Naming the Gods: Cy Twombly's Passionate Poiesis

Naming the Gods: Cy Twombly's Passionate Poiesis concerns itself with the contemporary art work of Cy Twombly as seen against the deep background of classical Greek mythology. In particular, the two entwined figures and images of Orpheus, lyre player, lover and journeyer to the underworld, and Dionysos/Bacchus, god of wine, ecstasy and madness, are taken up as the two principal thematic leitmotifs which animate and overarchingly inform Twombly's entire artistic oeuvre across all the mediums in which he worked, both literally and symbolically, from the early 1950's until the last series of brilliantly colored paintings he made just before his death in 2011. His preoccupations with the rhythms of language, poetry and writing on the one hand, and his tendencies towards wildly expressive gestural abstraction on the other, ultimately combine in his creation of a genuinely new and original performative aesthetic which unites and connects the powerful impulses of mark-making, painting and assembling with the basic human needs for individuation, realization and redemption.

In a long and rich tradition of sublime poiesis spanning ancient Greek tragedy, through Romanticism, the poets Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke, and into our own fragmented and imperiled postmodernist times, Twombly's artistic corpus is viewed as providing a radically renovative relationship and practice for honoring, working with and valorizing both psyche and matter, the inner and outer worlds, as well as with delimiting a uniquely germinative and seminal space for the further enactment of creative human 'doing, ' 'making, ' 'pro-ducing, ' and 'being, ' in reciprocal and intimate relationship with the otherness of 'things, ' nature and the environment.

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Naming the Gods: Cy Twombly's Passionate Poiesis

Naming the Gods: Cy Twombly's Passionate Poiesis concerns itself with the contemporary art work of Cy Twombly as seen against the deep background of classical Greek mythology. In particular, the two entwined figures and images of Orpheus, lyre player, lover and journeyer to the underworld, and Dionysos/Bacchus, god of wine, ecstasy and madness, are taken up as the two principal thematic leitmotifs which animate and overarchingly inform Twombly's entire artistic oeuvre across all the mediums in which he worked, both literally and symbolically, from the early 1950's until the last series of brilliantly colored paintings he made just before his death in 2011. His preoccupations with the rhythms of language, poetry and writing on the one hand, and his tendencies towards wildly expressive gestural abstraction on the other, ultimately combine in his creation of a genuinely new and original performative aesthetic which unites and connects the powerful impulses of mark-making, painting and assembling with the basic human needs for individuation, realization and redemption.

In a long and rich tradition of sublime poiesis spanning ancient Greek tragedy, through Romanticism, the poets Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke, and into our own fragmented and imperiled postmodernist times, Twombly's artistic corpus is viewed as providing a radically renovative relationship and practice for honoring, working with and valorizing both psyche and matter, the inner and outer worlds, as well as with delimiting a uniquely germinative and seminal space for the further enactment of creative human 'doing, ' 'making, ' 'pro-ducing, ' and 'being, ' in reciprocal and intimate relationship with the otherness of 'things, ' nature and the environment.

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Naming the Gods: Cy Twombly's Passionate Poiesis

Naming the Gods: Cy Twombly's Passionate Poiesis

by Gary Astrachan
Naming the Gods: Cy Twombly's Passionate Poiesis

Naming the Gods: Cy Twombly's Passionate Poiesis

by Gary Astrachan

Paperback

$34.95 
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Overview

Naming the Gods: Cy Twombly's Passionate Poiesis concerns itself with the contemporary art work of Cy Twombly as seen against the deep background of classical Greek mythology. In particular, the two entwined figures and images of Orpheus, lyre player, lover and journeyer to the underworld, and Dionysos/Bacchus, god of wine, ecstasy and madness, are taken up as the two principal thematic leitmotifs which animate and overarchingly inform Twombly's entire artistic oeuvre across all the mediums in which he worked, both literally and symbolically, from the early 1950's until the last series of brilliantly colored paintings he made just before his death in 2011. His preoccupations with the rhythms of language, poetry and writing on the one hand, and his tendencies towards wildly expressive gestural abstraction on the other, ultimately combine in his creation of a genuinely new and original performative aesthetic which unites and connects the powerful impulses of mark-making, painting and assembling with the basic human needs for individuation, realization and redemption.

In a long and rich tradition of sublime poiesis spanning ancient Greek tragedy, through Romanticism, the poets Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke, and into our own fragmented and imperiled postmodernist times, Twombly's artistic corpus is viewed as providing a radically renovative relationship and practice for honoring, working with and valorizing both psyche and matter, the inner and outer worlds, as well as with delimiting a uniquely germinative and seminal space for the further enactment of creative human 'doing, ' 'making, ' 'pro-ducing, ' and 'being, ' in reciprocal and intimate relationship with the otherness of 'things, ' nature and the environment.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781630517366
Publisher: Chiron Publications
Publication date: 02/01/2020
Pages: 262
Product dimensions: 8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

Gary D. Astrachan, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and Jungian psychoanalyst in private practice in Portland, Maine. He is a faculty member and supervising and training analyst at the C.G. Jung Institutes in Boston and in Switzerland and lectures and teaches widely throughout North America, Latin America and Europe. He is a founding member of the C.G. Jung Center of Brunswick, Maine, and is also an independent curator of contemporary art installations and exhibitions. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles in professional journals and books and writes particularly on the relationship between analytical psychology and Greek mythology, poetry, painting, film, postmodernism and critical theory.

Table of Contents

Prefatory Note vii

List of Images viii

Chapter I Caesura-ing the Visible 1

Chapter II This Matter of Space/Making Space Matter 7

Chapter III Orpheus descending, falling 25

Chapter IV Leaving Traces and Making Marks 79

Chapter V Dionysos: Performing Madness and Ecstasy 95

Chapter VI Bacchus and the Folds of the World 143

Chapter VII The Rubedo, La Véraison, the Reddening 161

Chapter VIII Seeing and Being Seen /The Spaces Between 197

Appendix I 231

Appendix II 233

Bibliography 235

Acknowledgements 247

Photography and Copyright Credits 248

About the Author 250

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