Category Archives: painting

The Battle Rages on: Cy Twombly’s 50 Days at Iliam

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Since 1989, with few exceptions, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has featured Cy Twombly’s massive cycle of ten paintings in a gallery at the very end of the Museum’s modern and contemporary art galleries. 50 Days at Iliam tells the story of the end of the Trojan War. The paintings fill the large gallery and its antechamber with a swirl of chaotic action. It is only since spending more time with the work that I realized what is happening; much like Homer’s Iliad, the viewer is dropped in medias res into a story of rage and war that is as relevant today as when it was first told.

Entering, large white canvases covered in scribbles and scratches vie for attention. A huge canvas with three large color clouds anchors the facing wall. Penciled in names and painted texts run over and on top of each other; large color splotches in reds and greys and blues take up vast territories; black lines mark out triangles and phalluses and circles while scratching out other symbols and names; white paint partially or fully effaces the rest. The names of some gods, goddesses, and heroes stand out. The effect is chaotic with no immediate sense of narrative. In place of it, there is a sense of momentum–a rush of red clockwise across the room.

The most arresting canvas to me is the fourth from the left–a giant fireball of red-orange that seems to have exploded, hovering above red script spelling out the phrase “Like a fire that consumes all before it.” In the context of battle it reads like an epic emphatic bloodsplat. While it works on that register, it works more subtly to link the story being told across the canvases as well.

Homer’s Iliad dates to roughly the 8th century BC, and Twombly–enamored with Greco-Roman mythology–closely read Alexander Pope’s 18th-century English translation. In the last fifty days of the Trojan War, the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans comes to head. The great Greeks warrior Achilles refuses to fight because he is enraged that his war booty has been taken from him by his king. The Greeks start to lose. But the Trojan prince Hector kills Achilles’s close companion Patroculus in battle. Achilles wants vengeance and returns to the fray, killing Hector and winning the war for the Greeks. In Homer’s Iliad, the Greek Army is like a fire that consumes all before it. In Pope’s introduction to his translation, Pope compares Homer’s poetry to a fire that consumes all before it. Twombly’s red paint moves across the canvases on the left side of the room, spelling out the name of Achilles and the other Greek heroes and the painted works also consume what is before them–both clockwise, as the red colors fade into the blues and greys of the dead souls of the Trojans on the right side of the room, and on the facing canvases. The Fire that Consumes All Before It faces The House of Priam, and indeed that fire, of the Greek warriors, will consume and destroy the members of the Trojan king’s house just as it visually does in the installation that Twombly creates.

The artist advised the museum on how to install his 10-painting cycle, and the current gallery has been carefully modified to fit the artist’s requirements. The first painting in the cycle–The Shield of Achilles–hangs immediately outside the gallery. It represents the gift that the nymph Thetis made for her son Achilles to protect him in battle and which was famously described in intricate detail in Homer’s Iliad. Upon entering the room, bold red script lists out the Greek army in Heroes of the Achaeans, with the words Achillles and Achaens being most prominent. Achaens are Greeks, and Ilians are Trojans. Twombly uses Greek and Roman naming conventions, and deliberately subverts conventional spellings in other ways, substituting the Greek Delta for As and mispelling “Ilium” in the title of the cycle as “Iliam”–the extra A intended as a reference to Achilles.

Even while the large white surfaces are covered in text, much of that writing is deliberately painted over or scratched out. Heroes of the Achaens is the second painting in the cycle, but Twombly pairs it visually with the last painting in the cycle, Heroes of the Ilians, by placing it on the same wall. It is thematically linked. Heroes of the Ilians is also a roll call of the characters who played a part in those last fifty days, this time those on the Trojan side. Their defeat and demise is denoted by the many erasures and the use of grey, white, and blue to evoke the cool shades of death. So too does the shamrock-like outline which recalls the color clouds that Twombly uses elsewhere to evoke shades. Shades, in the ancient Greek conception, are souls of the dead that inhabit the underworld.

Facing the red rage of the left-hand side paintings, full with the names and stories of the Achaean warriors, is a line up of the Trojan side, its warriors and goddesses and battle positions, but Twombly uses a light cyan and grey, a color linked to death, for the panels on this side. The two armies are facing off on the opposing walls. At the same time, the emotional arc of the room cycles from left to right, from rage to death. In Achaens in Battle, Twombly paints the word “artist” above what looks like a painter’s palette at the very bottom of the canvas. To me, this suggests that the artist is putting himself in a spectator’s seat for the battle, and by proxy, so are we the viewer in prime seats to watch the climax of The Iliad unfold.

