College, 316, and Katz, Black Mountain College, 100–133.

41. “What Abstract Art Means to Me” (1951), in Terenzio, Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, 85.

42. Motherwell’s anthology aimed at a documentary account of Dada writings, manifestos, and early histories; see “A Personal Expression” (1949), in Terenzio, Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, 59–60. See also William S. Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), esp. 11–63, and Craft, Audience of Artists, esp. 43–69.

43. Robert Motherwell, “Stuart Brent Presents Cy Twombly,” WCT 14. Motherwell described the New York School painters as “always lyrical, often anguished, brutal, austere, and ‘unfinished’” (Terenzio, Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, 83).

44. On the “neo-Dada” reception of the joint Rauschenberg/Twombly 1953 exhibition at the Stable Gallery, see Craft, Audience of Artists, 225–32.

45. For Motherwell’s automatism, see ibid., 46–47; Arthur C. Danto, “The ‘Original Creative Principle’: Motherwell and Psychic Automatism,” in Robert Motherwell on Paper: Drawings, Prints, Collages, ed. David Rosand (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 39–57; and Mary Ann Caws, Robert Motherwell: With Pen and Brush (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 76–93.

46. “The Modern Painter’s World” (1944) in Terenzio, Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, 34. Cf. Motherwell’s 1956 interview: “Abstract expressionism should never have been coined—better ‘abstract automatism’” (ibid., 147).

47. See Rose, Interview with Robert Rauschenberg, 36.

48. See Bastian, CTP I: 96–97, and cf. Panorama (1955), Bastian, CTP I: 98–99, #50. Surviving works from the mid-1950s suggest that Twombly replaced “automatic writing” with stenographic shorthand.

49. Rose, Interview with Robert Rauschenberg, 36.

50. Ibid., 36–37. The term “primordial” implicates the free-floating Jungianism of the period. Varnedoe notes that Twombly has no memory of these paintings (“Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 55, n. 43). Ritual (1949) bears out Rauschenberg’s memory of “hot pinks and golds” (see Bastian, CTP I: 37, #2).

51. See ibid., 1: 46, #11, and 47, #12. For Twombly’s Kline-influenced evolution at this period, see also Cycles and Seasons, 55–56 and Leeman, 14–15.

52. See Bastian, CTP I: 50–51, #15, #16 (painted on top of a Rauschenberg painting); for the double-headed ram form, see CTP I: 59, #23, and for Rauschenberg’s photograph of Twombly in front of it, Bastian, CTP II: 285. On the importance of doubling in “didymous” titles such as Didim, see Leeman, 16–19.

53. WCT 14. For Motherwell’s own relation to destructiveness, see Craft, Audience of Artists, 46–55.

54. See Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 55, n. 36. Twombly would have seen Luristan artifacts in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; see also Nesin, Twombly’s Things, 107, 174, and 223, n. 37.

55. On the “positive outbreak of glyphomania” at Black Mountain College, see Leeman, 16. Ben Shahn’s A Glyph for Charles (1951) depicts Olson as a human glyph; see Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 1987), 224.

56. “Human Universe” (1951), in Charles Olson: Collected Prose, 159.

57. Ibid., 162.

58. See Butterick, Collected Poems of Charles Olson, 244, 654. Olson’s reference to Ashurbanipal is an early instance of the letter “A” as signifier for Twombly. Cf. Olson’s rhapsody on white, “Cy Twombly” (1952), in Allen and Friedlander, Charles Olson: Collected Prose, 175–78.

59. After Black Mountain College folded in 1956, Olson planned to convene an “institute in the earliest writings of man … Sumerian, Hittite, and Canaanite”; see “On Black Mountain I” (1968), in Charles Olson, Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews, ed. Ralph Maud, 2nd ed. (Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks, 2010), 268, and “On Black Mountain II” (1969), ibid., 328.

60. Twombly may have intended an anagram of the name of Olson in his paintings Solon I and Solon II (1952), named for the Athenian law-maker and poet; see Bastian, CTP I: 66–67, #31, #32.

61. “Within the span of one summer class we might be assailed by snatches of Sumerian history, of Fenollosa’s theories on Japanese art, of Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy; by passages from D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classical American Literature, Dostoevski’s Notes from the Underground, Leo Frobenius’s books on African rock painting, Pausanias’s Descriptions of Greece … and from Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kultur (‘just because it razzledazzles History’)”; Du Plessix Gray, “‘Black Mountain’: The Breaking (Making) of a Writer,” 303.

62. Ibid., 304. Twombly did not take Olson’s course, but Olson was enthusiastic about him and his work; see George F. Butterick, ed., Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, 10 vols. (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1980–96), 8: 199.

63. See Bastian, CTP I: 54–7, #19–21, and cf. Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 61, n. 99.

64. Ibid., 56, n. 49.

65. See Bastian, CTP I: 76, #37, and cf. 77, #38 (later painted over), and 79, #39. The impassioned scribble of La-La is visible in a 1953 photograph of Rauschenberg’s Fulton Street studio (Rauschenberg, Photography, 179, #84).

66. See Hopps, Robert Rauschenberg, 186–87, figs. 113–14; a series of installation photographs survives (see ibid., 188–90, #115–17, #119, #120). For Duchamp’s alleged remark, see Tomkins, Off the Wall, 112, and Craft, Audience of Artists, 225 and 277, n. 1.

67. WCT 24.

68. Ibid., 25.

69. Ibid., 27. Fitzsimmons on Rauschenberg’s contraptions: “how dull they seem 25 years after Dada” (ibid.).

70. Bastian, CTP I: 69, #33, and 75, #36.

71. Bastian, CTP I: 71, #34. The site of Volubilis includes triumphal arches, gateways, and the ruined Basilica; see Jean-Luc Panetier, Volubilis: Une cité su Maroc antique (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2002).

72. For Twombly’s recurrent use of a “goodluck charm from Morocco” in his work, see Richard Shiff, “Charm,” in Cycles and Seasons, 11–28. Responding to the question, “What is a fetish?” Shiff answers: “A fetish is highly specific; it belongs to you” (“Charm,” 17)—a definition complicated by the uses of “fetish” objects in 1950s Morocco.

73. Unpublished poem, 1953; Butterick, Collected Poems of Charles Olson, 291, 656.

74. David Sylvester, “Cy Twombly” (2000), in Interviews with American Artists (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 175 (emphasis in original).

75. “I’ve found when you get old you must return to certain things in the beginning.… You tend to be nostalgic … there’s a lot of references to crossing over” (ibid., 174). For the ship motif, see Achim Hochdörfer, “‘I voyaged quite alone in the silence of this magic sea,’” WCT 293.

76. See Robert Pincus-Witten, “Twombly’s Quarantine,” in Cy Twombly: An Untitled Painting (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 1994), 14–17.

77. See “Untitled Painting” (1994), Bastian, CTP IV: 183 ff., #65, where the painting spreads across four pages.

78. Pincus-Witten, “Twombly’s Quarantine,” 17. Cf. Brice Marden: “I haven’t seen a painting this big in this town ever … it’s an event just to walk into the room and see it”; Kirk Varnedoe, “Cy Twombly: An Artist’s Artist,” WCT 249.

79. Twombly uses Gregory’s translation of Song 46 (“Say goodbye, Catullus, to the plains of Asia Minor”); see The Poems of Catullus, trans. Horace Gregory (New York: Grove Press, 1956), 61. Twombly recalls: “Because it had already taken five or six years … I thought it had taken so long, it was languid and I wanted to call it On the Mists of Idleness” (Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” 176); on the Keats sonnet, see Pincus-Witten, “Twombly’s Quarantine,” 17.

80. Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” 176.

81. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 50.

82. See Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 33, and Bastian, CTP I: 211–13, #133.

83. Gregory, Poems of Catullus, 61, 167. “Catullus went to Asia Minor to see his brother, and while he was there his brother died, and he came back in this little boat” (Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 50). For biographical emphasis on the death of Catullus’s brother, see William Fitzgerald, Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 185.

84. “Catullus’ great gift is that of revealing the essentials of his psyche” (Gregory, Poems of Catullus, xviii–xix); Twombly marked the passage in Gregory’s introduction. On Catullus as “the Rilke of antiquity,” see Fitzgerald, Catullan Provocations, 212.

85. Poem 101, Gregory, Poems of Catullus, 167.

86. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 50. Twombly said of the change from “plains” to “shores”: “For me it’s a fantasy” (ibid., 50). He would have known Catullus’s celebration of his old boat in Poem 4 (Gregory, Poems of Catullus, 8–9).

87. Anne Carson notes the migration of aequor in Nox, her commentary on Catullus’s Poem 101: “[AEQUUUS] a smooth or level surface, expanse, surface; a level stretch of ground, plain.… Have we made it across the vast plain of night? The surface of the sea especially as considered as calm and flat …”; Anne Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010). On the transmission of Catullus’s graveside farewell, see Fitzgerald, Catullan Provocations, 225.

88. “It was impossible to view [Say Goodbye] from very far back … the only possible way to view the work was to begin at one end and walk alongside it”; Dorothea Rockburne, “Moveable Feast,” Artforum 50.3 (November 2011): 218.

89. Pincus-Witten, “Twombly’s Quarantine,” 17.

90. A note of the “Theban Triad” (Khonsu, Amun, Ma’at) survives among Twombly’s preparatory transcriptions (Archives Foundazione Nicola Del Roscio).

91. Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” 176. “It went on for three or four years and I didn’t do anything. Then I rolled it up and it went to Virginia” (Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 50). For the effects of time and travel “as part of the content of the painting,” see “Cy Twombly: An Artist’s Artist,” WCT 248.

92. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 49. On Burton’s prose as “… a sample of NON VERSE which has qualities of poetry,” see Pound, ABC of Reading, 61.

93. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, commentary by J. B. Bamborough and Martin Dodsworth, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 1: 6.

94. Ibid., 1: 11. “A ‘cento’ is a literary composition constructed from quotations from another author” (ibid., 1: xxxiv).

95. Ibid., 1: 136.

96. “Love of Learning, or overmuch Study” (ibid., 1: 302 ff.) “No labour in the world like unto study” (ibid., 1: 308).

97. Ibid., 2: 65–66.

98. Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1: 242. For allusions to Keats’s sonnet in Twombly’s Ode to Psyche (1960) and Untitled (1960), see chapter 7.

99. Rollins, Letters of John Keats, 1: 243.

100. Spring is for beauty, summer for enjoyment, autumn a time “to look / On Mists in idleness,” while winter is a reminder of mortality; see Jack Stillinger, ed., The Poems of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 238. Cf. the discussion of Quattro Stagioni in Cycles and Seasons, 193–95. The order of painting was Autunno, Inverno, Primavera, and Estate. The title “Say goodbye, Catullus …” appears on the Tate version of Estate, overlaid by “BAIA di Gaeta” (see Bastian, CTP IV: 180, #64, pt. II).

101. Hayden Herrera, “Cy Twombly: A Homecoming,” in Harper’s Bazaar (August 1994): 142–47.

102. Cf. Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy: “this fleeting world, which in some strange way / keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. / Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, / just once. And never again. But to have been / this once, completely, even if only once”; Stephen Mitchell, trans., Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rilke (New York: Random House, 1995), 383. For the Duino Elegies, see Donald Prater, A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 346–57.

103. “It was impossible to come out of Black Mountain College and not love Rilke”; Rockburne, “Moveable Feast,” 219. Twombly called one of his blackboard paintings Duino (1967); see Bastian, CTP III: 87, #29.

104. Paul de Man, “Tropes (Rilke),” in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 20.

105. See Schmidt, Cy Twombly: The Sculpture, 89, fig. 35 and detail: “And we, who have always thought of happiness climbing, would feel the emotion that almost startles when happiness falls.” Twombly’s quotation comes from the 1981 edition of Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York: W. W. Norton, 1939).

106. Twombly gives large-letter emphasis to “Falls” (cf. “Once”); a loose transliteration of Mitchell: “And we, who have always thought / of happiness as rising, would feel / the emotion that almost overwhelms us / whenever a happy thing falls”; see Mitchell, Ahead of All Parting, 395 (original emphases).

107. Rilke wanted to ensure that “the reader can understand … precisely this falling of the catkins” (referring to his earlier mention of catkins); see Mitchell, Ahead of All Parting, 574. For Rilke’s “falling” meter, cf. William H. Gass, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1999), 100.

108. Mitchell, Ahead of All Parting, 383.

109. Ibid., 383–85; ellipses in original.

110. Ibid., 285, 384.

111. Ibid., 387.

112. “I unrolled it and got to a friend’s warehouse and finally completed it because of the boats”; Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 50; the prototype was “a Celtic boat found in England with lots of oars” (ibid., 48).

113. Pincus-Witten, “Twombly’s Quarantine,” 17–18.

114. W. G. Sebald, “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese: On the Pictures of Jan Peter Tripp,” in W. G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp, Unrecounted (London: Penguin, 2005), 90–91.

115. See introduction and figures I.1 to I.5 for Untitled (1993), and Twombly’s edited excerpts from Seferis’s Three Secret Poems, in Raizis, Greek Poetry Translations, 158–71.

116. Ibid., 163, and see introduction and figure I.5.

117. For the personal allusions in Three Secret Poems, see Beaton, George Seferis, 386–90.

118. The passage continues: “You must get / Out of Sleep”; cf. Raizis, Greek Poetry Translations, 165, and see introduction and figure I.1.

119. Kazanjian, “A Painted Word,” 551. By the time of the MoMA exhibit, the painting Kazanjian saw at Gaeta had been replaced.

120. “Automobile,” in George Seferis, Collected Poems, trans. Keeley and Sherrard, 234 (ellipses and emphases in original); Twombly substitutes “on” for “and” (“high on light”).

121. The word “secret” held particular meaning for Seferis (“secretive, yes, but not secret, mystika”); see David Ricks, “Seferis’s Three Secret Poems,” Harvard Review 30 (2006): 68. Keeley calls them “Private. Also cryptic”; Edmund Keeley, On Translation: Reflections and Conversations (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000), 80.

122. While Greek ambassador in London during the late 1950s, Seferis—a supporter of Enosis (reunion of Cyprus with Greece)—became an anguished participant in the negotiations between Greece, Turkey, and the UK; see Beaton, George Seferis, 342–58.

123. See ibid., 3–30, and, for World War II, 211–53. Seferis’s “The Return of the Exile” (1938), anticipates a bitter homecoming; see Seferis, Collected Poems, 114–15.

124. On Seferis’s intertwining of myth and history (“the ‘Mythical Method’”), see Edmund Keeley, Modern Greek Poetry: Voice and Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 68–94, and Seferis, Collected Poems, 277.

125. For Seferis’s 1969 “Statement,” see Beaton, George Seferis, 398–401, and Keeley, Modern Greek Poetry, 95–118.

126. Raizis, Greek Poetry Translations, 168.

127. Ibid., 168. The opening lines of the next stanza (marked in Twombly’s copy) appear in Mo-MA’s Estate: “You were talking about things they couldn’t see / and they were laughing” (ibid., 168).

128. “His mortal heart presses out / a deathless, inexhaustible wine”; Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, VII (Mitchell, Ahead of All Parting, 423).

129. See Cycles and Seasons, 194–95; in the photo essay in Bruce Weber, A House Is Not a Home (New York: Bulfinch Press, 1996), #18, the note rests on a bowl of paint-tubes.

130. Kazanjian, “A Painted Word,” 551. The last line is a misreading of “infinite.”

131. See Raizis, Greek Poetry Translations, 164, and introduction and figure I.1.

132. See Bastian, CTP IV: 180, #64, pt. II. The Tate version of Estate was photographed in Twombly’s Gaeta studio in 1995 (Weber, A House Is Not a Home, #28).

133. “Our Dearest White Youth” (1895), in The Complete Poems of Cavafy, trans. Rae Dalven (New York: Harcourt, 1976), 199 (ellipses in original); bookmarked in Twombly’s copy.

134. W. H. Auden, “Introduction,” in Dalven, Complete Poems of Cavafy, ix.

135. “Of course, I love E. M. Forster on Cavafy”; Edmund White, “Cy Twombly,” in Arts and Letters (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2004), 256. For Forster, Cavafy was “a recluse, who, though not afraid of the world, always stands at a slight angle to it”; E. M. Forster, “The Poetry of C. P. Cavafy” (1919), in Pharos and Pharillon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 97.

136. Forster, “The Complete Poems of C. P. Cavafy” (1951), in Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), 234. Cavafy’s poem is quoted here from Dalven, Complete Poems of Cavafy, 86 (Forster uses Mavrogordato’s translation).

137. Forster, “Complete Poems of C. P. Cavafy,” 234.

138. “Introduction,” in Dalven, Complete Poems of Cavafy, viii. Auden could not read Cavafy’s poetry in the original Modern Greek (combining “high” style and demotic); see Keeley, On Translation, 5–10.

139. “Twombly stammers slightly.… He has trouble writing, even something as familiar as his address in Rome.… This mild aphasia or dyslexia throws a curious light on the painter celebrated for incorporating words into his canvases.” (White, “Cy Twombly,” 264).

140. “[T]he sea is white three quarters of the time, just white—early morning. Only in the fall does it get blue.… The Mediterranean … is just always white, white, white” (Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” 174).

141. Baron Corvo, The Venice Letters, ed. Cecil Woolf (London: Cecil Woolf, 1974), 19–20. The passage continues: “… poised in air like showers of aquamarines on a sapphire sea with shadows of lapis-lazuli … poised in an atmosphere of lavender and heliotrope … limitless amethyst and far-reaching turquoise …” (ibid., 20). For Corvo in Venice, see A.J.A. Symons, Quest for Corvo (New York: Macmillan, 1934), esp. 12–13, 219–34.

142. J. D. McClatchy, “Interview: Richard Howard, The Art of Poetry No. 86,” Paris Review 169 (Spring 2004): 188–89. For Howard, the dramatic monologue includes “the secret that the speaker, who does not know it, must reveal” (ibid., 188).

