Naming the Veils, Tracing the Shades: The Eternal Returns of Cy Twombly
By Devon Deimler

Scribbled icons and scrawled monikers from Greek mythology. Scattered knots upon vast surfaces of yellowed white—lingering, ingrown, beneath smeared layers of fleshy oil stick and smudged pencil. American abstract painter Cy Twombly can lead a survey of Under-Art-Worlds for these images, often described as mad or childish, and for his perennial references to bygone figures famous for journeys Below. Even a brief underworld exploration of Twombly’s work may gain depth when led by one of the artists’ primary mythic guides—the poet Orpheus, known most intimately to Twombly through the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, is a misty myth of lost love and death, of near retrieval and thereafter eternal poetic remembrance. Twombly follows Orpheus in a manner that maintains the underworld’s sense of vagueness and at the same time pierces or rends that veil with an incisive act of memento mori: naming as a way of resurrecting the dead. 

“Transience everywhere plunges into a deep being” – Rilke ​

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