This volume includes a preface from Doris Ammann and Georg Frei, Heiner Bastian’s “Anatomy Out of Light and the Sea: Cy Twombly’s Triptych ‘Hero and Leandro,’” color plates, and a list of works exhibited.

Bastian’s brief essay begins with Museaus’s account of the myth of Hero and Leander, describing the Leander’s drowning in the Hellespont while trying to reach his lover Hero. He identifies “an equally tragic parallel in the mythical story of the lovers Pyramus and Thisbe told by Ovid in Metamorphoses book IV” and notes Arthur Rimbaud and William Shakespeare’s respective responses. He then turns to Christopher Marlowe’s unfinished version of the narrative, which George Chapman completed and published after Marlowe’s passing. Arriving at last at Twombly’s four-part painting, Bastian asserts that “[i]ts predicative imagery is the Mediterranean mythological world of Apollonian beauty and the sheer boundlessness of its mutability. But it is also the reflection of Dionysian nature, a force without which the Apollonian would be inconceivable.” As is typical of his writing on Twombly, Bastian stresses “indiscernibility,” emphasizing “the suggestion of an interminable sensualistic meaning.” He also discusses the following list of referents: “poems by the Soldier and poet Archilochos of Paros, the hymns of Artemis and Hera written by the former slave and poet Alman from the Lydian capital Sardes, and the few surviving lyric Euclidean fragments by Sappho of Lesbos, the most dreamlike of all the islands off the coast of Asia Minor.” He then considers landscape as metaphor in Hero and Leandro, drawing on Saint-John Perse, and concludes that “[t]he painting in its meditative radiance returns to nature, to the echoless space of the sea, and to its myth.”

Scholars interested in this volume may also consult Mary Jacobus’s Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (2016), especially chapter 5, “Romantic Twombly”; Cy Twombly, ed. Kirk Varnedoe (1994); Stephen Bann’s “Wilder Shores of Love: Cy Twombly’s Straying Signs,” in Materialities of Communication (1994); Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters, ed. Nicholas Cullinan (2011); Richard Leeman’s Cy Twombly: A Monograph (2005); Demosthenes Davvetas, “The Erography of Cy Twombly” (1989); and Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, eds. Christine Kondoleon and Kate Nesin (2020). 

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

This catalogue has been published on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly (June 8–September 29, 2017) at Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich.

Cy Twombly. Anatomie aus Licht und Meer, Anatomy out of light and the sea. Text by Heiner Bastian. Published by Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich, 2017. 48 pages, fully illustrated. German/English edition.