143. Archives Foundazione Nicola Del Roscio; Twombly made two other transcriptions, deleting the phrase “of afternoon.”

144. Richard Howard, Untitled Subjects (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 59–60; repr. in Inner Voices: Selected Poems 1963–2003 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), 38.

145. See Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 219, and Pincus-Witten: “Twombly remains the artist for whom the true subject of painting is the Sublime” (“Twombly’s Quarantine,” 14).

CHAPTER TWO | PSYCHOGRAM AND PARNASSUS: HOW (NOT) TO READ A TWOMBLY

1. WCT 51–52; “psychogram” (a system for diagnosing psychological personality traits) is associated with “graphology” (handwriting analysis).

2. Robert Pincus-Witten links Twombly’s expansive canvases to “the Baroque richness of his new environment” (“Learning to Write” [1968], WCT 59), while Suzanne Delehanty similarly notes the influence on Twombly of Renaissance and Baroque panoramas, landscapes, and love cycles; see “The Alchemy of Mind and Hand” (1975), WCT 64–65.

3. “Learning to Write” (1968), WCT 59.

4. On the problem of the “pastness” of art since art history’s beginnings with Vasari, see Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art?, trans. Christopher S. Wood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 3–16.

5. See Bastian, CTP II: 42–43, #3. Delehanty links the theatricality of The Italians (“a pantheon of erotic signs”) to Twombly’s creation of panoramic spaces like those of classical Rome (WCT 65).

6. As Delehanty notes, the artist was living just across the Tiber, five minutes from the Villa Farnesina (WCT 65).

7. See Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura: Meaning and Invention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 22–42, for the evidence pointing to Tommaso Inghirami as advisor for Raphael’s frescoes. The prominent Platonist, Giles (Egidio) of Viterbo, has also been claimed as philosophical advisor for Raphael’s School of Athens; see Glenn W. Most, “Reading Raphael: The School of Athens and Its Pre-Text,” Critical Inquiry 23 (Autumn 1996), 145–82, esp. 169–71.

8. Plato’s divine cosmology is indicated by his Timaeus, and Aristotle’s concern with human nature by his Ethics; see Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura, 86–87, and Most, “Reading Raphael,” 157–58.

9. Countering E. H. Gombrich, “Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura and the Nature of Its Symbolism,” in Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), 85–101, Most argues for Raphael’s break with allegorical representation (“Reading Raphael,” 146–57).

10. The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano, trans. David Quint (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979); references are to the book and stanza (Italian/English) of Quint’s edition. Poliziano (1454–94), Florentine man of letters and friend of Ficino and the Neoplatonist Pico della Mirandola, also advised the young Michelangelo on classical subjects (see ibid., vii–viii).

11. For a detailed description, see La Villa Farnesina in Rome, ed. Gianfranco Melafarina (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 2003).

12. Giuliano provided the pretext for Poliziano’s uncompleted work celebrating a Medici-sponsored tournament of 1475. Giuliano was assassinated in 1478, halting Poliziano’s composition of the Stanze; see Quint, Stanze of Angelo Poliziano, ix–xii.

13. The source for Poliziano’s description of the garden and palace of Venus is Claudian’s Epithalamium, but Vulcan’s mythological decorations for the palace were Poliziano’s invention (see ibid., xi, 94–97).

14. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xvii. On the “phantasm” in medieval love poetry and the linguistic sign, see ibid., 73–79, 124–31.

15. “The Wisdom of Art,” (1979), WCT 105–6. Translations of “The Wisdom of Art” and “Cy Twombly: Works on Paper” (1979), reprinted in WCT as “Non Multa Sed Multum,” are included, with slight differences, in Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 157–76, 177–94. For Valéry’s early memories of the Mediterranean, see “Mediterranean Inspirations,” in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, ed. Jackson Mathews, 15 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956–75), 15:19–35.

16. “Wisdom of Art,” 105, 106.

17. Ibid., 105.

18. Ibid., 103–4, 105. Barthes is referring to the airy white-on-white of Twombly’s School of Fontainebleau (1960); see Bastian, CTP I: 236–37, #145.

19. “Wisdom of Art,” 110; see Bastian, CTP II: 120–21, #64 and cf. CTP II: 118–19, #63; for other versions, cf. Venus (1962) and Birth of Venus (1963), see CTP I: 198–99, #131, 222–23, #155, and the 1963 drawings using the same iconography—Artemis the many-breasted—included in Del Roscio, CTD 3: 196–98, #279–82.

20. See Quint, Stanze of Angelo Poliziano, 51 n., for the story of Chronus’s castration of his father Uranus, from whose testicles Venus emerged.

21. “… even when he wants to create something against meaning or outside it, [man] ends up producing the very meaning of nonsense or non-meaning” (“Wisdom of Art,” 106).

22. Ibid., 108; see Mathews, Collected Works of Paul Valéry, 1: 10–11 (“Water’s laughter, and the fickle dancing of the waves”).

23. “Wisdom of Art,” 108.

24. Ibid., 108; Bastian, CTP II: 60–61, #13.

25. “Wisdom of Art,” 108. The reference is to the shipwreck in Virgil, Aeneid I. 118: “Apparent rari nantes” (“Here and there they are seen swimming”).

26. Cf. Katharina Schmidt on “the relaxed, festive gaiety” of Bay of Naples: “its salmon tones, its pinks and reds … [evoke] the calm horizon of the sparkling sea in summer” (“Way to Arcadia,” WCT 149).

27. “Wisdom of Art,” 111.

28. Ibid., 108.

29. Ibid., 110.

30. Ibid., 113; cf. “this leavened flight of bees [that] typifies the mark that [Twombly] leaves” (“Non Multa Sed Multum,” WCT 95).

31. “Wisdom of Art,” 112.

32. Barthes’s two essays on Twombly, written soon after The Pleasure of the Text (1975), imply the same distinction between plaisir and jouissance (“bliss,” “orgasmic pleasure”), or between “readerly” or lisible text (controlled by the author), and the “writerly” or scriptible text that allows for the re-formation of meaning and subjectivity. For Barthes, Twombly’s work “holds up a sign that says ‘to be written’” (“Non Multa Sed Multum,” WCT 91).

33. Bastian, CTP II: 72–74, #19. The Triumph of Galatea and Bay of Naples are triangulated at the Menil by a third painting, Twombly’s Untitled (1961, begun 1959); see Bastian CTP II: 64–66, #15.

34. In Empire of Flora (1961), Twombly’s signature encircles the same testicular sign; similar marks occur both singly and paired, sometimes outlined, in other paintings of the same year—notably, School of Athens (1961), as well as Untitled (1961); see Bastian, CTP II: 50–51, #7; 62–63, #14; 74–75, #20. Cf. also the visceral series, Ferragosto I–V (1961), painted in the August heat of Rome (Bastian, CTP II: 76–85, #21–25).

35. The same leaping nonfigurative figures can be seen in both the Ferragosto series and the loosely sketched lollipop figures of Rape of the Sabines (1961); see Bastian, CTP II: 40–41, #2.

36. Paul Valéry: The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot (New York: Vintage, 1958), 70. Cf. Twombly’s collage To Valéry (1973), in Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954–1977 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1979), 97.

37. Valéry’s emphasis on the autonomy of art is a precursor for Barthes’s emphasis on the reader’s imaginative construction (versus the writer’s intentions); see Steven Cassedy, “Paul Valéry’s Modernist Aesthetic Object,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45.1 (Autumn 1986): 77–86.

38. Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 149–80.

39. Bastian, CTP II: 242–43, #163. The giornata—literally, the day’s work—refers to the area of fresh plaster in a fresco that could be painted while still wet.

40. “Thinking through the Work of Art,” 166.

41. Ibid., 162.

42. Ibid., 178.

43. Ibid., 160.

44. Ibid., 160, 162.

45. Ibid., 162.

46. Ibid., 162–63.

47. Ibid., 164–66.

48. Ibid., 167.

49. Ibid., 167.

50. Ibid., 169.

51. For the prominence of Sappho and her lyre in Raphael’s design for The Parnassus and for Apollo’s lira da braccio, see Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura, 117–24; cinquecento interest in Sappho had been aroused by Poliziano’s Commentary on Ovid (1481) and Raffaele Maffei’s biography, published in 1506 (see ibid., 121–22, 134). Apollo’s lyre intriguingly resembles the recurrent seed-pod sign (lucky charm) in Twombly’s painting; see Richard Shiff, “Charm,” in Cycles and Seasons, 10–31.

52. “Thinking through the Work of Art,” 172.

53. For Pindar’s association with Apollo and the Castalian Spring, see Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura, 124–33. For another quotation from Sappho during this period, see Twombly’s Untitled (1962); Bastian, CTP II: 152–53, #82.

54. “Thinking through the Work of Art,” 175, 174.

55. Ibid., 174. For the Pythagorean associations of Apollo and the triangle of which he forms the apex, see Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura, 135, and for Raphael’s Pythagorean emphasis on harmony, see ibid., 164–72.

56. “Thinking through the Work of Art,” 175.

57. Ibid., 178. To Jasper Johns, “art criticizes art”—“It seems to me old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers old”; see Art News 72 (1973), 21 (cited by Belting, The End of the History of Art?, 112, n. 105).

58. “Thinking through the Work of Art,” 176.

59. Ibid., 179.

60. Cf. Heinrich Wölfflin’s foundational turn-of-the-century work; see Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 46–68.

61. “Thinking through the Work of Art,” 179.

62. See Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1997). Panofsky’s essay, translated into Italian in 1960, was reviewed in the journal Paragone in 1961. See also Joel Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” Critical Inquiry 6.3 (Spring 1980): 499–526, esp. 514–26, and Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, 130–57. For the role of theories of perspective, see Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), esp. ch. 1, as well as James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 15–22,187–205.

63. “Wisdom of Art,” 110.

64. On the window-figure in Twombly’s photography, drawing, and painting, see Achim Hochdörfer, “‘Blue Goes Out, B Comes In’: Cy Twombly’s Narration of Indeterminacy,” in Hochdörfer, Cy Twombly: States of Mind, 12–36, esp. 12–17. Twombly uses the window-sign in other paintings belonging to 1961, and in Leda and the Swan (1962); see Bastian, CTP II: 92, #35; 95, #38; 124–25, #66.

65. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), 55. For a brief history of Alberti’s window, see Michael Ann Holly, “Telling a Picture,” in Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 15–16; Elkins (Poetics of Perspective, 46–52); and Damisch on windows as optical metaphor (Origin of Perspective, 102, 136, 350). For Alberti as architect, see Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Renaissance (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), esp. 113–49.

66. “Thinking through the Work of Art,” 179.

67. See Bastian, CTP II: 212–13, #142, #143; 214–15, #144–47.

68. See Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura, 115.

69. “Thinking through the Work of Art,” 178.

70. For the Parnassian and Apollonian associations of the Homeric Hymns (printed in 1504), see Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura, 115–16.

71. Below Raphael’s Parnassus are trompe l’oeil bas-relief panels by Perin del Vaga depicting Alexander committing the poetry of Homer to the tomb of Achilles, and Augustus preventing the burning of the Aeneid by Virgil’s friends.

72. J. W. Goethe, Italian Journey [1786–1788], trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (London: Penguin, 1970), 135.

73. See Most, “Reading Raphael,” 145–46 and n. 1.

74. Ibid., 146.

75. “If The School of Athens were an illustration, it could never have come to dominate our culture over the last five centuries as it has” (ibid., 180).

76. Ibid., 181.

77. For the figure of the thinking man, see Paul Zanker, The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity, trans. Alan Shapiro (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 102–8.

78. See John Addington Symonds, trans., The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti, 2nd ed. (London: Smith, Elder, 1904); Michelangelo’s sonnets are discreetly appropriated for Platonic love (ibid., xviii–ix).

79. Sonnet V satirically describes Michelangelo’s body as distorted and worn out from working on the Sistine Chapel ceiling; see “On the Painting of the Sistine Chapel” (ibid., 6).

80. Michelangelo makes frequent reference to the block of marble as the materia prima of his art: “to break the marble spell / Is all the hand that serves the brain can do” (“e solo a quello arriva / La man che ubbidisce all’ intelletto”; Sonnet XV, ibid., 17).

81. See Michelangelo’s 1506 sonnet, “To Pope Julius II” and “On Rome in the Pontificate of Julius II” (Sonnet II, III, ibid., 4, 5).

82. See Most, “Reading Raphael,” 162–64. For the influence of Giles (Egidio) of Viterbo, see also Ingrid D. Rowland, “The Intellectual Background of The School of Athens: Tracking Divine Wisdom in the Rome of Julius II,” in Raphael’s School of Athens, ed. Marcia Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 131–70.

83. See ibid., 156; Joost-Gaugier questions the identification (Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura, 112).

84. For Bramante’s influence and the importance of Roman archeological ruins as part of the early sixteenth-century Etruscan revival, see Most, “Reading Raphael,” 172–79.

85. Inghirami (Fedra) played the role of Phaedra as a sixteen-year-old boy in a 1486 staging of Seneca’s play; for his personality, oratorical renown, and the tragi-comical mode of his death—crushed by a cart while reading a book in the street—see Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura, 22–42.

86. On Raphael’s study for the Gorgon’s head, see Paul Joannides, The Drawings of Raphael, with a Complete Catalogue (London: Phaidon, 1983), 80–81, #24. The Gorgon’s (or Medusa’s) Head formed part of the “aegis” of terror carried by Athena; Michelangelo’s sonnet “On Rome in the Pontificate of Julius II” refers to the Medusa as the authority whose gaze turns the viewer to stone: “while he / Who wears the robe, is my Medusa still” (“Può quel nel manto che Medusa in Mauro”; Symonds, Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti, Sonnet IV, 5).

87. See Rowland, “The Intellectual Background of The School of Athens,” 152. The two panels beneath Apollo represent Anger and Lust, while Reason—also interpreted as Astrology—is enthroned beneath Athena; see Arnold Nesselrath, Raphael’s School of Athens (Vatican State: Edizioni Musei Vaticani, 1997), 90–91, #67–70.

88. See Ralph E. Lieberman, “The Architectural Background,” in Hall, Raphael’s School of Athens, 79–80, 84, nn. 32, 34.

89. The group includes Averroës (Ibn Rushd), the Islamic philosopher from Al Andalus who represents the preservation of Aristotle’s thought in Islamic tradition.

90. Derrida calls Plato’s idea of thinking “the inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound”—“a discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering.” The metaphor for this silent dialogue is a book, or the “supplement” of writing; see Jacques Derrida, “The Double Session,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 184.

91. Barthes contrasts message and sign with the “atmosphere” surrounding gesture, “which produces all the rest … without perhaps really wanting to produce anything at all” (“Non Multa Sed Multum,” WCT 90).

92. See Most, “Reading Raphael,” 181.

93. See Joannides, The Drawings of Raphael, 187–88, #218 r, #220 v, #221 v, #225 r; and Francis Ames-Lewis, The Draftsman Raphael (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 85, #97–100.

94. Rowland discusses Giles of Virterbo’s views on the relation between human love and sapientia (“The Intellectual Background of The School of Athens,” 149).

95. Sonnet 1, Three Sonnets by Raphael, transcribed and trans. Gerald Taylor (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1983); Italian modernized. The full text of Raphael’s five sonnets, with drafts and variants, can be found in A. Zazzaretta, “I sonnetti di Raffaello,” Arte; rivista di storia dell’arte 32 (1929): 77–88, 97–106.

96. Sonnet 2, Taylor, Three Sonnets by Raphael.

97. Sonnet 3, ibid.

98. Cf., for insance, the series of 1961 drawings that include “Studies” for Triumph of Galatea; Del Roscio, CTD 3: 47–51, #42–50.

99. Bastian CTP I: 257, #166. Sappho’s “Invocation to Aphrodite,” in which Aphrodite descends in her sparrow-drawn chariot in answer to the afflicted lover’s call; see Richmond Lattimore, trans., Greek Lyrics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 2. See also Bastian CTP I: 259, #168, and cf. Twombly’s numerous versions of Study for School of Athens (Bastian CTP I: 256, #165; 260–61, #169, #171; 264–65, #174; 267, #176).

100. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 47; see Bastian CTP II: 62-63, #14. Schmidt notes that Twombly “caused a real scandal with the picture in Rome” (“Way to Arcadia,” 149).

101. For Twombly’s examination of Raphael’s use of architectural space and perspective, see Cycles and Seasons, 86; see also Cullinan, Twombly and Poussin, 36.

102. On the uncertain vanishing-point of Raphael’s Renaissance School of Athens versus the “visual-ray” method (suited to delineating complex architectural detail), see Elkins, Poetics of Perspective, 227–30.

103. “Mystery in Literature,” in Mary Ann Caws, Mallarmé in Prose (New York: New Directions, 2001), 48. Cf. Twombly’s often-quoted 1957 reference to “the symbolic whiteness of Mallarmé” (Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 27). The word “White” appears to be part of a half-obscured phrase written midway in the left-hand margin.

104. Cf. Proclus, cited by Panofsky: “‘Space is nothing other than the finest light’” (Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 49 and 114, n. 31).

105. See Bastian CTP II: 244–45, #164.

106. Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, 71.

107. See Damisch, Origin of Perspective, 45.

108. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 67–68.

109. “Non Multa Sed Multum,” 94; Howard translates “joy” as “bliss” (jouissance); see Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, 166.

110. Damisch, Origin of Perspective, 446; see ibid., 446, n. 88, drawing on Wittgenstein’s definition (Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 3.144). Damisch’s approach draws on a continental tradition that extends from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty to Benveniste and Lacan.

111. In Damisch’s formulation: “perspective tends toward discourse as toward its own end or reason for being; but it has its origin … on that plane where painting is inscribed” (Origin of Perspective, 447).

112. On indiscipline in art history, see W.J.T. Mitchell, “Art, Fate, and the Disciplines: Some Indicators,” in The Fate of Disciplines, ed. James Chandler and Arnold L. Davidson, Critical Inquiry 35.4 (Summer 2009): 1023–31.

