“Gary Astrachan literally gathers the reader up into an entrancing meditation on the transformative power of art to change our minds. His book evokes the healing poiesis of art and is a precious gift to our troubled and chaotic times.”
-Murray Stein, Ph. D., author of The Bible As Dream
“Gary Astrachan has written a book in somewhat of a new genre all its own. Depth psychology, philosophy, mythology, art history and literary criticism here interpenetrate, cross-breed and give birth to a poetic dissertation on the perennial attempt to name the gods back into our lives. He weaves the threads of Western culture into a garment that could be worn seamlessly at the Knitting Factory or in the Academy, while delivering us from a labyrinth of images and ideas into revery again and again. Occasionally, more often in the wake of some fall that radically disrupts and shatters the fragile psychic structures that we tend to regard as reality, we get to experience the interconnectedness of all phenomena, and sometimes even, the formless common ground from which it emerges. Here in Astrachan’s book on the art works of Cy Twombly along with those of a selection of his stellar forebears and fellow ‘effers’ of the ineffable and their mythic heritage, is in effect something of a guide book for the inhabiting of such realms.”
-Corwin Fergus, Jungian analyst, and filmmaker of Oil and Water: Reflections on Nature, Madness and Psyche
“It took my breath away to come upon the Maenads scrawled across the top of a single canvas once in a museum, and now there’s an entire book devoted to the Dionysian pressure in Cy Twombly’s life and work. Astrachan’s book elucidates Twombly’s art while exploring a mythological pulse and psychological territory not previously entered. His painterly writing is gorgeous– smart and luscious wine-soaked prose that turns into poetry. Following the sublime Orphic thread through these pages with Astrachan gives us a clue to the epiphanies in Twombly’s oeuvre, the determination, touches of madness, the intelligent and erotic élan vital, the pouring forth into language and image that never ceased in his spectacular career.”
-Nor Hall, author of Irons in the Fire and Those Women
“In this moving and penetrating book, Gary Astrachan has succeeded in excavating many of the deeper Graeco-Roman mythological influences which make their presence felt in the art work of Cy Twombly. The author explores the multi-faceted meanings which Twombly’s art invokes in its performative processes, and makes us look with new eyes, hearts, and minds at the soulful dimensions of artistic creativity in general. Living amidst the poetic splendors and fragmented histories of Rome, Twombly drew upon its layered aesthetic treasures in his life-long pursuit of weaving mythological meanings into completely contemporary
forms.Astrachan dwells brilliantly on the signs, messages and interconnections in Twombly’s paintings and drawings which restore language, writing and mark-making to their archetypal backgrounds in the realm of the gods. This book helps us to grasp the ‘understandable’ in Twombly’s work while creating space for what is not yet ‘understandable,’ or perhaps even ‘representable,’ to still strongly resonate.”
-Allan Guggenbühl, Jungian analyst and author of Men, Power, and Myths
