Untitled (Bacchus)
Cy Twombly
CY TWOMBLY, 2008. ACRYLIC PAINT ON CANVAS
The ‘new mythology’ of 1950s America never appealed to Cy Twombly. Departing the US in 1957 for Rome, it was instead the ancient Roman and Greek pantheons that intrigued him. Unlike the great sculptors of those eras, Twombly’s vision of the divine was never set in stone - instead, he championed a more primeval approach. He painted this enormous 3-by-5 metre canvas using a pole-mounted decorator’s brush. Its bright red spirals seem to both climb and fall; running down the canvas like the dripping of wine. Bearing the Roman appellation of Bacchus, god of wine and celebration, Twombly spent years working on the series in direct response to the Iraq War. The paintings cannot contain the madness within them, it rises from the depths and engulfs the room.. ‘To paint,’ said Twombly, ‘involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of sensation or release.’