This exhibition catalogue includes a foreword from Sandra Marinopoulou, Nicholaos Chr. Stampolidis’s “Divine Dialogues—Prologue: The making of an exhibition” and “Cy Twombly and antiquity,” Jonas Storsve’s “Cy Twombly and Greece,” a catalogue of objects (divided into the sections “Pan,” “Aphrodite,” “Apollo and Dionysus,” “The François Vase,” “Aristaeus and Orpheus, and Nike”), a timeline of Twombly’s life, and a bibliography. Text is published in Greek and English.

Both the foreword and the preface focus on Twombly’s relationship to Greece and its history. Stampolidis’s prologue also discusses the Greek artists placed into dialogue with Twombly in the exhibition, as well as describing the exhibition layout. In his essay “Cy Twombly and antiquity,” Stampolidis offers the following gloss of the catalogue: “The texts in the present catalogue focus primarily on the dialectic relationship between Mediterranean antiquity and Twombly's work, as it unfolds through the works presented in this exhibition and the author's gaze… General views and references are made only where deemed necessary, i.e. references to recent studies on the relation between Twombly's works and earlier works of art, primarily of the Renaissance, more rarely of Greco-Roman antiquity, but also literature, particularly poetry” (21). His essay considers Twombly and Greek gods, Twombly and the François vase (570 BCE, collection of the Archaeological Museum of Florence), and Twombly and other figures in Greek mythology such as Aristaeus and Orpheus. Storsve’s essay glosses the many engagements with Greece in the artist’s practice and focuses on the 1970s, identifying it as the period with the most sustained engagement with Greek mythology. Each section of the following catalogue of objects is accompanied by a gloss of the titular figure(s) or object and of Twombly’s engagement with it. 

Scholars interested in this volume may also consult Mary Jacobus’s Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (2016); Richard Leeman’s Cy Twombly: A Monograph (2005); Kate Nesin’s Cy Twombly’s Things (2014); Cy Twombly: Œuvres sur papier 1973–1977, Musée de Grenoble (2023); Audible Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros, published by Daros Services AG (2002); 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)

Published in 2017 on the occasion of the exhibition Divine Dialogues: Cy Twombly and Greek Antiquity at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens (May 25–September 3, 2017).

Divine Dialogues: Cy Twombly and Greek Antiquity. Texts by Nicholaos Chr. Stampolidis and Jonas Storsve. Published by Museum of Cycladic Art, 2017; 168 pages; fully illustrated. Greek/English edition.