CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/24/2020

'Cy Twombly: Making Past Present' is NEW from MFA Boston

"Death of Pompey," made in Rome, 1962, is reproduced from Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, published to accompany MFA Boston's forthcoming exhibition pairing a selection the artist's paintings, drawings and sculptures alongside works of classical antiquity—some of which were in Twombly's own collection. "Cy Twombly was fascinated by ancient Greece and Rome. This much is incontestable," Brooke Holmes writes. "But when it comes to what we should make of Twombly's lifelong engagement with 'the ancients,' critics have found far less to agree on. What is the status of his knowledge? Erudition? Inspiration? What is the mode of his engagement? Ambition? Play? Affection? Escapism? Iconoclasm? Given the integral place of classical antiquity in Twombly's work—and his move to Italy in the late 1950s—the terms of his reception were, for much of his career, yoked to the broader fortunes of some of the more troubled terms of later twentieth-century criticism: humanism, classicism, aesthetics. The result is that conjugating Twombly with 'the ancients' has tended to sharpen the contrast between two opposed Twomblys: one sited firmly within the canon, alive to timeless truths but inured to the present; the other consummately anticanonical—the 'irreverent schoolboy' who, bored in Latin class, carves the names of dead poets into his desktop, or the Zen master who pricks 'the humanist turgescence.' Twombly's work has always forced a negotiation between the classical and the contemporary…"