Untitled (Bolsena)

In a lonely farmhouse, just north of Rome, the world changed around Cy Twombly. An artist who had always dealt with the ancients, an artist of myths and antiquity, of the twin forces of Dionysus’ chaos and Apollo’s order, was thrust into modernity when a Rocketship took three men to the moon. The Bolsena series was painted in the shadow of the Apollo mission, the very name almost a challenge to the artist to update his ancient associations. In these works, he embraces the rationality and order of the God Apollo to deal with contemporary events, a rare instance in his artistic career. Thoughts of space and science, of numbers, calculations and ascension filled his mind as he worked, after a summer spent closely watching the news of the mission. Twombly translated his primal mark making style into something that could speak to its opposite, to an undisputed mark of progressed civilization. His work becomes almost diagrammatic, the lyricism of his fluid style seem like calculations, the diagonal arc capturing a sense of the rocket’s movement across the sky. The painting exists in a tension, between gravity and weightlessness, movement and stasis, antiquity and technology. Twombly was reckoning with his place as a contemporary artist who had, up until now, not dealt with his contemporary world.