113. See G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1: 11.

114. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, xvi. For the “room” or “stanza” in medieval Italian poetry, see Angelo M. Mangini, “Stanza della scrittura,” in Luoghi della letteratura italiana, ed. Gian Mario Anselmi and Gino Ruozzi (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2003), 341–51.

115. See Plato, Republic, trans. Robin Water-field (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 361: “there’s an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy … if the kinds of poetry and representations which are designed merely to give pleasure can come up with a rational argument for their inclusion in a well-governed community, we’d be delighted” (607b–c).

116. “Stanze,” xvii, xvi.

117. Ibid., xvii.

118. Ibid., xvii.

119. Ibid., xviii.

120. Ibid., xvii, xviii.

121. Cf. Damisch: “in Italian the same word quadro can designate, when used as a noun, a ‘painting,’ and, as an adjective, a rectangle with four right angles and four sides of equal length” (Origin of Perspective, 101).

CHAPTER THREE | TWOMBLY’S VAGUENESS: THE POETICS OF ABSTRACTION

1. Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 234. “L’écrit, envol tacite d’abstraction, reprend ses droits en face de la chute des sons nus”; Oeuvres de Mallarmé, ed. Yves-Alain Favre (Paris: Éditions Garnier, 1985), 304. Subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition.

2. See Bastian, CTP I: 274–75, #183; cf. Cullinan, Twombly and Poussin, 103, 106, and Cycles and Seasons, 84–85, 88, nn. 12, 13, and see also Abigail Susik, “Cy Twombly: Writing after Writing,” Rebus: A Journal of Theory and Art History 4 (Autumn/Winter 2009): 1–28, esp. 9–14.

3. Rosemary Lloyd, ed. and trans., Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 47: “ce mot sombre, et rouge comme une grenade ouverte, Hérodiade”; Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance, ed. Henry Mondor, 11 vols. (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1959–95), 1: 154.

4. Twombly’s quotations are drawn from the bilingual edition, Stéphane Mallarmé, Poems, trans. C. F. MacIntyre (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), 21 (“Abolie, et son aile affreuse dans les larmes / Du basin, aboli, qui mire les alarmes”; ibid., 20). Twombly inscribed the same quotation in his drawing, Untitled (1959); see Del Roscio, CTD 2: 205, #174.

5. “… but horror! in the dusk, in your austere pool / I have known the nakedness of my scattered dreams” (“Mais, horreur! des soirs, dans ta sévère fontaine, / J’ai de mon rêve épars connu la nudité”; ibid., 33, 32). See also Adriana Bontea, “Cy Twombly: Painting as an Art of Thinking,” in Greub, Cy Twombly. Bild, Text, Paratext, 39–42.

6. Cf. Cy Twombly: “… painting is mute … but think of reading it like a piece of music. Also, music is interesting because there’s a language. There’s no language for painting. Music has a language and it’s legible” (unpublished conversation, 2007); Cullinan, Twombly and Poussin, 24, 63, n. 27.

7. See Henrietta Bannerman, “A Dance of Transition: Martha Graham’s ‘Herodiade’ (1944),” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 24.1 (2006): 1–20, and ibid., 24.2 (2006): 163–64, for Graham’s “transmediation” of Mallarmé.

8. Bannerman, “A Dance of Transition,”13.

9. Lloyd, Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé, 39; Mallarmé’s emphasis (“Peindre, non la chose, mais l’effet qu’elle produit”; Mallarmé, Correspondance, 1: 137). For Hérodiade’s nonrepresentational reflexivity, see Roger Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 83–108.

10. Interview with David Sylvester (1960); see Caws, Robert Motherwell, 100. Cf. the 1957 letter in which Twombly wrote that he had been reading Mallarmé “seriously” along with Pound’s essays (Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 62, n. 116). Pound’s “The Serious Artist” might have led Twombly to Hérodiade; see Eliot, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 53.

11. “Wisdom of Art,” WCT 105.

12. Ibid., 105.

13. Ibid., 103, 109.

14. “Non Multa Sed Multum,” WCT 90 (Barthes’s emphasis).

15. Ibid., 90 (Barthes’s emphasis).

16. Ibid., 97.

17. “Wisdom of Art,” WCT 112 (Barthes’s emphases).

18. Ibid., WCT 105.

19. “Non Multa Sed Multum,” WCT 97.

20. For metrical, linguistic, and typographical innovations in Un Coup de Dés, see Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé, 246–70. Mallarmé emphasizes music’s break with speech, in contrast to Olson; “Projective Verse” insists that “breath allows all the speech-force of language back in,” with the typewriter acting like a musical score: “For the first time, the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had”; Allen and Friedlander, Charles Olson: Collected Prose, 244, 245.

21. “Non Multa Sed Multum,” WCT 90, 91. Cf. Barthes’s paraphrase of Mallarmé’s “Mystery in Letters”: “Mallarmé’s typographical agraphia seeks to create around rarefied words an empty zone in which speech … no longer reverberate[s]”; “Writing and Silence,” in Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 75.

22. Barthes continues: “Vagueness … excludes the idea of enigma” (“Non Multa Sed Multum,” WCT 89). Cf. Robert Pincus-Witten, on Twombly’s assignment to Cryptography—“‘I was a little too vague for that’” (“Learning to Write,” WCT 58).

23. See Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography (New York: Doubleday, 1999), and, for the build-up of US intelligence post–World War II after NSA’s foundation in 1952, see David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing, rev. ed. (New York: Scribner, 1996), esp. 672–733.

24. Italo Calvino notes that Italian is the sole language in which the word “vague” (vago) is associated “tanto all’incerto e all’indefinito quanto alla grazia”; Italo Calvino, Lezione Americane (Milan: Garzanti, 1988), 59.

25. See Panorama (1955), Bastian, CTP I: 98–99, #50; cf. ibid., I: 96–97, for Twombly’s 1955 photograph of Panorama and other “stenographic” paintings, later destroyed.

26. For the series of Nini’s Paintings (1971), see Bastian, CTP III: 262–71, #126–30; the sequence is reassembled in Cycles and Seasons, 140–49.

27. See Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 27, reprinting Twombly’s 1957 manifesto in L’Esperienza moderna.

28. Cf. Kahn, The Codebreakers, 398–401 for the unbreakability of the random “one-time” system that “dissolve[s] in chaos on the one hand and infinity on the other” (ibid., 400).

29. Mallarmé, Divagations, 209 (Oeuvres de Mallarmé, 277). For Mallarmé’s poetics, see Elizabeth McCombie, “Introduction,” Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, trans. E. H. and A. M. Blackmore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), ix–xxvii.

30. Exhibited in 1963, Poems to the Sea was accompanied by Manfred de la Motte’s essay distinguishing the series from “the fatal calligraphy” of “the poème-objet” (“Cy Twombly,” WCT 52). Bastian summarizes Poems to the Sea as “A poetry which projects nothing but the form of the moment of becoming”; Cy Twombly, Poems to the Sea (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1990). For Poems to the Sea and the “poeticization” of Twombly’s sculptures, see also Nesin, Twombly’s Things, 25–27.

31. Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 27.

32. Mallarmé’s sonnet (“Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui”), according to the edition Twombly used, is “the sitting duck for all teachers of advanced French courses”; Mallarmé, Poems, trans. MacIntyre, 144. For Motherwell’s collage Mallarmé’s Swan (1944), originally Mallarmé’s Dream, and for Motherwell’s A Throw of the Dice (1987–88), see Caws, Robert Motherwell, 99–102, and Mary Ann Caws, “Mallarmé’s Progeny,” in Mallarmé in the Twentieth Century, ed. Robert Greer Cohn and Gerald Gillespie (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 90.

33. Mallarmé, Collected Poems, 262–63 (Oeuvres de Mallarmé, 423–24).

34. Ibid., 263 (Oeuvres de Mallarmé, 425). Un Coup de Dés is not included in the MacIntyre translation Twombly used for Hérodiade, but the sail in Motherwell’s 1944 Mallarmé’s Swan suggests that Motherwell certainly knew it, as did John Cage; for Cage’s citation of Un Coup de Dés in the early 1950s, see Kate van Orden, “On the Side of Poetry and Chaos: Mallarméan Hasard and Twentieth-century Music,” in Meetings with Mallarmé in Contemporary French Culture, ed. Michael Temple (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), 160–79, esp. 170–78.

35. For Derrida’s reading of the blank and the fold (hymen or veil) in Mallarmé’s writing, see “The Double Session,” in Derrida, Dissemination, 173–85, esp. 178–80, 251–61. Derrida’s seminar critiques Jean-Pierre Richard, L’univers imaginaire de Mallarmé (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1961). Cf. Geoffrey Bennington, “Derrida’s Mallarmé,” in Temple, Meetings with Mallarmé, 138–41.

36. “The Fundamentals of Ballet,” Mallarmé, Divagations, 139 (Oeuvres de Mallarmé, 237).

37. “Ballets,” Divagations, 130 (Oeuvres de Mallarmé, 229–30).

38. “Crisis of Verse,” Divagations, 208 (Oeuvres de Mallarmé, 277).

39. “Crisis of Verse,” 210 (Oeuvres de Mallarmé, 278).

40. “Crisis of Verse,” 209 (Oeuvres de Mallarmé, 277).

41. “The Book as Spiritual Instrument,” Mallarmé, Divagations, 227 (Oeuvres de Mallarmé, 295).

42. On the wing in Twombly’s work, see Leeman, 114; for Twombly’s winged palm-leaf sculpture, Cycnus (1978), see Cullinan, Twombly and Poussin, 130–31.

43. “The Book as Spiritual Instrument,” 229 (Oeuvres de Mallarmé, 298).

44. “Mallarmé’s Bibliography” (1896), in Mallarmé, Divagations, 298 (Oeuvres de Mallarmé, 361). Apropos of Mallarmé’s poetics, Johnson notes that music is “a system of sounds that appeals directly to the senses and emotions, and a system of pure relations and intervals” (Divagations, 300).

45. “The Mystery in Letters,” ibid., 236 (Oeuvres de Mallarmé, 306).

46. Mallarmé is reflecting on the pioneer of modern dance, Loie Fuller; see “The Fundamentals of Ballet,” 137 (Oeuvres de Mallarmé, 235–36).

47. Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 116. Bowie compares Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés and Debussy’s La Mer (1965): “Mallarmé puns upon la vague (‘wave’) and le vague (‘vagueness’), as if the representation of the sea were perpetually under threat”; “Sea and Structure in fin-de-siècle France: Mallarmé and Debussy” (2000), repr. in Selected Essays of Malcolm Bowie, Vol. I: Dreams of Knowledge, ed. Alison Finch (London: Legenda, 2013), 125–34.

48. Mallarmé, Collected Poems, 179, 157.

49. Ibid., 177, 155; 165, 143; 181, 159. For the image of the storm-tossed ship, see Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, 125–26; for Mallarmé’s play on voile and vague, see ibid., 131.

50. Mallarmé, Collected Poems, 166, 144.

51. Ibid., 177, 155.

52. Ibid., 178–79, 156–57: “no act of knowing eliminates the unknowable; no would-be definitive thought may free itself from contingency” (Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, 127). Cf. Derrida on the “blank”: “it refers to the non-sense of spacing, the place where nothing takes place but the place” (“The Double Session,” in Dissemination, 257).

53. Mallarmé, Collected Poems, 157, 181, 159. Blackmore’s translation loses the play of “verse” and “vers” (“a commonplace upsurge is shedding absence”; ibid., 179).

54. “Concerning ‘A Throw of Dice,’” in Mathews, Collected Works of Paul Valéry, 8: 309.

55. Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, 116.

56. “The Mediterranean, at least—the Atlantic is brown—is always just white, white, white”; Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” in Interviews with American Artists, 175.

57. “… that final unthinkable blankness in which all particulars and all identities are lost” (Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, 136).

58. Susan Stewart, The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 99, 103.

59. Ibid., 103.

60. Bastian uses Pound’s “Phanopoeia” as the epigraph to his edition (“The sea-clear sapphire of air, the sea-dark clarity, / stretches both seacliff and ocean”); see Twombly, Poems to the Sea. Roman numerals refer to individual drawings in the sequence.

61. “Mallarmé has given [number] a multiple resonance far beyond anything that a mere ‘allegory of the dice-thrower’ might require”; Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, 129. Cf. Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé, 246–55, and Quentin Meillassoux, The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarme’s Coup de Dés, trans. Robin Mackay (New York: Sequence Press, 2012).

62. “What Thought Is Like,” 106.

63. Ibid., 106.

64. Twombly plays on the accidental convergence of wavy lines and the word “waves” in the inscription on Part IX of Coronation of Sesostris (2000): “leaving Paphos ringed with waves”; Bastian, CTP V: 80, #8, pt. IX.

65. Pincus-Witten, “Learning to Write,” WCT 58.

66. Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 27.

67. Varnedoe points out that Twombly had abandoned house-paint for tubes of oil paint, creating “discrete mounds that stood off the surface with a smooth, plump integrity … the white oil pigment had a ‘body’ of its own” (“Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 31).

68. Mallarmé, Collected Poems, 69, 68.

69. “… the genital member … drift [s] across the waves, wrapped in white foam” (“il frusto genitale … errar per l’onde in bianca schiuma avolto”); Quint, Stanze of Angelo Poliziano, I. xcix/99.

70. See Bastian, CTP II: 118–19, #63; 120–21, #64. For Rauschenberg’s incorporation of a reproduction of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in his combine painting, Rebus (1955), see Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, Robert Rauschenberg, A Retrospective (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997), 117, #86. The word “Zephyr,” inscribed on Poems to the Sea, XVII, suggests that Twombly had Botticelli’s painting in mind.

71. Twombly’s numerical tallies contain a reminiscence of cryptanalysis, where the numbers 1–5 (sometimes 1–10) conform to the 5-group (or 10-group) digital codes that are the basis for most numerical ciphers.

72. Among the series of 34 drawings made at Sperlonga, many share the motifs of Poems to the Sea, including references to Sappho; see Del Roscio, CTD 2: 155, #121; 156, #122; 164, #130.

73. See Part III of Coronation of Sesostris (2009), Bastian, CTP V: 74, #8, pt. III. Sappho’s “Eros, weaver of myth, / Eros, sweet and bitter, / Eros, bringer of pain” comes from Davenport, Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman, 108, #100.

74. See chapter 2.

75. The Songs of Sappho in English Translation by Many Poets, decorated by Paul McPharlin (Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1942).

76. Cy Twombly: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Printed Graphic Work, 1953–84, ed. Heiner Bastian (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 48–51, #20. Leeman calls the series “a reminder that rhythm (in the prosodic sense) is the very foundation of poetry” (Leeman, 182–84).

77. Bastian, CTP II: 152–53, #82; 158–59, #86. Twombly uses H. T. Wharton’s translation, included in The Songs of Sappho, 23, #13; cf. Davenport, Archilochus, Sappho, Alkman, 84–85, #20 (Sapphic Fragment 31).

78. “It is not the case that every gap or illegibility is specifically indicated.… Brackets are an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event rather than an accurate record of it”; Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), xi.

79. Mallarmé, Collected Poems, 3, 2.

80. See chapter 2 and cf. chapter 7 for Twombly’s use of a rectangular or square cartouche as a sign for mirror as well as representation. Some of the pictographs in Poems to the Sea (including a sailboat) can be found in the large Sperlonga Drawing (1959); see Cy Twombly, Works from the Sonnabend Collection, ed. Kristy Bryce (London and New York: Eykyn Maclean, 2012), #2, and cf. Del Roscio, CTD 2: 167, #133.

81. George Seferis, “The Cystern,” in Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 497.

82. Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middle-town, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 109; Cage’s lecture, first delivered in 1949 at the Artists’ Club (founded by Motherwell), has the Zen-derived structure of his music compositions and the soporific refrain “If anyone is sleepy let him go to sleep” (ibid., ix).

83. See Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 37–39, and Cycles and Seasons, 121–22.

84. Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 39.

85. The three sheets dated on the verso “1959” are XVI, XIX, and XXI; see “Catalogue,” in Cy Twombly, Letter of Resignation, ed. Heiner Bastian (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1991), n.p.

86. The entire series is reproduced in color in Del Roscio CTD 4: 132–39, #160; cf. also the scribbles of “A Letter to Nicola” (1967), ibid., 4: 152–53, #179.

87. See Bastian, Cy Twombly, Printed Graphic Work, 35–37, #6–9. For Twombly’s interest in Leonardo’s notebooks and mirror-script, see Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 41.

88. See Twombly, Printed Graphic Work, 52–55, #21–26.

89. See The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 19: 235–39: “thinking possesses the capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived” (ibid., 237).

90. See Leeman, 181, detecting the presence of a pronominal addressee (“I,” “my,” “you”) that confirms “the epistolary character of the whole,” along with other recognizable words (“crazily,” “love”) and suggests “a much more personal ‘resignation’ played out between 1959 and 1967.”

91. See “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious” (1957), in Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 412–44; Lacan’s “letter” designates “the material medium [support] that concrete discourse borrows from language” (ibid., 495).

92. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 58; emphasis in original.

93. Ibid., 58–59.

94. Bastian, “Semina Motuum,” in Cy Twombly, Letter of Resignation: “a dialogue in search of a new form of expression” (n.p.).

95. John Waters, Role Models (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), 247. I am indebted to Neil Hertz for drawing my attention to Waters’s provocative reading.

96. Ibid., 247.

97. Ibid., 250.

98. Ibid., 249.

99. Ibid., 250. Hans-Thilo Schmidt, a disgruntled German office-worker employed in the command center of the German Army cipher bureau, sold the operation manuals for the Enigma machine to the French secret service in the early 1930s; see Kahn, The Codebreakers, 973–74. During the 1950s, NSA was dogged by similar cold-war defections, to which the closeted status of homosexuals may have contributed (see ibid., 690–97).

100. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 62.

