This monograph by Gary D. Astrachan includes the following chapters: “Caesura-ing the Visible”; “This Matter of Space/Making Space Matter”; “Orpheus descending, falling”; “Leaving Traces and Making Marks”; “Dionysos: Performing Madness and Ecstasy”; “Bacchus and the Folds of the World”; “The Rubedo, La Véraison, the Reddening”; “Seeing and Being Seen / The Spaces Between.” The volume considers Twombly in light of both the myths from classical antiquity that he frequently invoked throughout his practice and subsequent figures in classical reception such as Friedrich Hölderlin with whom Twombly had an affinity. Of Twombly’s oeuvre, Astrachan asserts that “[t]his art makes its connections through disintegration, disruption. sexuality, chaos, breakdown, loosening, loss, trauma, and madness” (5). He also engages heavily with Giorgio Agamben’s essay on Twombly, “Beauty that falls,” which is reproduced in full in Cy Twombly Sculptures 1992–2005, published by the Alte Pinakothek München with Schirmer/Mosel (2006). Of the titular poesis, Astrachan writes that “[p]oiesis also opens up a terrible gulf of aloneness and presents this other, through the presentational experience itself. Poiesis is, in fact, just this presentation and production of 'otherness.’” (12). Throughout, in applying this to Twombly’s work, he maintains that “Poiesis is this work which we enjoin and fling ourselves into, basically, in order to die, and perhaps, be reborn—and perhaps not. The faint and vanishing traces etched by this inexorable and relentless effort onto and into matter we call art, poiesis, the attempted articulation, testimony and witnessing of what it is to be for a while, for a brief time, in this human life” (23). 

Scholars interested in this monograph may also consult the following volumes: Cy Twombly, published by the Centre Pompidou (2016); Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, ed. Nicholas Serota (2008); Mary Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (2016); Thierry Greub, Inscriptions (2022); Cy Twombly, published by Gagosian Gallery (2016); Dominique Baqué’s Cy Twombly: Sous le signe d’Apollon et de Dionysos (2016); Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, eds. Christine Kondoleon and Kate Nesin (2020); Nela Pavlouskova’s Cy Twombly: The Late Paintings 2003–2011 (2015); Camino Real, published by Gagosian (2010); and Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works, 2000–2007, published by Yale University Press for the Art Institute of Chicago (2009).

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Naming the Gods: Cy Twombly's Passionate Poiesis. By Gary D. Astrachan. Published by Chiron Publications, 2019. 250 pages. English edition.