Twombly paints abstract portraits of the characters in the form of color clouds in the central painting Shades of Achilles, Patroculus, and Hector. Shades of Achilles, Patroculus, and Hector hangs on the back wall, facing the viewer as you enter the gallery. It represents the culmination of the plot and the events that led to the fall of Troy, and it mediates between the red rage of the Greeks that moves toward it on the left and the blue shades of death that moves away from it on the right on the Trojan side. It is the death of Patroculus by Hector that brings Achilles back into the fray. Achilles then kills Hector, knowing that by doing so he fates himself to die.

Alexander Pope’s translation begins with the words: 

Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring 
Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing!

But in Homer the poem begins with the word μῆνιν, or rage. Rage is the driving force of the story, and it unfurls across the Twombly’s painting like a vengeful river on the left-hand side of the gallery until it transmutes into blue-grey death on the right-hand side of the gallery. Twombly takes the gestural marks of action painting and the lessons of abstraction and applies them to a Classical theme, reopening this subject matter for contemporary art at a time when the impetus for painting was thought to come from the artist’s psyche. The old story becomes distilled to the emotional forces at work, creating a meditation on war and its causes, the grievances and vengances its nurtures, and the implacable way it moves forward once it starts. Then and now, the end is the same: Shades of Eternal Night await the warriors of those fifty days battling on the plains of Troy.

Hilma af Klint’s Vast Cosmic Synthesis at the Guggenheim

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Installation view. Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future at the Guggenheim Museum, October 12, 2018 – April 23, 2019.

Between 1906 and 1915, a young artist in Stockholm worked tirelessly under the instruction of a set of spirit-guides to complete a set of 193 paintings. She dreamed that they would one day decorate a circular temple that spiraled upward. Over a hundred years later, that vision came partially true, with the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future installed in the Guggenheim’s high round atrium. Hilma af Klint’s work, largely unknown until about 30 years ago, feels like a surprise and revelation for several reasons. She was a successful female artist in Stockholm at a time when women did not have professional careers, and she was a visionary who painted abstract paintings avant la lettre. For the former, Hilma produced careful botanical illustrations; the focus of the exhibition is her magnificent body of abstract paintings, particularly the 193 paintings for the temple.

Group IX/UW, The Dove, No. 13. 1915. Oil on canvas.

The exuberantly colored paintings look as though they could have been made yesterday, so easily do they fit the visual mores of our time. Hilma intended these paintings “for the future”, when they would be more readily understood as diagrams that reveal the essential nature of the universe. Abstraction as we often understand it–simplifying the form of a real object like a tree or chair to get at its essential nature, for example–is not what is happening here. “Nonobjective” painting, which the Guggenheim was founded as a temple to, use geometries to attain a spiritual dimension instead of relating to the physical world. Hilma’s work, although spiritual and geometric, operates by yet another means.

Group VI, Evolution, No. 7. 1908. Oil on canvas.

The artist’s extensive notebooks and journals detail how she saw these works as diagrams of natural and scientific phenomena, such as atoms and evolution. It is as if she was attempting to make a periodic table of the cosmos in 193 paintings. A devout Christian, Hilma famously claimed that spirits guided her early work, telling her what to paint. Today that sounds like quackery. It was more common and accepted within society, and, indeed, the scientific community at the time. Her approach is painstaking: she strives for an accurate analysis of the systems of the cosmos using visual means. 

Installation shot, Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 5 – 8, Adulthood. 1907. Tempera on paper, mounted on canvas.
Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 1, Childhood. 1907. Tempera on paper, mounted on canvas.

The The Ten Largest series represents the different stages of life. Each line and color aligns with a complex symbology that Hilma created. For example, Hilma associated the blue of the above work with childhood. These ten paintings are presented in order of childhood, to youth, to adulthood, to old age on the Guggenheim’s walls, which is what the artist intended: they were meant to be seen as a series and only in that order can they represent that whole lifespan of a person. Hilma made these large, roughly 10×8-foot paintings on the floor (before Pollock). This series is the first you encounter at the Guggenheim, setting the stage for the exuberant and complex paintings the fill the circular ramp.

  • Tree of Knowledge, No. 1. 1913. Watercolor, gouache, graphite, and ink on paper.
  • Tree of Knowledge, No. 3. 1915. Watercolor, gouache, graphite, and ink on paper.
  • Tree of Knowledge, No. 4. 1915. Watercolor, gouache, graphite, and ink on paper.

At the same time, watercolors like the gorgeous Tree of Life illustrations show how Hilma also worked on a very small scale. She was an inveterate planner and notetaker. Partially this is because she wanted to make sure future generations understood her work. Notebooks contain detailed instruction on different symbols or the meaning of certain colors. This care points to her confidence that future generations, if not her own, would appreciate the detailed, god-given visions that she presents.

Altarpieces (from left to right): Group X, No. 2, Group X, No. 3, Group X, No. 1. All oil and metal leaf on canvas. 1915.