101. Ibid., 63.

102. Waters, Role Models, 248.

103. See, Singh, Code Book, 202–17, and for successive attempts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, Linear B, and Mayan glyphs, Kahn, Codebreakers, 895–37.

104. See Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 33–40; for Fenollosa’s essay, see Fenollosa and Pound, Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, 41–60.

105. Pitman and Gregg shorthand both rely on combinations of hooks and strokes, but the cursive squiggles, curves, and loops of Gregg shorthand (more popular in the United States) are closer to Twombly’s “stenographic” signs.

106. “… the decoding work he was given was taxing for him: he thinks he is ‘too vague’ for such exacting tasks, and remembers the uncomfortable pressure of feeling that any mistake might be construed as an act of sabotage” (Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 59, n. 76).

107. See Roger Chartier, Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), esp. 15–19.

108. “Dating is also a signing.… The moment the author signs always slips away”; Julian Wolfreys, ed., The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 35. The date, 18 March 1959, may correspond to the hypothetical date of conception of Twombly’s son Alessandro, b. 18 December 1959.

109. Barthes, “Non Multa Sed Multum,” WCT 90.

110. See Andrew Brown, Roland Barthes: The Figures of Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 152–209, esp. 176–82: “where does scribble end and writing as communication, or drawing as representation, begin?” (ibid., 178).

111. “Barthes sees Twombly’s scribble … as a kind of après-écriture in which the will-to-power has been temporarily suspended” (ibid., 203).

112. Jacques Derrida, “Scribble (writing power),” trans. Cary Plotkin (1979), repr. in The Derrida Reader, ed. Wolfreys, 50–73. “Scribble” is Derrida’s introduction to Malpeines’s partial translation of William Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (1742); Malpeines’s Essai sur les hiéroglyghes des Egyptiens (1744) had made Warburton’s conception of Egyptian hieroglyphs fundamental to Enlightenment attempts at deciphering them.

113. “Scribble (writing power),” 116; cf. Brown, Roland Barthes, 152, for an additional etymological meaning relevant to both Barthes and Twombly: Low German schrubben, “to scrub” (hence, to erase).

114. “Scribble (writing power),” 132. Twombly explores a different aspect of the veil in Veil of Orpheus (1968) and his two versions of Treatise on the Veil (1968, 1970), recollecting the bars and “rests” of a musical score; the “musique concrète” of Pierre Henry’s experimental ballet, Orphée (1951/3) included the audible tearing of a piece of cloth (see Cycles and Seasons, 121–25, 125, n.15).

115. See Brown, Roland Barthes, 184–85, 195–96.

116. “… what subtends Barthes’s fascination with scribble, his love of the ideogram, and his hostility to phonetic alphabets, is a constant distancing of the power and violence that he sees as inherent in the voice” (ibid., 209).

117. Ibid., 203. For Barthes’s relation to Bataille and its influence on his reading of Twombly, see also Susik, “Cy Twombly: Writing after Writing,” 1–28, esp. 1–9.

118. Bastian, “Semina Motuum,” in Letter of Resignation, n.p.

119. A reproduction of Leonardo’s “Deluge Descending a Valley,” Windsor Castle, Royal Library (RL12382r.), forms part of Twombly’s collage, Untitled (1968); see Del Roscio CTD 4: 171, #198. The overlapping pages contain rows of “wave” scribbles.

120. Cf. the vivid descriptions of shipwreck in Leonardo Da Vinci, Leonardo’s Notebooks, ed. H. Anna Suh (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2005), 30. Leeman calls Leonardo’s deluge drawings “the writing of a fundamental rhythm” (Leeman 185).

121. See Pleynet, “Designs in Letters, Numbers, and Words or Painting by Ear” (1976), WCT 74, 75–76.

122. Ibid., 79.

123. See “Scribble (writing power),” 136–38.

124. See Rosalind Krauss, “Grids” (1979), in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 9.

125. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 52. Twombly refers to his preoccupation with “a linguistic thing that crops up regularly”—“pseudo-writing,” or “certain garbled linguistic things” including pseudo-Japanese and Arabic (ibid., 53).

126. See, for instance, Bastian, CTP III: 231–33, #111; 234–35, #112.

127. Fisher compares the blackboard paintings to “God’s blackboard, although God never erases His thoughts … an image of thought itself,” whose “never-ending stream” evokes “murmuring rather than talking, humming rather than singing” (“Thinking through the Work of Art,” 155–56).

128. Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 225;Varnedoe defines the blackboard paintings as the “negation” of Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism (ibid., 223–26).

129. “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 41–42.

130. Linking the series to Leonardo’s deluge drawings and descriptions, Cullinan underscores the work of mourning in the Nini paintings; see Cycles and Seasons, 137–39. Nini Pirandello, who committed suicide, was the wife of Twombly’s gallerist.

131. Varnedoe links Italian Futurism’s quasi-scientific decomposition of movement to “agitations of the spirit” (“Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 40–41).

132. Bastian, CTP III: 268–69, #129.

133. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 49.

134. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W.Norton, 2002), 91–2.

CHAPTER FOUR | ACHILLES’ HORSES, TWOMBLY’S WAR

1. Collected Poems, trans. Keeley and Sherrard, 5.

2. Twombly’s Lepanto (2001) recalls the defeat of the Ottoman navy by the Venetian and Spanish navies in 1571; see Richard Howard, “On Lepanto,” in Cy Twombly, Lepanto, 35–40, and Kirk Varnedoe, “Cy Twombly’s Lepanto,” ibid., 45–62.

3. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 123.

4. Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 10; cf. Johanna Burton, “Cy Twombly’s Transformations,” in Hochdörfer, Cy Twombly: States of Mind, 226–39.

5. Francesco Clemente; Kirk Varnedoe, “Cy Twombly: An Artist’s Artist,” in WCT 241–42.

6. For Rome–New York art connections during this period, see Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 26–27 and 61, nn. 110–14.

7. In the late 1970s, Twombly visited Afghanistan, and later protested against the Russian invasion; see Nicola Del Roscio, “Trip to Russia and Afghanistan with Cy Twombly, 1979,” in Greub, Cy Twombly. Bild, Text, Paratext, 459–70.

8. “The sound of ‘Asia Minor’ is really like a rush to me”; “Cy Twombly,” in Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, 176.

9. See Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered, ed. R. W. Baker, Shereen T. Ismael, and Tareq Y. Ismael (London: Pluto Press, 2010), and The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq, ed. Peter Stone and Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly (Melton, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2008).

10. Conversation with Nicola Del Roscio, Gaeta, March 2013.

11. “Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic)”; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 462.

12. The RETORT collective’s Debordian analysis argues for the inseparability of “permanent war” and modernity; see Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London and New York: Verso, 2005), and W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Spectacle Today: A Response to RETORT,” Public Culture 20.3 (2008): 573–81.

13. Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 36.

14. See David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), esp. 55–58, 88–119; the naming of ordinary soldiers is a relatively recent phenomenon (see ibid., 21–36).

15. Apropos of his sculptures, Twombly invoked “the fundamental principle in Homer’s world, that poetry belongs to the defeated and to the dead”; see Nesin, Twombly’s Things, 137, 229, n. 120. For Twombly’s epitaphic and memorial sculptures, see ibid., 130–49.

16. On key terms in the Iliad, including the distinction between Achilles’ wrath (menis) and his grief (penthos), see Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 69–93.

17. Cavafy, Collected Poems, 5.

18. References are to The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, ed. Reuben A. Brower and W. H. Bond (New York: Macmillan, 1965); cited by book and line. In Homer’s Iliad, the word used for tomb-stone is stele, placed on a tomb (tombos): “But as a pillar remains firm that stands on the tomb of a dead man or woman …”; Homer, Iliad, vii. 434–35, trans. A. T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2: 261. For the association of horses and funerary practices, see Mark W. Edwards, The Iliad: A Commentary, Vol. V: Books 17–20 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 106.

19. For Pope’s contrast between pity and ruthlessness, see David Hopkins, Conversing with Antiquity: English Poets and the Classics, from Shakespeare to Pope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 299–307; and on Pope’s translation generally, see Robert Sowerby, “Epic,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, 1660–1790, Vol. 3, ed. Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005),159–66.

20. Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Trauma (New York: Atheneum, 1994), 39–68 and 77–99.

21. Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” 178.

22. See Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 19. Rauschenberg (b. 1925) was drafted into the navy in 1943, serving in the Navy Hospital Corps until his discharge in 1945; Jasper Johns (b. 1930) served in the army for two years from 1951, in the United States and Japan, before returning to New York in 1953.

23. Ibid., 59, n. 73. For Twombly and code-breaking, see chapter 3.

24. See Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 19–20, and Robert Pincus-Witten, “Learning How to Write” (1968), WCT 58–59.

25. See Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 59, n.76.

26. See Bastian, CTP II: 186–91, #122–27; the Bacon allusion is clearest in Death of Giuliano de Medici (1962), ibid., II: 190–91, #127.

27. On the “imagined portraits from history,” see Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 37, 63, and n. 153; for Twombly’s attraction to “the bloody deaths of heroes and powerful men,” cf. Delehanty, “Alchemy of Mind and Hand,” WCT 65, 73.

28. For Pompey, see Bastian, CTP II: 192–95, #128, #129; for Julius Caesar, ibid., II: 204–7, #135, #136.

29. See Del Roscio, CTD 3:166–68, #232–34; #232 contains the word “Autoritato.”

30. See Bastian, CTP II: 202–3, #134, and the smaller study, ibid., II: 202, #133. Twombly’s interest in rocketry was shared by Rauschenberg, whose Round Trip I (1963) includes rocket launches; see Thomas Crow, “Southern Boys Go to Europe: Rauschenberg, Twombly, and Johns in the 1950s,” in Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collections, ed. Stephanie Barron and Lynn Zelevansky (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001), 60–61 and fig. 21.

31. Schmidt, “Way to Arcadia,” WCT 153. The “Spear which stern Achilles only wields” was plucked from the mountain-top by Chiron, his father’s centaur teacher: “From Pelion’s cloudy Top an Ash entire / Old Chiron fell’d, and shap’d it for his Sire” (xix. 422–24).

32. “I always think of A as Achilles”; Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” 177, 178.

33. See Del Roscio, CTD 3: 97–99, #128–32; 103–7, #133–41, all emphasizing the letter “A” shape with a triangle at the apex.

34. For contemporary anti-nuclear imagery, see the CND poster, “Stop Nuclear Suicide” (1963), in James Aulich, War Posters: Weapons of Mass Communication (New York: Thames & Hudson/Imperial War Museum, 2007), 232, #299.

35. Fredric Jameson, “War and Representation,” Special Topic: War, PMLA 124.5 (2009): 1547; on the intertwining of weaponry and photography, see Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London and New York: Verso, 1989). An iconic photograph has Lyndon Johnson watching a TV showing the 1964 launch of the Saturn I rocket with its trail of fire (ibid., fig. 45).

36. See Julia Bryan Wilson, “Building a Marker of Nuclear Warning,” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 183–204.

37. See Bastian, CTP II: 200–201, #132, and Del Roscio, CTD 3: 132–33, #180–82, where the name or appendage representing Patroclus is also cancelled out with an “X.” On “the despair linked to the loss of a loved one,” see Leeman, 79–80.

38. See Srinivas Aravamudan, “Perpetual War,” PMLA 124.5 (2009): 1505. Achilles’ lament for his dead comrade-in-arms, when “Our Swords kept time, and conquer’ed side by side” (xviii. 402), suggests the proximity of phallic prowess and homoerotic bonding.

39. See Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 37; the series was painted in December 1963—an instance of the “didymous” (two-headed) motif in Twombly’s work; see Leeman, 78–81.

40. See Bastian, CTP II: 224–33, #156. Varnedoe suggests that expressionism and abstraction were out of step with “Warhol’s grainy, drumbeat images of the police dogs of Birmingham and of the mourning Jackie Kennedy” (“Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 38).

41. Identifying himself with Hercules, Commodus staged bloody gladiatorial combats against humans and beasts. Critics have puzzled over Twombly’s choice of subject; Delehanty ingeniously suggests “creativity suppressed to destruction” (“Alchemy of Mind and Hand,” WCT 66).

42. Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 63, n. 152; the emperor’s head was displayed during the exhibition.

43. For the 1960s context (including film), see the comprehensive exhibition catalogue by Germano Celant, The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968 (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1994).

44. See Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 175–77. Rauschenberg recalls that while making the first series of his Divine Comedy in 1960, “it was election year and a historian would be able to read that this was when it was done” (ibid., 345, n. 5). Linking the Commodus series and the Kennedy assassination, see Stemmrich, “Talking about the Essence of Something,” in Hochdörfer, Cy Twombly: States of Mind, 82.

45. See Bastian, CTP II: 254–57, #171.

46. Bastian calls Twombly’s triptych a “deliberately eroticized apotheosis of life and death” (CTP II: 30); for the winged flying phalluses and chariot-like testicles, see Leeman, 56–59.

47. Pope’s Iliad includes two famous similes comparing the dust of attacking armies to snow storms (see xii. 175–82 and xii. 331–42). Mary Favret points to their legacy for poetry in “Still Winter Falls,” PMLA 124.5 (2009): 1548–61; for Romanticism’s shaping perception of modern war “at a distance,” see also Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

48. See Hopps, Robert Rauschenberg, 166–68, figs. 53, 54; for Johns’s dream of painting the US flag, see Kirk Varnedoe, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 124 and 135, #8. On the three-way relation between Johns, Twombly, and Rauschenberg, see Crow, “Southern Boys Go to Europe,” 44–67.

49. Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber, 1973), 345.

50. White, “Cy Twombly,” 266.

51. Julie Sylvester, ed., Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2005), #37, #38; and cf. Delehanty, “Alchemy of Mind and Hand,” WCT 65, 73.

52. See Cycles and Seasons, 152 and 155, n. 7; for the armorial associations of “electrum,” see Leeman, 207 and 311, n. 10. Nesin’s detailed discussion emphasizes the materiality of the two collages (Twombly’s Things, 169–72).

53. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ed. Oscar Levy, trans. William A. Haussmann (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2006), 3.

54. Nietzsche, “An Attempt at Self-Criticism” (1886), ibid., xxi. Twombly describes his mood when painting as “ecstatic”: “I’m usually in a very good humor except that I can be a little violent if it’s going bad.” (Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” 179).

55. Davenport, Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman, 21, #10; 19, #1. Enyalios is Ares (Mars). Twombly calls Archilochos “my favourite poet” (Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 50).

56. Davenport, Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman, 22, #16.

57. See Jan Mieszkowski, “Watching War,” PMLA, 124.5 (2009): 1648–61.

58. For the series Synopsis of a Battle (1868), see Bastian, CTP III: 132–39, #55–58; 152–53, #66.

59. For the Orion series, see ibid., III: 118–23, #47–50; and for astronomy, see Leeman, 201.

60. See Bastian, CTP III: 146–51, #63–65.

61. See Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 43, and Cycles and Seasons, 111–12.

62. See Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 40–41, and 63, n. 160; and cf. Bastian, CTP III: 34, n. 7, for the influence of Italian Futurism. Twombly’s collage To Balla (1974) is reproduced in Hochdörfer, Cy Twombly: States of Mind, 153, #112.

63. “Eye and Mind” (1961), in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 138. For Twombly’s interest in Leonardo’s geometry (including “infinite progression”), see Leeman, 189–90.

64. Cf. the military diagrams in Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia, reproduced in John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), esp. 46–52 and figs. 19–21; descriptive geometry evolved in relation to gun-emplacement (ibid., 153–63).

65. Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, Decisive Battles: Their Influence upon History and Civilization (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1940). Fuller was also the author of Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1933), a work associated with Lexington’s Civil War history.

66. See Bastian, CTP III: 35, n. 9; cf. Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, The Generalship of Alexander the Great (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958), 154–62. Fuller praises Alexander for “iron will, self-control, and devotion to [his] life’s task” (ibid., 58 and n. 5); he became a supporter of Oswald Mosley during the 1930s, witnessing Hitler’s mechanized military birthday parade in 1939.

67. Twombly’s pictographs of airplanes, submarines, castles, and mountain ranges, interspersed with scribbled graffiti and broken phrases (“sempre,” “why,” “my heart in your birth,” “sad flight”), record the experience of recent fatherhood; see Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 33.

68. See Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, Tanks in the Great War, 1914–18 (New York: Dutton, 1920). Fuller claimed credit for the World War I tank-battle of Cambrai in 1917, during which almost half of Britain’s 380 tanks were destroyed or disabled.

69. See, for instance, “Battle of Issus,” The Generalship of Alexander the Great, [158], fig. 8. Twombly gave the same title to a 1960 painting, Synopsis of a Battle (see Bastian, CTP I: 263, #173). But: “the relation of Twombly’s works to their sources needs to be understood in the same way as Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield … as the ekphrasis of an impossible thing” (Leeman, 95–96).

70. See David H. DeVorkin, Science with a Vengeance: How the Military Created the US Space Sciences after World War II (New York, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1992).

71. As illustrated by Ivan D. Ertel and Mary Louise Morse, The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology, 4 vols. (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1969–78).

72. See Del Roscio, CTD 4: 172–79, #199–207.

73. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 142 and 390, n. 46. For Twombly’s Leonardo collages as a “commentary” on drawing, see Susan C. Larsen, “Cy Twombly: Works on Paper; 1954–1976” (1981), WCT 118–19.

74. See Suh, Leonardo’s Notebooks, 266–67. Cf. Albrecht Altdorfer’s bird’s-eye view of the clash of armies, Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529), depicting Alexander’s rout of the Persians.

75. See Sylvester, Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper, #49. Leeman identifies the war-chariot with the allegorical chariot of Plato’s Phaedrus (Leeman, 218–21, 223).

76. Sylvester, Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper, #47; and Lambert, CTOP VII: 169–70, #178, #179.

77. See Tim Rood, American Anabasis: Xenophon and the Idea of America (London: Duckworth Overlook, 2010), 222–27, noting Twombly’s response to contemporary conflicts between East and West.

