Image: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
The Philadelphia Museum of Art has reprinted its catalogue on Cy Twombly’s 'Fifty Days at Iliam', bringing back a publication devoted to one of the artist’s best-known works. The museum’s store says the book is back in stock after its third reprinting, while the exhibition page identifies 'Cy Twombly’s Iliad' as the framework for the project. The catalogue is presented as a multifaceted account of 'Fifty Days at Iliam' (1978), a cycle of ten paintings based on Alexander Pope’s 18th-century translation of Homer’s 'Iliad'.
The museum describes the publication as a revelatory resource that combines scholarly essays, firsthand accounts of Twombly at work, and images of the canvases together with related drawings and sculptures. According to the store listing, the volume is edited by Carlos Basualdo and includes essays by Basualdo, Olena Chervonik, Richard Fletcher, Emily Greenwood and Nicola Del Roscio. The publication also reproduces previously unpublished photographs showing 'Fifty Days at Iliam' in the artist’s studio at the time the paintings were completed.
Twombly’s series has long been understood through the lens of classical literature and mythology, and the museum’s exhibition text underlines that connection. 'Fifty Days at Iliam' is described there as a “painting in ten parts” about the final days of the Trojan War, and as a pinnacle of Twombly’s lifelong preoccupation with Greek and Roman mythology. The museum says the artist deliberately misspelled the besieged city as Iliam, and that within the cycle he explored heroism and aggression, comradeship and revenge, victory and mourning through the language of abstraction and figuration.
The exhibition page also places the paintings alongside related material that helps frame Twombly’s visual thinking. A group of large drawings titled 'Shades of Night' is presented as revealing preparatory work and the development of visual motifs around the same period. The museum notes that these drawings can be read as an artist’s diary or as a kind of astronomical notation, and says their progression from deep blues to brighter reds echoes a movement from darkness to dawn. The page further points to Twombly’s recurring treatment of word as image.
Alongside the drawings, the exhibition included six bronze sculptures chosen by Twombly in 2011 as complements to 'Fifty Days at Iliam'. The museum states that five of those works were recent gifts of the Cy Twombly Foundation, while an untitled work from 1979 was a promised gift of Keith L. and Katherine Sachs. The sculptures are described as abstract forms that nonetheless reflect Twombly’s sustained engagement with classical art, with charioteers, banners, sea sails and thrones evoking triumph, defeat and the residue of ancient warfare.
The exhibition 'Cy Twombly’s Iliad' was shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from May 20, 2017, to Oct. 8, 2017, in Alter Gallery 176 and Tuttleman Gallery 174 on the first floor. Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, is listed as the curator, and support for the exhibition came from The Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Art. The catalogue, published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is listed at 168 pages and priced at $60.