After 1915, and a personal crisis, Hilma’s practice changed from one of explicit direction by spirit guides to a more self-directed selection of imagery, in series of paintings such as Evolution, Dove, Swan. For Hilma, the scientific and spiritual worlds were naturally conjoined, and so she moved easily between the subject matter of Evolution to the trio of Altarpieces (above). At the same time as Hilma explored a radically non-representational mode of painting, she was trained and successful as a botanical draftsperson, of which there are a few examples. Her life’s work, therefore, seems to have been one of vast synthesis. Hilma’s colorful iconography illustrates no less than the interconnected nature of all natural systems and world religions. Sweeping from the micro of a botanical illustration like the one below to the paintings above, Hilma could see a world in a grain of sand, and then create a visual analysis of its place in the cosmos.

Untitled. 1890s. Watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper.

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future is on view through April 23 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

A Schematic and Spiritual Early Abstraction: Hilma af Klimt

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Hilma af Klint in her studio, 1895

Swedish painter Hilma af Klint is pictured above at age 33, looking entirely comfortable in her studio space in Stockholm among figurative works and wooden furniture. This conventional photograph does not hint at her other body of work: large and dynamic abstract paintings that preceded work by such pioneers of abstraction in modern art as Kandinsky and Malevich. “The Keeper” exhibition, up at the New Museum through September 25, boasts a beautiful gallery with 16 of these audacious, tactile, spiritually driven exercises in expressing the nature of a godly reality through reduced line and color. They make a case for a kind of abstraction not encompassed by the story of a move toward reduction and simplification in response to an increasingly chaotic modern world.

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Installation view, “The Keeper,” New Museum, 2016

Af Klint was in fact trying to express a complex vision of the world. John Yau describes af Klint’s exhibition history and context wonderfully in this essay on Hyperallergic. Yau clarifies how the artist arrived at the mystic belief that “painting was the best medium for bringing the invisible or occult world into the visible.” Her readings in theosophy led her to pursue schematic illustrations in which color has distinct emotional valences (for example, blue represented masculinity; pink, spiritual love). As the image below suggests, af Klint’s works are tactile and imperfect, as if the artist was unconcerned with rigorous line for its own sake, but rather pursued form to make visible the underlying order she found in the world. Her abstract paintings were not shown publicly until 1986, writing her out the history of modernist abstraction that she pre-dated. Since then her work has been increasingly shown.

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The Swan, No. II, Group IX/SUW, 1914-15

Why did Massimiliano Gioni and the other curators include these paintings in “The Keeper”? They don’t suggest an interest in preservation in themselves. Rather than small sketches or drawing diagrams on paper, af Klint choose to work in paint on large canvases, despite the fact that she did not show or sell these works as she did in her concurrent figurative practice. Instead, she preserved these works at home until her death in 1944. Gioni, Artistic Director of the New Museum, also included af Klint’s work in the Central Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. At that time, he defended her mystic occultism, which to many people would separate it from art as such, saying:

“placing a work [of art] next to materials that are difficult to classify [such as af Klint’s], thus repositioning it in a narrative dimension, the reinterpretation of the piece is reactivated as both the trace of a personal experience and a different means through which to conceive our image culture. Thus the work of art returns to its former existence as a mysterious object charged with multiple meanings, and returns to presenting a view on the world.

…What really interested me was to reveal the mysterious and, at time, even mystical fascination with art….To escape from the definition of a work’s quality according to its market value. I believe it is essential that works are inserted into a discourse that embraces the entire system of images, including pieces that do not conform to the rules of the market”

—I Dream of Knowing Everything: An Interview with Massimiliano Gioni on the 55th International Art Exhibition, by Christina Baldacci (Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, 2013)

Perhaps one can interpret preservation more generously, in which case these images display a need of the artist to preserve a vision of inner reality of the world. Their size is impressive. Yet, the square format does not recall the human figure, as is sometimes ascribed to vertically oriented canvases. They remain removed from the human experience in their non-figurative imagery as well–for example, in the dynamic composition of radial swirls spiraling across a red background as in The Swan, No. 9 below. Af Klint also used recognizable elements at times, such as birds or astrological signs. In her hands, these elements serve a symbolic purpose rather than an attempt at illusionism.

The Swan, No. 9, Group IX/SUW, 1914-15

The Swan, No. 9, Group IX/SUW, 1914-15

Af Klint’s paintings do an amazing job of unsettling notions of abstraction in art history and the role of mystic diagrams in high art. The paintings do not confirm to the rules of the market, certainly, but they don’t confirm to the story of high art either. I, at least, experienced them as powerful and challenging images. Even at the overwhelming Central Pavilion at the Biennale, af Klint’s few contributions exercised some kind of magnetic appeal. Seeing a larger group of her paintings at the New Museum now is rewarding, as they easily slip into the Modernist, white cube context but still resist clear categorization. It is touching to see the fragile application of paint and imagine the strange tenacity which drove a young Swedish women to create such unconventional works that operate even today on several registers.