78. “Affirmations: As for Imagisme,” Pound, Selected Prose, 345, 346.

79. Immanuel Kant: Philosophical Writings, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1986), 282.

80. Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 45.

81. See ibid., 45. Twombly’s title alludes to Pope: “The Action is hurry’d on with the most vehement Spirit, and its whole Duration employs not so much as fifty Days”; see “The Preface to the Iliad,” in Selected Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Paul Hammond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 92.

82. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 10. Nietzsche notes that his reflections on Greek tragedy were contemporary with Wagner’s Beethoven essay, written “amidst the horrors and sublimities” of the Franco-Prussian war (ibid., xxvii).

83. Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” 177, 178; the prow of Twombly’s boats are similar pointers: “I always make a direction that’s pointed” (ibid., 178). On the capital “A” of Fifty Days in Iliam, see Burton, “Cy Twombly’s Transformations,” 230–31.

84. Cf. Lambert, CTOP VII: 40, #17–19, and 56–57, #34–38; the Philadelphia Museum of Art holds some of these blood-red studies. Twombly associates his cloud-shapes with memorialization as well as death (cf. ibid., VII: 76, #71h, #71g).

85. “The whole Compass of Nature cannot afford a nobler and more exact Representation of a numerous Army, drawn up in Line of Battel, and expecting the Charge”; Hammond, Selected Prose of Alexander Pope, 113. A “Cloud of Grief” descends on Achilles at the news of Patroclus’s death (xvii. 26), while “a Veil of Clouds” protects Hector from Achilles (xx. 513–14) and Antenor at a critical moment (xxi. 705–6). For the “Homeric mist,” see also Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 69–70.

86. Pope translates the bodies heaped up by Patroclus as “a Monument of Dead” (xvi. 511). Achilles tows Hector’s body round Patroclus’s temporary “Monument”—“A common Structure on the humble Sands; / Hereafter Greece some noble Work may raise …” (xxiv. 25; xxiii. 307–8).

87. Homer’s text refers to a burial mound (sema) or tumulus: “And someone of men who are yet to be will one day say … ‘This is the mound of a man who died long ago, whom once in his prowess glorious Hector slew’”; see Murray and Wyatt, Homer, Iliad, vii. 86–92, 1: 321. Burial mounds (tumuli) were a familiar sight on the shores of the Hellespont; see G. S. Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary, Vol. II: Books 5–8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 245–46.

88. Gregory Nagy’s account of the original Homeric poem traces its transmission, before writing, to oral re-creations of the “Homeric” performer; see Gregory Nagy, Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Homeric Questions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 13–27.

89. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 14.

90. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 53.

91. “Preface to the Iliad,” in Hammond, Selected Prose of Alexander Pope, 98.

92. Ibid., 90–91; Pope’s Iliad translates the simile differently: “The shining Armies swept along the Ground; / Swift as a Flood of Fire …” (ii. 947–48). Cf. Dennis J. Schmidt, “‘Like a Fire That Consumes All Before It’: On Language and Image,” in Lyrical and Ethical Subjects: Essays on the Periphery of the Word, Freedom, and History (Albany: SUNYPress, 2005), 141–62.

93. Pope, “Preface to the Iliad,” 91.

94. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Image and Violence,” in The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 22; on violence and monuments, see also W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 371–84.

95. In a school classics project comparing the Iliad with Fifty Days at Iliam, “we also discussed the possibility that [it] was shaped by and comments on the Vietnam War”; Rebecca Resinski, “Conversing with Homer and Twombly: A Collaborative Project on the Iliad and Fifty Days at Iliam,” Classical Journal 101.3 (2006): 311–17.

96. See Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 12.

97. For the controversy surrounding Lin’s abstract design, see ibid., 15–20, and Charles Griswold, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall: Philosophical Thoughts on Political Iconography,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Summer 1986): 688–719.

98. On the anticipatory structure of epitaphic address, see Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 90.

99. Jove takes Priam’s part against Achilles: “Nor let him more … Vent his mad Vengeance on the sacred Dead: / But yield to Ransom and the Father’s Pray’r” (xxiv. 149–51); the deal is brokered when Thetis visits Achilles in his tent (xxiv. 169–76).

100. “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 243.

101. Simon Gribelin, The Shield of Achilles, in Twelve Tables. From Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, 6 vols. (London: printed by W. Bowyer for Bernard Lintot, 1720), 5: [facing p. 3]. Twombly acquired the six-volume octavo second edition of Pope’s Iliad (1720–21), which includes Gribelin’s engraving.

102. W. H. Auden saw in Hephaestus’s shield a totalitarian world given over to war; see The Shield of Achilles (New York: Random House, 1955), 35–37.

103. Lessing, Laocoön, 94. Schmidt sees the shield as “a commentary on … the very nature of storytelling” (Schmidt, Lyrical and Ethical Subjects, 161).

104. See Gregory Nagy, “The Shield of Achilles: Ends of the Iliad and Beginnings of the Polis,” in Homeric Responses (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 72–87.

105. Lessing, Laocoön, 99, 95. Cf. Pope’s commentary, “Observations on the Shield of Achilles,” in Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (London: W. Bowyer, 1720–21), 5: [106].

106. See Nagy, Homeric Responses, 82–87.

107. Nagy defines “a relativized Iliad” limited by “an ever-evolving polis outside the narrative” (ibid., 8).

108. Davenport, Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman, 58, #184.

109. See Nesin, Twombly’s Things, 78, and Schmidt, Cy Twombly: The Sculpture, 122–23, #56 (#48). For Twombly on the excremental theory of the infantile origins of art, see Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” 178, and Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 50.

110. See Schmidt, Cy Twombly: The Sculpture, 50–56, #15, #16–18, #23; the small chariots made in 1979 and 1980 in Bassano resemble the stylized chariots of Fifty Days at Iliam (ibid., 65–67). For Giacometti’s introduction of the chariot into modern art, see Bird, “Indeterminacy and (Dis) order in the work of Cy Twombly,” 500.

111. See Schmidt, Cy Twombly: The Sculpture, 92, 93, #44, 107–9. Twombly is alluding to Taq-i Kisra or the Hall of Chosru I in the ancient city of Ctesiphon.

112. See ibid., 100, #51, #52, and 117–21; on the Mesopotamian associations of Twombly’s Thicket series, see Nesin, Twombly’s Things, 90–99.

113. See Elaine Scarry, “Watching and Authorizing the Gulf War,” in Media Spectacles, ed. Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 57–73; on the “weaponization” of images, see Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), esp. 67–89.

114. See Schmidt, Cy Twombly: The Sculpture, 101, #62; and cf. Nesin, Twombly’s Things, 93–94. Twombly implicitly contradicts Baudrillard’s assertion of virtuality (“an experimental, blank war”); see Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 73.

115. Davenport, Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman, 58, #184; Archilochos’s epitaph bids the wayfarer pass by “lest you stir up the hornets” (ibid., 3). Nesin suggests that the epitaph makes Archilochos speak; see Twombly’s Things, 130–32.

116. “Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another”; Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 284. Cf. Derrida on the “juridicality” of Kant’s discourse, in Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 71, 111.

117. “Wanderer, kommst du nach Sparta, verkündige dorten, du habest / Uns hier liegen gesehn, wie das Gesetz es befahl”; Schmidt, Cy Twombly: The Sculpture, 129 and 149, n. 81. Schmidt compares the 1992 bronze cast with an ancient Etruscan helmet, “underlin[ing] the brutal martial core” of war (ibid., 121 and fig. 33).

118. Cavafy, Collected Poems, 15; for Twombly’s scribbled outline, see introduction and figure I.6, and on Cavafy’s poetry, see White, “Cy Twombly,” 256, and cf. chapter 1.

119. See Bastian, CTP V: 124–25; 126–43, #28–41. For the historical moment of the Bacchus cycle (“in the summer of 2005, as America was once again at war with Iraq”), see Cycles and Seasons, 219; cf. the discussion of Twombly’s development of the Bacchus cycle (including its associations with the Iliad) during 2006–7, in Nicholas Cullinan and Nicholas Serota, “‘Ecstatic Impulses’: Cy Twombly’s ‘Untitled (Bacchus),’ 2006–8,” Burlington Magazine 152 (September 2010): 613–16.

120. See Malcolm Bull, “Fire in the Water,” in Cy Twombly, Bacchus (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2005), 49–55; and cf. Bird, on its elegiac yet visceral effects, in “Indeterminacy and (Dis)order in the Work of Cy Twombly,” 503).

121. See Bastian, CTP V: 126–31, #28–33.

CHAPTER FIVE | ROMANTIC TWOMBLY

1. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 47.

2. Virgil I: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1–6, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 1: 126.

3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters, ed. and trans. T. J. Reed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 24. Benacus is the ancient name for Lake Garda.

4. Ibid., 24. Cf. the revised passage in Goethe’s Italian Journey (1816–17): “This is the first line of Latin verse the subject of which I have seen with my own eyes … the wind still churns up the lake which a line of Virgil’s has ennobled to this day”; J. W. Goethe, Italian Journey [1786–1788], trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (London: Penguin, 1970), 42.

5. Johann Jacob Volkmann, Histrisch-Kritische Nachrichten von Italien, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Verlegts Caspar Fritsch, 1777), 3: 790.

6. “This house is so much like me that it is like talking to myself” (Twombly); US Vogue (December 1982): 268. On the Bassano setting, see Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 44–47, and James Rondeau, ed., Cy Twombly: The Natural World (New Haven, CT, and London: Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University Press, 2009), 18–19.

7. See Bastian, CTP IV: 84–89, #14; 104–7, 112–13, #23, #27; 120–33, 148–155, #28–40, #50.

8. Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” 173. In the context of Twombly’s seasonal returns to Virginia, “landscape is what he likes looking at most”; David Sylvester, “The World Is Light,” in Cy Twombly: Ten Sculptures, ed. Nicola Del Roscio (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 1997), 18. Cf. Twombly’s photographs of the countryside around Lexington, Virginia, in Cy Twombly: Photographs, #165, #166.

9. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 46. For Twombly’s interest in Poussin, see also Katharina Schmidt, “Way to Arcadia,” WCT 160.

10. Bastian, CTP I: 214–15, #134, and cf. Woodland Glade (1964), ibid., II: 246–47, #165: “a kind of romantic English thing rather than Poussin. It was just a homage” (Twombly); Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 46. Blue Ridge Mountains Transfixed by a Roman Piazza (1962) offers a witty reprise of the relation between Lexington and Rome (Bastian, CTP II: 164–67, #90, #91).

11. See Bastian, CTP IV: 70–83, #13; 114–19, #27.

12. “I knew a poet who was totally ignorant about botany. And I said: you can’t be a poet without knowing any botany or plants and things like that”; Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” 173. For Twombly and the Georgics, see chapter 6.

13. For the two natural history works on paper, see Bastian, Cy Twombly: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Printed Graphic Work, 70–77, #42–51, and 78–83, #52–59; see also chapter 6. Cf. Gottfried Boehm, “Remembering, Forgetting: Cy Twombly’s Works on Paper” (1987), in WCT 183: “these works are reminiscent of charts shown to pupils during their lessons.”

14. See Christopher Wright, Poussin: Paintings, A Catalogue Raisonné (London: Harlequin, 1985), 105, plate 81 (210, #155) and 214–16, #164. For detailed reproductions, see T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2006). Cf. Richard Verdi, Cézanne and Poussin: The Classical Vision of Landscape (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1990), 57–62.

15. See Katz, Black Mountain College, esp. 182–216, for Olson’s relations with Twombly and Rauschenberg; for first-hand accounts of Olson’s influence, see also Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (New York: Norton, 1993), 353–88, 389–407.

16. Twombly recalls of his contemporaries at Black Mountain: “They were into D. H. Lawrence” (Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 44), influenced by Olson.

17. See WCT 19–20; Butterick, Charles Olson & Robert Creeley, 9: 64, 60–61.

18. Ibid., 9: 61. Olson dismisses “the whole act of Rauschenberg” as “some gesture some posture” (ibid., 9: 63). He goes on to contrast “the clear genius of this lad, Twombly, the success of his year and the total defeat of Bob’s” (ibid., 9: 64–65).

19. Ibid., 8: 199. For Olson’s views on line, see Katz, Black Mountain College, 186–87.

20. See Hopps, Robert Rauschenberg, 79, #30; for the large black paintings exhibited at the Stable Gallery in 1953, see ibid., 87–91, #37–39.

21. See Leeman, 261, 268.

22. Kirk Varnedoe, “Cy Twombly: An Artist’s Artist” (1994), in WCT 244, 247.

23. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 52. Twombly’s Untitled I (1962) consists of a palette with color-identifications and Sapphic inscription (Bastian, CTP II: 152–53, #82); see Cycles and Seasons, 183.

24. See “The Gate and the Center,” in Allen and Friedlander, Charles Olson: Collected Prose, 169.

25. Bastian, CTP IV: 30. “Is this romantic inscription … too abstract a cipher, too ambivalent a sign of the classical formation as befits all reference to Goethe?” (ibid., IV: 30).

26. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 49. Cf. Cézanne: “Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured”; see Richard Kendall, ed., Cézanne by Himself: Drawings, Paintings, Writings (London: Macdonald Orbis, 1988), 298.

27. Goethe, Italian Journey, 349.

28. Goethe, Flight to Italy, 115–16. For Goethe’s Italian journey, see John R. Williams, The Life of Goethe: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 24–29, and Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, 2000), 1: 415–530.

29. On Goethe’s Roman artistic circle, see ibid., 1: 433–35.

30. See Goethe, Italian Journey, 156, Williams, Life of Goethe, 156–60, and Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, 1: 418, 447–56; for the sea in Goethe’s Iphigenia auf Tauris, see ibid., 1: 454. On Goethe’s return to poetry, see Jane Brown, “The Renaissance of Goethe’s Poetic Genius in Italy,” in Goethe in Italy, 1786–1986, ed. Gerhart Hoffmeister (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), 77–93.

31. Goethe, Italian Journey, 288–90. For Goethe’s response to the Neapolitan and Sicilian landscape as Homeric (“for the first time the Odyssey has been a living truth to me”), see ibid., 310; on his projected play, Ulysses among the Phaeacians, see Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, 1: 467, 470–81.

32. Goethe, Flight to Italy, 87. For Italy as the ultimate telos of Goethe’s poetic, emotional, and intellectual development, see Matthew Bell, Goethe’s Naturalistic Anthropology: Man and Other Plants (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 177–84.

33. Goethe, Flight to Italy, 115. Goethe would have been familiar with engravings, paintings, and reproductions of classical art and sculpture from his father’s Italian journey; see Richard Block, The Spell of Italy: Vacation, Magic, and the Attraction of Goethe (Detroit: Wayne Sate University Press, 2006), 49–109.

34. Goethe, Flight to Italy, 116 (Goethe’s emphasis).

35. Cf. Sigmund Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” (1936), in Strachey, Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 22: 239–48.

36. Goethe, Flight to Italy, 117.

37. Ibid., 118; by January 1787, Goethe was writing from Rome with perplexity: “The more I see of this city, the more I feel myself getting into deep waters” (Italian Journey, 165).

38. Goethe, Flight to Italy, 133. Goethe’s drawings of landscapes and classical sites are reproduced in Goethe in Italia, ed. Jörn Göres (Roma: Museo del Folklore/Electra, 1988).

39. Goethe, Flight to Italy, 121.

40. See ibid., 13–14; for Goethe’s interest in Howard and meteorology, see Williams, The Life of Goethe, 118–19, 271–73.

41. “Various shades of blue distinguished one part of the background landscape from another, and against this I could see that the atmosphere was charged with water vapour, evenly distributed” (Goethe, Italian Journey, 49).

42. Ibid., 114.

43. Ibid., 33. For Goethe’s geology, see Williams, Life of Goethe, 268–71, as well as his early essay, Uber den Granit (1784–85), celebrating granite as the Urgestein, or primal rock (ibid., 270); cf. Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, 1: 346–49. Goethe shared Ruskin’s belief that painters should study geology along with botany; see Malcolm Andrews, “Nature as Picture or Process?” in Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 182, 186.

44. See Williams, Life of Goethe, 269–70; Goethe was on the losing side of the scientific dispute.

45. Goethe, Italian Journey, 125.

46. Ibid., 125.

47. For Goethe’s Sicilian discovery of the “Primal Plant” or Urpflantze, see ibid., 310, 366–68; on plant morphology and the Urphänomen, see Williams, Life of Goethe, 264–68, 259–60.

48. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), esp. 67–74.

49. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Preface to the First Edition” (1810), Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Locke Eastlake [1840] (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), xl–xli. On Goethe’s idiosyncratic definition of theory, see J. Hillis Miller, Illustration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 135–43.

50. For Goethe’s argument with Newton, see Williams, Life of Goethe, 260–64. See also Dennis L. Sepper, Goethe Contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. 174–95.

51. See Andrew Wilton, Painting and Poetry: Turner’s Verse Book and His Work of 1804–1812 (London: Tate Gallery, 1990), 181; cf. Frederick Burwick, The Damnation of Newton: Goethe’s Color Theory and Romantic Perception (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyler, 1986), 37–42, and John Gage, Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth (New York: Praeger, 1969), 173–88. For Goethe’s influence on modern painters including Kandinsky, see also John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), esp. 46–47,192–95.

52. Goethe, Theory of Colours, 234, #586. “Transparent substances may be said to be in the highest class of inorganic matter. With these, colourless semi-transparence is closely connected, and white may be considered the last opaque degree of this” (ibid., 203–4, #494). On the association of color with organic life, cf. Cézanne: “Colour is alive, it alone can convey living things” (Kendall, Cézanne by Himself, 305).

53. Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 27.

54. “‘Nature,’ … is an abstraction, as is the idea of man standing before it”; Nancy, “Uncanny Landscape,” in Ground of the Image, 56.

55. Ibid., 53.

56. Ibid., 62, 59, 61.

57. Ibid., 62.

58. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 52. For the role of drawing as form(ing), see Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, trans. Philip Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), esp. 10–14, 20–24.

59. Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 147–52, 115; Twombly is included on the basis of works such as Olympia (1957).

60. See Bastian, CTP IV: 84–89, #14; for two related “landscapes,” see Twombly’s Untitled (1980) and Untitled (1981), ibid., IV: 94–95, #19; and 96–97, #20.

61. “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Johnson and Smith, Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 67.

62. Christian Klemm, “Material-Model-Sculpture: Objects Transposed into Imagination,” in Schmidt, Cy Twombly: The Sculpture, 163. Klemm links Twombly’s chariot-shaped Untitled (1979) to Goethe in Italy: “In the sculpture, as in those paintings, the nature of the material remains the primary means of expression” (ibid., 163).

63. See chapter 6.

64. Richard Block, “Scribbles from Italy: Cy Twombly’s Experiment in Seeing Goethe See Language,” in The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture, ed. Evelyn K. More and Patricia Anne Simpson (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 289–309.

65. Ibid., 308.

66. Ibid., 304, 294. Cf. Goethe: “Productions of nature … are subject to external conditions of nature, but to a counter-effect from within as well” (ibid., 302; Block’s translations).

67. Ibid., 308 (Block’s translation).

68. Bastian, CTP IV: 36, n. 7; “scripture” (die Schrift) could be translated as “writing” or “script.”

69. Gottfried Boehm, “Remembering, Forgetting: Cy Twombly’s Works on Paper” (1987), WCT 187: “The inner eye we observe in action in his pictures is that of memory” (ibid., 186).

70. Goethe, Italian Journey, 196.

71. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 45.

72. Goethe, Italian Journey, 183.

73. “Hero and Leander” (1598), in The Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney and Brian J. Striar (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 194.

74. In Chapman’s moralizing sequel, Neptune bangs his head on the heavens and proves unable to quiet the stormy seas; see Cheney and Striar, Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe, vi. 195–200. For Marlowe’s irony, see William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1977), 85–116, and for the mischievous Neptune subplot, see Claude J. Summers, “‘Hero and Leander’: The Arbitrariness of Desire,” in Constructing Christopher Marlowe, ed. J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 133–47.

75. See Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1977), 2: 348, #370. For Twombly and Turner, see Jeremy Lewison, “Turner Monet Twombly: Painting in Later Life,” in Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), esp. 52–60.

76. See Bastian, CTP II: 122–23, #65. Cf. Katharina Schmidt, “Hero and Leander,” in Eva Keller and Regula Malin, Audible Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros (Zurich: Daros/Scalo, 2002), 107, and Lisa Hopkins, “Twombly’s Hero and Leandro (To Christopher Marlowe),” in Greub, Cy Twombly. Bild, Text, Paratext, 245–60.

77. Cf. J.M.W. Turner, Rough Sea with Wreckage (ca. 1830–35) and Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842); see Butlin and Joll, Paintings of J.M. W. Turner, 2: 438, #455; and 338, #398.

78. See Bastian, CTP IV: 112–13, #26.

79. Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” 175.

80. In the pale pink and greens of the wave-painting in oil and its pendant on paper, Untitled (1986), Bastian, CTP IV: 134–35, #41, a plunge of deep green topped with pink falls diagonally across the canvas. Twombly’s fascination with the Bay of Gaeta also produces the wave-studies of the Gaeta Sets (1981, 1986); see Cy Twombly: Serien auf Papier (1957–87), 138–44.

81. See Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 63, n. 173. Twombly’s disruption of narrative sequence has been linked with Alain Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman; see Cycles and Seasons, 165 and 167, n. 4, and Leeman, 156.

82. Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” 176. “If I can get a good hot story going I can paint better, but sometimes I’m not thinking about the painting, I’m thinking about the subject” (ibid., 180).

83. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 52.

84. Schmidt points out that pt. II contains Hero’s half-obliterated name; see “Hero and Leander,” in Keller and Malin, Audible Silence, 107.

85. Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” 175.

86. See, for instance, J.M.W. Turner, Seascape with Storm Coming (ca. 1840), in Butlin and Joll, Paintings of J.M. W. Turner, 2: 444, #466.

87. See the Miramare sequences (2005), in Cy Twombly, Photographs 1951–2007, #142–44, 146–50.

88. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 140–41. Lacan’s seminar, “The Split between the Eye and the Gaze” (1964), takes issue with Merleau-Ponty; see The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 71–76.

89. See Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 139. For the tension between both Sartre’s and Lacan’s accounts of vision and Merleau-Ponty’s, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 276–98, 297–327, 339–37.

90. “It is this Visibility, this generality of the Sensible in itself … that we have previously called flesh” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 139).

91. Ibid., 142.

92. Ibid., 248: “it is consciousness that it does not see.… What it does not see is what makes it see” (working note of 1960).

93. Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” 179: “I cannot sit and make an image. I cannot make a picture unless everything is working. It’s like a state” (ibid., 179).

94. Cf. André Green’s psychoanalytic account of negative hallucination in The Work of the Negative, trans. Andrew Weller (New York: Free Association Books, 1999), 161–214.

95. The graphite on paper inscription (Hero and Leandro, Part IV) is reproduced in Keller and Malin, Audible Silence, [112], #19, and Cycles and Seasons, 171.

96. For liquidity in Hero and Leandro, see Bann, “Wilder Shores of Love,” 199–213.

97. The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 94. Allott notes that “dead-heavy” (l. 13) was suggested by Chapman’s “Dead wearie,” describing the half-drowned Odysseus; see The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), 107 n.

98. Tassie perfected the process of reproduction, using high-quality hard paste. See the online Beazley archive for reproductions of the extensive Tassie gem collection, available at http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/xdb/asp/browse.asp (accessed 6 November 2015).

99. See John Curtis Franklin, “Once More the Poet: Keats, Severn, and the Grecian Lyre,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 48 (2003): 227–240; for Twombly and Keats’s epitaph, see Cycles and Seasons, 182.

100. “As I ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” st. 3; in Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1860). For Twombly’s childhood summers at Gloucester, Massachusetts, see Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,”174, 175: “I had a particular passion for boats, and now I live by the sea.”

101. Bastian, CTP IV: 30.

102. Goethe, Theory of Colours, 334, #863.

103. Ibid., 316, #802.

104. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 142.

105. The “pond” paintings are a mirror for art critics: Bastian sees in them “the immaterial, fluid animism of confession” (Bastian, CTP IV: 33); Leeman calls them “epiphanies” related to “the inner life of the artist” (Leeman, 62); Cullinan observes the figure of Clement Greenberg “lurk[ing] beneath the surface” along with Pollock, Turner, and Monet (Cycles and Seasons, 182).

106. Robert Bly, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 101.

107. Ibid., 101. Elsewhere, Rilke’s Narcissus forever endures “the outrage of his too pure image” (“cet outrage / de son image à jamais trop pure …”); see “Narcissus” (Narcisse), in The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. A. Poulin, Jr. (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2002), 282–83.

108. “The Fishes poem is called Moving Forward: & it is about looking at a picture”; unpublished note in the Menil Collection. For Twombly’s sculpture, Untitled (1987) with the Rilke inscription attached to its back, see Nesin, Twombly’s Things, 75–77.

109. “Objects grow ever more akin to me, / all images more intensely seen …”; “Progress,” in The Poetry of Rilke: Bilingual Edition, trans. Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2009), 93.

110. Bastian, CTP IV: 120–21, #28. Cf. part I of the nine-part Untitled (1988), the “title” canvas of the Venice Biennale “Green Paintings,” inscribed “(PONDS) to Rilke”; Twombly’s lineation sinks downward to land on “Fishes” (Bastian, CTP IV: 149, #50).

111. See ibid., IV: 122–25, #29–31.

112. See ibid., IV: 126–29, #32–38.

113. Ibid., IV: 130–31, #39; 132–33, #40.

114. See Lewison, Turner Monet Twombly, esp. 60–74; for Cullinan, the “Green Paintings” are “the most classical of [Twombly’s] career” (Cycles and Seasons, 183).

115. Clark, Sight of Death, 8.

116. Ibid., 63.

117. Ibid., 64.

118. See Marin, Sublime Poussin, 29–61.

119. See Clark, Sight of Death, 66.

120. For Poussin’s drawing from nature, see Anna Ottani Cavina, “Poussin and the Roman Campagna: In Search of the Absolute,” in Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, ed. Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008), 39–49.

121. For Poussin’s Echo and Narcissus, see Wright, Poussin:Paintings, 39, plate 21, and 161, #53.

122. Clark, Sight of Death, 202–3.

123. Ibid., 176; Clark’s polemic against what he calls the “regime of the image” (“I see our image machines as flooding the world with words”) leads him to find “instances of what images are like when they truly interfere with preconceptions” (ibid., 176).

124. Ibid., 176–77.

125. Ibid., 216.

126. Ibid., 177.

127. Ibid., 204.

CHAPTER SIX | THE PASTORAL STAIN

1. Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–92), 1: 40. For Twombly’s Theocritan works and pastoral poetry, see also Jürgen Hamerstaedt, “Cy Twombly’s Thyrsis-Triptichon und die Hellenistiche Hirtendichtung des Theokrit,” in Greub, Cy Twombly. Bild, Text, Paratext, 186–208.

2. These works on paper are reproduced in Lambert, CTOP VI: 183, #200; 181, #197; 184, #203. For related works, see also Idilli (1976), ibid., 180, #196, and two other versions, Idilli (I am Thyrsis of Etna blessed with a tuneful voice) (1976), ibid., 182, #198, #199, as well as Untitled (1976), ibid., 184, #202, and the related Death of Adonis (1976), ibid., 183, #201 (quoting from Bion’s “Lament for Adonis”). The three works on paper I discuss in detail are reproduced in Cy Twombly (Houston: Menil Foundation and Houston Fine Arts Press, 1990), #23, #24, #25.

3. Thyrsis [A Painting in Three Parts] (1977). The middle canvas is inscribed “I AM THYRSIS OF ETNA blessed with a tuneful voice”; see Bastian, CTP IV: 56–59, #8.

4. Anthony Holden, trans., Greek Pastoral Poetry: Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, The Pattern Poems (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1974). Twombly also owned a copy of Thomas Creech, The Idylliums of Theocritus; with Rapin’s Discourse upon Pastorals (Litchfield, UK: Anthony Stephens, 1684).

5. “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 45. For Adorno and the Frankfurt School, see Robert Kaufman, “Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 354–57.

6. The photograph of Twombly is reproduced as the frontispiece to volume two of Bastian’s Catalogue Raisonné (Bastian, CTP II).

7. See Bucolic (Aristaeus Mourning the Loss of His Bees) (1973) in Lambert, CTOP VI: 75, #80 (cf. the two versions, ibid., 74, #48, #49); Virgil (1973), ibid., 77–81, #51–58; Untitled (1976), ibid., 166, #179, and cf. the two related works, ibid., 165, #177, #178. The Shepheardes Calender (1977), privately printed in 1985, is reproduced in color in Cy Twombly: Serien auf Paper 1957–1987, 103–15.

8. See Seamus Heaney, “Eclogues in extremis: On the Staying Power of Pastoral,” in Vergil’s Eclogues, ed. Katharina Volk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 245–60.

9. Cf. Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 44, 46; for Twombly’s love of the pastoral genre, see Cullinan, Twombly and Poussin, 98.

10. See The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, 5 vols. (London: Longman, 1995–2005), 2: 236–67. For Dryden’s essay on translation, see ibid., 2: 236–57. Sylvae gave its name to a number of drawings by Twombly in the early 1980s; see Lambert, CTOP VII: 126–27, #129–31, #134.

11. Sylvester, “Cy Twombly,” 173.

12. Natural History, Part II, “Fagus Silvatica”; see Bastian, Cy Twombly: The Printed Graphic Work, 78–83, #52–59; cf. Cy Twombly: Photography, Prints, and Works on Paper from the Grosshaus Collection (Cologne: Walter König, 2011), 119.

13. For the original thirty-one works on paper (1974–75), the basis of the 10-part 1974 portfolio of lithographs, see Lambert, CTOP VI: 90–103, #68–92. The series is reproduced in Bastian, Cy Twombly: The Printed Graphic Work, 70–77, #47–51, and Cy Twombly: Photographs, Prints, and Works on Paper from the Grosshaus Collection, 101–11.

14. The Mushroom Book (1972), by John Cage, Lois Long, and the mycologist Alexander Smith. Lithographs by Long and Cage are overlaid with tissue, “handwritten in five different litho crayon intensities … enabling the reader, if he’s so inclined, to go hunting in [Cage’s] handwritten page”; David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage, A Life (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), 235–36. During 1959, Cage had a lucrative stint as a mushroom expert on the Italian quiz show Lascia o Raddoppia (ibid., 194–96).

15. On the prevalence of the almond-shaped laurel leaf motif in Twombly’s work during 1974, and the phallic, feminine, and Dionysian associations of the fig leaf, see Leeman, 214–15.

16. Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics, trans. T. F. Royds (New York and London: Dutton/Dent, 1965), 91; subsequent verse quotations are taken from Royds’s Everyman edition, which Twombly owned, accompanied by references to the Latin text of Fairclough, Virgil I. Twombly later acquired Dryden’s Translation of the Works of Virgil. Containing Pastoral, Georgics, Aeneis (London: Jacob Tonson, 1698).

17. For the link between botanical illustration and the English reception of Virgil’s Eclogues, see Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 238–41 and fig. 23.

18. Lambert, CTOP VII: 61, #43. Twombly uses the Greek word for “grove.” The same photograph of the view from Twombly’s house in Bassano in Teverina provided the end-papers for the 1979 Gagosian publication of Fifty Days at Iliam (1978).

19. See Menil, Cy Twombly, #25 (Lambert, CTOP VI: 184, #203).

20. Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 35, 38–39: “O Singer of Persephone! / In the dim meadows desolate / Dost thou remember Sicily?” (ll.1–3); The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1: 67–68.

21. Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 39. Holden criticizes Empson for suppressing Theocritus in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935); for changing views of pastoral, see Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

22. Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 18, 39. Holden’s XII is “The Beloved Boy” (“You are come, dear boy; two nights and days, / and you are come …”); XXIII is “The Lover” (“A lover once pined for a heartless youth …”); in XXIX, “For a Boy,” an older man enjoins constancy (ibid., 90, 128, 151).

23. Ibid., 153.

24. Another work on paper, Twombly’s Untitled (1976), also features a collaged leaf-print from Some Trees of Italy (Laurus nobilis), quoting Theocritus’s Idyll V (“The Goatherd versus the Shepherd”): “And acorn-husk falls short / of wild apple’s taste; / the one is sour, the other honey-sweet” (Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 68); see Lambert, CTOP VI: 184, #202.

25. “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 41.

26. Ibid., 40–41.

27. Ibid., 44.

28. Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 163.

29. See Menil, Cy Twombly (1990), #23, and Lambert, CTOP VI: 183, #200.

30. Cf. Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 50.

31. For the figure of adynaton, see Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 264–67: “Inventory is put at the service of disorder” (ibid., 265).

32. “Preface” to Sylvae; Hammond, Poems of John Dryden, 2: 252–53.

33. Rosenmeyer, Green Cabinet, 267.

34. See Menil, Cy Twombly (1990), #24, and Lambert, CTOP VI: 181, #197; cf. Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 47. Another green (paesaggio) diptych version of Idilli (I am Thyrsis of Etna blessed with a tuneful voice) (1976) is illustrated by Leeman, 238, #211, #212 (cf. Lambert, CTOP VI: 182, #199).

35. Bastian, CTP IV: 56–59, #8, pts. I, II, III.

36. In Leeman, [228–31], #202–4, and #205 (detail), the lines can be clearly seen, although partially smudged; the missing words are supplied from Holden, Greek Pastoral Poetry, 51.

37. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 38.

38. Ibid., 48; Adorno is referring to a poem by Eduard Mörike.

39. Ibid., 43.

40. “In the lyric poem the subject, through its identification with language, negates both its opposition to society … and its mere functioning within a wholly socialized society” (ibid., 44).

41. For Twombly’s perennial mourning for the loss of a loved one and his dramatis personae (Hyacinthus, Narcissus, Adonis, Daphnis, Orpheus) as figures for the artist, see Leeman, 239.

42. Lambert, CTOP VI: 180, #195 (and cf. ibid., VI: 180, #194); reproduced in color in Hochdörfer, Cy Twombly: States of Mind, #116. Twombly’s text, Sappho’s “Lament for Virginity,” is quoted from Mary Barnard, Sappho: A New Translation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 34. The story is told in Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10. 162–219.

43. “As the contradiction between poetic and communicative language reached an extreme, lyric poetry became a game in which one goes for broke….” (“On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 44).

44. WCT 112; Barthes’s essay formed the preface to the Whitney exhibition catalogue containing a number of the works discussed here; see Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954–1977, 9–22.

45. See Lambert, CTOP VI: 75, #50; reproduced in Cullinan, Twombly and Poussin, 98–99, #7. For the link to “the theme of pastoral lamentation” in general, see Leeman, 91.

46. On the intertwined Aristaeus and Orpheus narratives, see Michael J. C. Putnam, Virgil’s Poem of the Earth: Studies in the Georgics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 276–323; Aristaeus (“the georgic artist in the process of learning”) becomes a version of Virgil (ibid., 276).

47. Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics, 169. Dryden calls the nymphs “sea-green sisters … their distaffs full / With carded locks of blue Milesian wool” (Translation of the Works of Virgil, 230). Glass was a highly specialized technology in Imperial Rome, and would have been greenish-blue; see Donald B. Harden, Glass of the Caesars (Milan: Olivetti, 1987). I am indebted to Susan Walker, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, for this information.

48. For Aristaeus’s education through (and in contrast to) the fate of Orpheus, see Putnam, Virgil’s Poem of the Earth, 315–21; Aristaeus becomes a type of Orpheus who avoids Orpheus’s death by passion.

49. See Lambert, CTOP VI: 130, #133, and 131, #134, and Whitney, Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954–1977, 102. The text of Twombly’s quotation comes from his bilingual edition of Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1942, repr.1962), 95.

50. Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics, 168. On Virgil’s apostrophe, see Putnam, Virgil’s Poem of the Earth, 276.

51. Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics, 181.

52. Ibid., 181; Virgil’s phrase repeats a phrase from the first line of Eclogue I.

53. See Lambert, CTOP VI: 79, #54, and Whitney, Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954–1977, 99. For others in the series, see Lambert, CTOP VI: 76–81, #51–81. See also the series Virgil I–IV (1973), in Cy Twombly: Serien auf Papier 1957–1987, 91–94, and, for Virgil (1972), see Bastian, CTP IV: 50–51, #4.

54. Barthes, “Wisdom of Art,” 104.

55. Ibid., 102–3 (Barthes’s emphasis); see Whitney, Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954–1977, 9–10.

56. Barthes, “Wisdom of Art,” 112.

57. Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics, 11.

58. Cited by Paul Alpers, The Singer of The Eclogues: A Study of Virgilian Pastoral (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 67; see Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1955), 300. For Virgil’s association with tranquility and consolation, see Twombly’s Everyman edition (Virgil’s “note of all but intolerable pathos” and “high-rapt calm … [not] too divinely alien to console”); Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics, vii, x.

59. Barthes, “Wisdom of Art,” 104.

60. See Alpers, Singer of the Eclogues, 248. I am indebted to Alpers’s subtle reading of Virgil’s Eclogues.

61. Barthes, “Wisdom of Art,” 104.

62. See Alpers, Singer of The Eclogues, 214.

63. Alpers identifies suspension in Virgil’s poetry as both a mood (uncertainty or doubt) and a grammatical and rhetorical feature: “Suspension seems to me the best word to use for such moments, because it suggests a poised and secure contemplation of things disparate or ironically related” (ibid., 103).

64. Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics, 7. Twombly quotes the opening lines of Eclogue I in his drawing, Untitled (1966): “Exile for me, Tityrus—you lie sprawling in the shade, / Teaching the woods to echo back the charms of Amaryllis” (E. V. Rieu’s 1949 translation); see Del Roscio, CTD 4: 121, #146.

65. “Here again, composing Theocritus’ effect involves composing in the literary sense” (Alpers, Singer of the Eclogues, 214).

66. Cf. the golden-age prophecy of Eclogue IV: “The plain shall softly teem with yellowing corn, / And grapes shall blush upon the unkempt briar, / And the hard oak-tree bole ooze honey-dew” (Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics, 25). For a detailed comparison of Theocritus’s Idyll I and Virgil’s Eclogue V, see Alpers, Singer of the Eclogues, 212–14.

67. Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics, 10: “Ante leves ergo pascentur in aethere cervi, / et freta destituent nudos in litore pisces, / ante pererratis amborum finibus exsul … quam nostro illius labatur pectore voltus” (Eclogues i. 59–63).

68. Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics, 44: “nunc et ovis ultro fugiat lupus, aurea durae / mala ferant quercus, narcisso floreat alnus, / pinguia corticibus sudent electra myricae, / certent et cycnis ululae, sit Tityrus Orpheus, / Orpheus in silvis, inter delphinas Arion” (Eclogues viii. 52–56).

69. Rosenmeyer, Green Cabinet, 266.

70. But cf. the bold comparison to Orpheus in Eclogue IV: “Not Linus then / Nor Thacian Orpheus shall surpass my song”; Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics, 26 (“non me carminibus vincet nec Thracius Orpheus, / nec Linus”; Eclogues iv. 55–56). For Virgil’s construction of a genealogy that includes Orpheus, see David O. Ross, Jr., “The Sixth Eclogue: Virgil’s Poetic Genealogy,” in Volk, Vergil’s Eclogues, 189–215.

71. “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” in Adorno, Notes to Literature, 2: 110.

72. Ibid., 2: 126.

73. Ibid., 2: 133.

74. Ibid., 2: 136. Adorno identifies Hölderlin’s “dissociation into names” as “the innermost tendency of [his] parataxis”—“the name alone has power over the amorphousness he feared” (ibid., 2: 140, 139). On Adorno’s reading of Hölderlin, see Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 140–44.

75. Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics, 24. As Putnam points out, Virgil’s first personal invocation to the Muses in the Eclogues has him singing in chorus with the Sicilian Muses; see Michael J. C. Putnam, Virgil’s Pastoral Art: Studies in the Eclogues (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 136.

76. Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics, 31.

77. Ibid., 31. Alpers argues that Daphnis, although deified, remains situated within the pastoral frame (Singer of the Eclogues, 199–200).

78. “Argument” to Canto VII, The Selected Poetry of Spenser, ed. A. C. Hamilton (New York: New American Library, 1966), 528. Twombly’s library included this edition, its contents page marked up. References are to Hamilton’s edition.

79. The Shepheardes Calender, given to Anne and Anthony d’Offay in 1977, was privately printed “for the friends of Anne and Anthony D’Offay” (London, 1985) as the desk-diary for 1986.

80. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Oram et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 30.

81. Ibid., 31.

82. See Twombly’s Untitled (1974), in Lambert, CTOP VI: 163, #174, for the melancholy lines from Januarye: “… My musing mynd, yet canst not, when thou should: / Both pype and Muse, shall sore the while abye. / So broke his oaten pype, and downe dyd lye” (“Januarye,” 70–72); see Oram, Shorter Poems of Spenser, 32. For the original woodcut with its broken pipe, see ibid., 29.

83. Ibid., 33.

84. For Spenser’s Renaissance and continental precursors, see Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology, 106–32.

85. Oram, Shorter Poems of Spenser, 62.

86. Ibid., 65.

87. Ibid., 208.

88. Ibid., 211, 212.

89. Ibid., 170. The “glosse” invokes Theocritus’s Idyll XVI, “wherein hee reproved the Tyranne Hiero of Syracuse for his nigardise towarde Poetes” (ibid., 176). E. K. comments with deliberate obfuscation: “I doubte whether by Cuddie be specified the authour selfe, or some other” (ibid., 177).

90. Ibid., 173.

91. “For what in most English wryters useth to be loose, and as it were ungyrt, in this Authour is well grounded, finely framed, and strongly trussed up together” (E. K.’s prefatory “Epistle”; ibid., 17).

92. See Lynn Staley Johnson, The Shepheardes Calender: An Introduction (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 1, on the Calender as “a refiguration of the social formation and a rewriting of literary tradition.”

93. See Lambert, CTOP VI: 168, #182; reproduced in Whitney, Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954–1977, 65.

94. The passage is marked up in Twombly’s text (Hamilton, Selected Poetry of Spenser, 544).

95. See Leeman, 274 (“atmospheric evocation of a rainy season associated with human mutability”). Twombly may also have associated Church’s postcard with the micro-climate of Gaeta, whose slopes permit the cultivation of palm trees. For another version quoting the same lines from the “Mutabilitie” Cantos, see Lambert, CTOP VI: 167, #180.

96. See ibid., VI: 166, #179. Cf. the two related works referring to “Mutabilitie” Canto VII, ibid., 165, #177, 178, and see Menil, Cy Twombly, #26. “R. R.” is Robert Rauschenberg, whom Twombly visited during March 1976 on Captiva Island, where he made all three works.

97. “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things”; Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 177–78.

98. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 463.

99. “Night Thoughts on Mutability,” in Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos, ed. Jane Grogan (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010), 30. Cf. Teskey’s discussion of the “Mutabilitie” Cantos in Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 168–88, and Two Cantos of Mutabilitie (1609), in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 333–48.

100. Teskey, “Night Thoughts on Mutability,” 34.

101. Reiman and Fraistat, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 92; cf. chapter 3.

102. For Romantic misprisions of Spenser, see Michelle O’Callaghan, “Spenser’s Literary Influence,” in McCabe, Edmund Spenser, 664–83, esp. 672–75, and Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 243–345; for the “Mutabilitie” Cantos, see ibid., 260–62, 276–78, 313–14.

103. For Twombly’s relation to Protean change and Heraclitan flow, see Craig G. Staff, “A Poetics of Becoming: The Mythography of Cy Twombly,” in Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, ed. Isabelle Loring Wallace and Jennie Hirsch (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 43–55, esp. 49–50, 54, nn. 25–26.

104. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 463.

105. For “Occasion” as “the latest of Mutability’s shifting identities,” see Judith Anderson, “Mutability and Mortality: Reading Spenser’s Poetry,” in Grogan, Celebrating Mutabilitie, 263.

CHAPTER SEVEN | PSYCHE: THE DOUBLE DOOR

1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. F. J. Miller, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1916), 1: 152–53.

2. Twombly’s fascination with pools and reflections spans Woodland Glade (To Poussin) (1960) and his later “pond paintings.” For Twombly as “Postmodern Narcissus,” see Stephen Bann, “Art and Metamorphosis,” in The True Vine: On Visual Representation and the Western Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 198–201.

3. See Twombly’s poster for the exhibition, Cy Twombly, Allusions (Bay of Naples), February 1975 (Lambert, CTOP VI: 129, #132).

4. Lambert, CTOP VI: 134, #139. For the cult of Dionysus, see E. R. Dodds, “The Blessings of Madness,” in The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 64–82.

5. See Michael Jameson, “The Asexuality of Dionysus,” in Masks of Dionysus, ed. Thomas H. Carpenter and Christopher Faraone (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 44–64.

6. Lambert, CTOP VI: 176, #188.

7. For the dubious etymology (“twice born” or “child of the double door”), see Robert Graves, Greek Myths (London: Cassell, 1955), 56 (perhaps Twombly’s source).

8. On Nietzsche’s development of an abstract “Dionysian” principle, see Albert Henrichs, “‘He Has a God in Him’: Human and Divine in the Modern Perception of Dionysus,” in Carpenter and Faraone, Masks of Dionysus, 13–43.

9. Lambert, CTOP VII: 141, #152. Twombly’s inscription echoes a phrase in M. B. Herter Norton’s bilingual translation of Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus (1942; repr. 1962), the edition used by Twombly: “In the postclassical phase of Greek culture, Orpheus was closely linked with Dionysus, into whose worship he was supposed to have introduced order and beauty” (ibid., 152). Twombly copied out this phrase (“order and beauty”) on a note headed, “Sonnets to ORPHEUS”; another sheet contains the same inscription (“Orpheus / brings order and beauty / to Dionysus”; a third sets out the names “Orpheus” and “Dionysus” over two diagonally oriented rectangles, labeled respectively “order” and “Beauty.” Along with pencil notes and sheets relating to Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, I owe this information to the Archives Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio.

10. Roland Barthes (“Non Multa Sed Multum”) and Philip Sollers (“Les Epiphanies de Twombly”) wrote the introductory essays for Lambert, CTOP VI and VII, respectively.

11. Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, in Yale French Studies 48 (1972), 76, originally published in L’Écriture et la différence (1967).

12. See André Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, trans. Andrew Weller (London: Free Association Books, 2001).

13. Stillinger, Poems of John Keats, 290.

14. See Bastian, CTP II: 128–29, #68. For materiality and the burden of the past in Hyperion, see Shahida Bari, Keats and Philosophy: The Life of Sensations (London: Routledge, 2012), 118–49.

15. Stillinger, Poems of John Keats, 349.

16. Twombly’s library included two copies of the 1960 Loeb edition of The Greek Bucolic Poets, trans. J. M. Edmonds (London: Heinemann, New York: G. P. Putnam, 1912); for the phrase “The Dorian Orpheus is dead” in Moschus’s “Lament for Bion” (l. 19), see ibid., 444–45.

17. See Del Roscio, CTD 2: 238, #198; 239, #199; 248, #206.

18. Cf. ibid., 2: 249, #207, which also includes the phrase “On mists of Idleness”—one of Twombly’s titles for Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor (1994); see chapter 1.

19. Stillinger, Poems of John Keats, 238.

20. Ibid., 290.

21. Ibid., 290. For Keats’s sparrow, see his 1817 letter to Benjamin Bailey; Rollins, Letters of John Keats, 1: 186.

22. Ibid., 1: 194.

23. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1984), 34–35. Cf. Keats on “Negative Capability”—“when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Rollins, Letters of John Keats, 1: 193).

24. Ibid., 2: 106–8. The story of Cupid and Psyche is told in Apuleius’s novel, The Golden Ass, books IV–VI.

25. Rollins, Letters of John Keats, 2: 106.

26. Ibid., 2: 108 (Stillinger, Poems of John Keats, 368).

27. See Del Roscio, CTD 2: 239, #199.

28. Rollins, Letters of John Keats, 2: 106, and Stillinger, Poems of John Keats, 365.

29. Del Roscio, CTD 2: 238, #198.

30. Stillinger, Poems of John Keats, 364; the letter-version reads “Blue, freckle-pink, and budded syrian” (Rollins, Letters of John Keats, 2: 106).

31. Stillinger, Poems of John Keats, 364–65.

32. “… the tears / of the pool, abolished”; see chapter 3.

33. Stillinger, Poems of John Keats, 366.

34. Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, 12. Green’s “thanatophilic ego” wants “to stay within Keats’ poetic universe, an ego half in love with death” (ibid., 23).

35. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 23–24.

36. Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, 38.

37. Stillinger, Poems of John Keats, 377.

38. But: “Freud seemed to want to distinguish clearly between the narcissism of dreams and the narcissism of sleep” (Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, 51).

39. “The mother shields the infant’s autoeroticism” (ibid., 74; Green’s emphasis). Like D. W. Winnicott, Green gestures toward the mother’s role in protecting the infant from traumatic impingent by the external world; cf. Freud, for whom people strive “[t]o be their own ideal once more … as they were in childhood”; “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), in Strachey, Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 14: 100.

40. Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, xxii.

41. For Twombly and the Narcissus story, see Cullinan, Twombly and Poussin, 33–34, and Bann, “Narcissus in Painting,” in The True Vine, 127–56.

42. See Shadi Bartsch, “The Philosopher as Narcissus: Vision, Sexuality, and Self-Knowledge in Classical Antiquity,” in Visuality before and beyond the Renaissance, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 70–97, and The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), esp. 84–102.

43. Rereadings of the Narcissus episode in Ovid are too many to list; but see especially Claire Nouvet, “An Impossible Response: The Disaster of Narcissus,” Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 103–34, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s response, “Echo,” New Literary History 24.1 (1993): 17–43 (alluding briefly to André Green on narcissism; ibid., 34–35).

44. Bastian, CTP I: 242, #148; 243, #149; 245, #151.

45. Bastian, CTP I: 243, #149.

46. See Graves, Greek Myths, 287.

47. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1: 158–59. Twombly’s library contained a 1983 reprint of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (1955).

48. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1. 160–61. Graves’s account emphasizes the blood that soaked the earth as Narcissus dies (see Greek Myths, 288).

49. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1. 158–59. This is close to the form of words used by Graves:: “Ah, youth, beloved in vain, farewell!” (Graves, Greek Myths, 288).

50. See Elaine Fantham, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 45: “one Latin word, imago, denotes both an echo—or aural reflection—and a reflection, which we might conceive of as a visual echo.”

51. “Does a verbal repetition signal identity, or does a gap open up in the space between two instances of the same word?”; Philip Hardie, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 7.

52. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1: 152–53.

53. Ibid., 1: 154–55.

54. Ibid., 1: 154–55. The image “becomes a different kind of imago as Narcissus the viewer is immobilized … by the spectacle of himself as art object”; Stephen Hinds, “Landscape with Figures: Aesthetics of Place in the Metamorphoses and Its Tradition,” in Hardie, Cambridge Companion to Ovid, 137.

55. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1: 148–49.

56. Ibid., 1: 158–59.

57. Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, ix.

58. “Understanding the message, Ameinias turns the object on himself.… Malediction replaces the oracle” (ibid., 45).

59. See Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” 14: 87: “They [homosexuals] are plainly seeking themselves as a love object, and are exhibiting a kind of object-choice which must be termed ‘narcissistic.’” In Freud’s essay on Leonardo, “the boys whom he now loves as he grows up are after all only … revivals of himself in childhood.… He finds the objects of his love along the path of narcissism”; “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood” (1910), in Strachey, Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 11: 100.

60. Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, 37. Cf. Derrida’s “Psyche, Invention of the Other” (1983), for the psyche as “cheval glass”; see Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, ed., Psyche: Inventions of the Other, 2 vols. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007–8), 1: xiii.

61. Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, 37.

62. Ibid., 38. Green’s “Neuter” (negative narcissism) “tends towards non-existence, anaesthesia, emptiness, the blanc (from the English ‘blank’ …)”; ibid., 10.

63. Twombly’s source, Rilke’s Narziss poems, is noted in the introduction to the group of drawings originally exhibited as “Allusions” (Lambert, CTOP VI: 128). For Freud’s 1914 “On Narcissism” as response to Rilke’s Narziss poems, see Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphor and Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 54–55, 170.

64. “Forward,” Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 10.

65. See ibid., 153–54; the angels of the second Duino Elegy are like “mirrors that draw their own outstreamed / beauty into their own face again” (ibid., 153).

66. See chapter 2.

67. One sheet, headed “NARCISSUS,” contains the following fragments from Norton’s commentary: “It lies open now in the indifferent / scattered water, & I may gaze on it / at length under my wreath of roses” and “He loved what went forth out of him / into himself again”; cf. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 153–54; I am grateful to the Archives Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio for making these transcriptions available.

68. Lambert, CTOP VI: 138, #147.

69. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 153. Cf. Erika M. Nelson, Reading Rilke’s Orphic Identity (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 152–54.

70. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 153.

71. Ibid., 154; a reference to Tiresias’s prophecy, “si se non noverit” (Met. iii. 348).

72. See Lambert, CTOP VI: 141, #152; Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 153.

73. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 81, #148.

74. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 133.

75. “Primal Sound,” in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1995), 299.

76. Ibid., 300. On Rilke’s essay, see Friedrich Kittler, in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 44–45.

77. For Rilke’s composition of Sonnets to Orpheus during his stay at Muzot, see Prater, A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke, 182–83, and Judith Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 173–74.

78. “Non Multa Sed Multum,” WCT 99.

79. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 67.

80. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York: W. W. Norton, 1939), 85; Twombly owned the paperback reprint of 1981. The last two lines of the Tenth Duino Elegy form the epigraph to Twombly’s sculpture Untitled (1987): “And we, who have always thought / of happiness climbing, would feel / the emotion that almost startles / when happiness falls” (ll. 110–13); see chapter 1.

81. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 66–67. Twombly inscribed the closing lines of sonnet 26 in German (“O du verlorener Gott! Du unendliche Spur! …”) on one of his 1979 Orpheus drawings; see Lambert, CTOP VII: 70, #64.

82. Rilke owned “a small engraving, representing Orpheus with his lyre … around which, he said, the Sonnets had in a flash grouped themselves” (Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 8).

83. Ibid., 158. The note explicates part II, sonnet 12, referring to Daphne’s transformation into a laurel (“And the transformed Daphne … wants you to change yourself into wind”; ibid., 93)—lines also copied out by Twombly (Archives Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio).

84. See Lambert, CTOP VII: 63, #47, #48. On the back of both Orpheus drawings, Twombly has referenced Rilke’s part II, sonnet 12. Two related Orpheus drawings contain the enigmatic Greek inscription, “ΕλΕστης,” for which I have been unable to find a meaning (Lambert, CTOP VII: 63, #45, #46).

85. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 75.

86. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2: 68–69; see chapter 6 for Virgil’s retelling of the Orpheus story.

87. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2: 68–69.

88. Ibid., 2:70–71. Orpheus is the storyteller of succeeding stories in book X on the theme of boys beloved by the gods (e.g., Hyacinthus): “Orpheus is the patron saint of homosexuality, or, more specifically, of pederasty”; Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 51–52.

89. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2: 122–23.

90. Ibid., 2: 124–25.

91. Part II, sonnet 5 (Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 25).

92. See Lambert, CTOP VI: 132, #136. In Shelley’s lyrical drama Hellas (composed 1821), winged Victory “sweeps all things to their appointed doom / And you to oblivion!” (ll. 450–51); see Reiman and Fraistat, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 444.

93. Lambert CTOP VI: 130, #133; part II, sonnet 13 (Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 95). The lines are also inscribed on another of Twombly’s “Orpheus” drawing (Lambert, CTOP VI: 131, #134).

94. Part I, sonnet 13 (Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 95).

95. Ibid., 8.

96. See Bastian, CTP IV: 92–93, #18; for other Orpheus drawings using the large “O,” cf. Lambert, CTOP VII: 63, #46–48; 69, #60–63.

97. Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Selected Writings, I: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 72.

98. Lambert, CTOP VII: 64, #49 (Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 60–61). The passage is one of those Twombly copied out in English (Archives Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio).

99. Lambert, CTOP VI: 151, #161.

100. Adonais takes one of its epigraphs from Moschus’s lament for Bion; see Reiman and Fraistat, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 408, 409. Subsequent line references refer to this edition.

101. Moschus calls himself “an inheritor of that Dorian minstrelsy which came of [Bion’s] teaching” (Edmonds, Greek Bucolic Poets, 452–53).

102. See Cullinan, Twombly and Poussin, 130–31 and #21; and cf. Twombly’s palm-leaf Cycnus (1979).

103. The second anniversary of the death of William Shelley occurred while Shelley was composing Adonais; see Kelvin Everest, “Shelley’s Adonais and John Keats,” Essays in Criticism 57.3 (2007), 237–64.

104. Edmonds, Greek Bucolic Poets, 388–91.

105. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, 141.

106. Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, 219–20.

CHAPTER EIGHT | TWOMBLY’S LAPSE

1. Nancy, Ground of the Image, 74.

2. See Xavier Girard, Matisse in Nice 1917–1954, trans. Sharon Hughes (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996), [40–41], [38–39]. Girard reproduces the three paintings and the sketch for La Robe Violette from Verve, 4.13 (1945), which also includes the color-coded sketch for La Porte Noire.

3. Éric Mézil, “Cy Twombly: Master-pyrotechnician of Fire Flowers,” in Cy Twombly, Blooming: A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2007), 182 (bracketed references are to the French original).

4. Ibid., 182: “Ça me plaît cet effondrement de la peinture avec Matisse” (ibid., 35).

5. Ibid., 181 (ibid., 34–35).

6. Ibid., 181 (ibid., 34).

7. See, for instance, Untitled, Rome (1997) and Untitled (Jupiter Island) (1992–2004), both included in the Avignon exhibition (ibid., 163, 165).

8. See chapter 6.

9. Jack Flam, Matisse on Art (New York: Phaidon, 1973), 51. For Matisse’s and the “decorative,” see Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 191–206.

10. See Karl Buchberg, Nicholas Cullinan, and Jodi Hauptman, Henri Matisse: The Cut Outs (London: Tate Publishing, 2014).

11. Twombly alludes to the “happy thing that falls” (the last line of Rilke’s Tenth Duino Elegy); see chapter 1; chapter 7. On paint “allowed to flow down the canvas,” see Cycles and Seasons, 231.

12. Cf. Twombly’s Treatise on the Veil (1968, 1970) and the “moving” sculpture Untitled (1981), in Schmidt, Cy Twombly: The Sculpture, 70–71, #27.

13. See Stemmrich, “Talking about the Essence of Something,” 60–85, and cf. Cycles and Seasons, 55–58.

14. Nancy, “Distinct Oscillation,” 72; see also Ian James, “Seeing and Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Ground of the Image,” in Modern French Visual Theory, ed. Nigel Saint and Andy Stafford (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013), 201–18.

15. Octavio Paz, Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Helen Lane (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 251.

16. See, for instance, Untitled or HRIH (1982), in Sylvester, Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper, #47, #48.

17. See Bastian, CTP V: 164–65, #55; Twombly, Blooming, 73, 75. “Ah, the peonies / For which Kusonoki / Took off his armour!”; see R. H. Blyth, ed., Haiku, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1952), 3: 284. Blyth relates the story (ibid., 3: 285); his section on peonies includes some (but not all) of Twombly’s quotations. Twombly’s source for his haiku was the Japanese grandmother of a friend whom he had asked for haiku poems relating to flowers; I am grateful to Yumiko Saito for this information.

18. Mark Francis speculates that the R in “ARMOUR” may have been added later (amour/ armour), conflating love and violence; see Rondeau, Cy Twombly: The Natural World, 41, n. 46.

19. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 50.

20. Basho: The Complete Haiku, trans. Jane Reichhold (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2008), 188. Haiku poetry in translation is rendered variously as three lines, with indentation, or one line with breaks. For the distinction between traditional and modern forms, see Selected Poems of Basho, trans. David Barnhill (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 4.

21. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 45. For the series, see Bastian, CTP V: 154–69, #49–58.

22. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 51.

23. Ibid., 52.

24. Ibid., 53. See Untitled (Winter Pictures), Bastian, CTP V: 110–25, #18–27.

25. Rondeau, Cy Twombly: The Natural World, 30, 41, n. 44. See also Klaus Berger, Japonisme in Western Painting from Whistler to Matisse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. 311–19; for screens, see Lionel Lambourne, Japonisme: Cultural Crossings between East and West (London: Phaidon, 2005), esp. 86–87.

26. See Untitled (1984–2002), in Sylvester, Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper, #82–84. For a related image, see Twombly’s photograph Unfinished Painting (Gaeta, 2006), in Cy Twombly, Photographs 1951–2007, #75.

27. Christian Poncelet, Matisse: Une Seconde Vie (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2005), 65 (Lettre de Matisse du 10 janvier 1946).

28. Ibid., 52–53, 56–61; for Matisse’s illustrated books of the same period, see ibid., 82–91.

29. Ibid., 58–59, 249, n.15.

30. See Untitled (2007); Bastian, CTP V: 167, #57. At upper left, Twombly repeats in small letters the haiku by Kikaku (“Ah, the peonies / For which Kusonoki / Took off his armour!”) that appears on the upper left of the celadon and white peony panel (cf. Bastian, CTP V: 165, #55).

31. See Twombly, Blooming, 56, 57, and Bastian, CTP V: 154–57, #49–#50.

32. Barthes, “Wisdom of Art,” in WCT 105.

33. For the hôtel particulier where Blossoms were first shown, see Mézil, “Cy Twombly: Master-pyrotechnician of Fire Flowers,” 175. Barthes identifies Twombly’s “Mediterranean space” with Valéry’s “vast rooms of the Midi” (WCT 105–6); cf. chapter 2.

34. Serota, “History behind the Thought,” 52, 53, 50; Twombly glosses “form” as “intuitive or emotional form” (ibid., 52).

35. Mézil, “Cy Twombly: Master-pyrotechnician of Fire Flowers,” 183 (ibid., 39).

36. See Tree Peony (1980) and Peonies (1980), in Cy Twombly, Photographs 1951–2007, #67, #68.

37. “The white peony: / At the moon, one evening, / It crumbled and fell”; see Blyth, Haiku, 3: 297; “What is common to both [peony and moon] is the mystery of all things, though the flower is so near us, the moon so far away” (ibid., 3: 297).

38. See also Yoshinobu Hakutani, “Cy Twombly’s Painting of the Peonies and Haiku Imagery,” in Greub, Cy Twombly. Bild, Text, Paratext, 290–92. Blyth associates Issa’s poetry with understated emotion, defining the quality that Basho and Issa share as “an objective-subjectivity in which the thing is suffused with the poetic life of the poet”; see R. H. Blyth, A History of Haiku, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1963), 1: 350–51, 346).

39. “The pistil of the peony is deep; / The bee is making its way out; / A leave-taking” (ibid., 2: 22). The parting here was from Toyo with whom Basho had stayed in 1684. Hakutani identifies the source as Lucien Stryke, trans., On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), 79; see “Cy Twombly’s Painting of the Peonies and Haiku Imagery,” 292. On Basho’s elongation of the second line to eleven instead of seven syllables (“too upset at the parting to keep to the rules of form”), see Reichhold, Basho, 279, n. 254.

40. “The heavy wagon / Rumbles by: / The peony quivers” (Blyth, Haiku, 3: 289); the reference is to the eight-wheeled carts of the wealthy: “The peony trembles a little with the vibration of the ground” (ibid., 3: 289).

41. See Reichhold, Basho, 411, 418.

42. “The stamens and pistil / Of the peony gush out / Into the sunlight” (Blyth, Haiku, 3: 286).

43. See Reichhold, Basho, 411.

44. See Barnhill, Selected Poems of Basho, 9–10.

45. Tacita Dean, Gaeta: A Photo-essay (2008), in Hochdörfer, Cy Twombly: States of Mind, 288; on an adjoining post-it note, Twombly has written: “The soul we once had.”

46. See Bastian, CTP V: 158–59, #51, #52, and cf. the Bacchus series, ibid., 124–43, #28–41—“some of the most liquid that Twombly has produced, engorged and overflowing with paint” (Cycles and Seasons, 220).

47. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 5.

48. “Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust, / Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel / Lidern”; Mitchell, Ahead of All Parting, 194–95. Rilke’s epitaph is marked in Twombly’s edition.

49. Ibid., 410–11; the “O” of Orpheus appears in Twombly’s Orpheus paintings, drawings, and sculpture during the late 1970s, resurfacing in Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor (completed 1994); see Bastian, CTP IV: 92–93, #18, and chapter 1. For the impact of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus on Twombly during the 1970s, see chapter 7.

50. See pt. IV of Analysis of the Rose (1985), Bastian, CTP IV: 118, #27: “Rose, Oh Sheer contradiction, …” Cf. ibid., CTP VI: 66–77, #22–27. In the Brandhorst Rose series, “Petals” replaces “lids” (Lidern); other epigraphs in the Brandhorst series come from Emily Dickinson (“The Soul has moments of Escape”); T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “Little Gidding” (“And all shall be well … when … the fire and the rose are one”; Patricia Waters (“Rose, / brief, / brief in its beauty …”); and Ingeborg Bachmann (“Shadows, Roses Shadows / Under an alien sky …” and “In the Storm of Roses”). Twombly’s transcriptions survive in Archives Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio. On the Brandhorst Rose paintings and the haiku in Blooming, see Armin Zweite, “Twombly’s Rosen: Zu einigen Bildern des Malers im Musum Brandhorst,” in Greub, Cy Twombly. Bild, Text, Paratext, 321–61.

51. See Sylvester, Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper, #52. For the Brandhorst Rose series as a reprise of Analysis of the Rose, see Cycles and Seasons, 229–31. Images in Twombly’s studio included Pierre Bonnard’s late painting, Nature morte au melon (1941), with its clashing Fauvist reds, yellows, and acid greens—perhaps a color-clue, like Matisse’s La Porte Noire (1942).

52. See Bastian, CTP VI: 80–89, # 28–32; for installation photo, see ibid., VI: 78.

53. Nancy, “Distinct Oscillation,” 64.

54. Ibid., 76.

55. Mitchell, Ahead of All Parting, 472–73. Rilke’s 1922 note refers to “a simple ‘eglantine,’ red and yellow, in the colors that appear in flame” (ibid., 588).

56. In a letter of 1923, Rilke calls the white rose “the most perfect image of that unity—I would even say, that identity—of absence and presence which perhaps constitutes the fundamental equation of our life” (ibid., 588).

57. See Herman Meyer, “Rilkes Begegnung mit dem Haiku,” Euphorion, Bd. 74 (1980), 134–68, and Yoriko Shibata, “The Influence of Haiku on Rilke,” Interlitteraria 3 (1998): 335–45.

58. Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe 1914–1926, 2 vols. (Weisbarden: Insel-Verlag, 1950) 2: 489; cf. Shibata, “Influence of Haiku on Rilke,” 341.

59. Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition, 224.

60. Ibid., 225.

61. Lineation as transcribed by Twombly. “Rose, so cherished by our customs, / dedicated to our dearest memories, / become almost imaginary / for being so linked to our dreams—”; Poulin, Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, 22–23, XXV. Poulin inserts three drafts from Rilke’s notebook (this is the second) in the original sequence of twenty-four poems, between the original XXIII and XXIV, disrupting a trajectory that moves from the late blooming rose of the original penultimate verse (XXIII) to the rose barely hanging on in the last (XXIV). For the three additional verses—each quoted in Twombly’s The Rose—see Rainer Maria Rilke, Poèmes français, ed. Karl Krolow (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1988), 212–13. The passages Twombly copied from Poulin’s translations are preserved among his papers (Archives Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio).

62. Mitchell, Ahead of All Parting, 588.

63. “Rose, certainly earthly and our equal, / flower of all our flowers, / inside yourself, petal over petal, do you feel / our own palpable pleasures?”; Poulin, Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, 20–21, XXIV (the third of Rilke’s notebook drafts).

64. See Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 130–55, esp. 147–48; for Merleau-Ponty’s language of noncoincidence, see Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 184–215, esp. 211–15.

65. See Cy Twombly, Photographs, #19–25.

66. “All alone, O abundant flower, / you create your own space; / you stare at yourself in a mirror / of odor. // Your fragrance swirls: more petals / around your teeming calyx. / I hold you back, you sprawl, / marvellous actress”; Poulin, Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, 12–15, XV. Rilke compares the self-sufficient rose to Narcissus: “you invent the theme / of the fulfilled Narcissus” (ibid., 4–5, V).

67. “Overflowing with your dream, / flower with so many others deep / inside, wet as one who weeps, / you lean against the dawn” (ibid., 6–7, VIII). Twombly has omitted the feminized eroticism of the second stanza with its “tender / forms of cheeks and breasts” (ibid., 9).

68. William H. Gass, Reading Rilke, 6 (translation by Gass). Twombly owned Gass’s book, which includes Rilke’s 1900 diary entry: Rilke “invented a new form of caress: placing a rose gently on a closed eye” (“only the gentle petal will continue to rest on the eyelid like sleep just before dawn”); ibid., 4.

69. Ibid., 6: “The poet collects the world inside himself as the rose gathers the light of the skies” (ibid., 7).

70. Twombly follows Poulin’s lineation apart from the last two lines, “the blooming rose is the omen / of her immeasurable endurance”; Poulin, Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, 22–23, XXVI (the first of Rilke’s notebook drafts).

71. Ibid., 22–23, XXVI, stanza 2. The word Poulin translates as “routine” is habitudes, recurring from Panel I (“so cherished by our customs”), implying daily yet continual life.

72. “I see you, rose, half-open book / filled with so many pages / of that detailed happiness / we will never read. Magus-book …” (ibid., 2–3, II).

73. Ibid., 16–17, XVIII.

74. Ibid., 202–3, #53.

75. Nancy, “Distinct Oscillation,” 69.

76. Pincus-Witten, “Peonies / Kusunoki. Thoughts on Cy Twombly’s ‘A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things,’” in Cy Twombly, A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2007), n.p.

77. “… the simple beauty created by an artist who has mastered all the intricacies of an art and returns, thus enriched, to the very beginning” (Reichhold, Basho, 415).

78. Pincus-Witten, “Peonies / Kusunoki,” n.p.

79. Nancy, “Distinct Oscillation,” 64.

80. Poulin, Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, 6–7, VI. “Vocable” includes the sense of “utterance” as well as invocation (for example, a saint’s name).

81. Nancy, “Distinct Oscillation,” 73.

82. Ibid., 75.

83. In a court case associated with the Avignon exhibition of Blooming, an artist was fined for leaving her lipstick kiss on one of Twombly’s paintings; the defense claimed that the kiss had been left as testimony to the power of art.

84. Nancy, “Distinct Oscillation,” 78.

85. Ibid., 67; cf. Mallarmé, “Crisis of Verse,” in Mallarmé, Divagations, 210.

86. Nancy, “Distinct Oscillation,” 72. Nancy also cites Burroughs’s cut-ups, concrete poetry, cubism, the Suprematists, and Hantaï; cf. Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

87. Nancy, “Distinct Oscillation,” 72.