The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Cy Twombly · a cycle of ten paintings scored as one work, numbered I to X under ten titles, among them Shield of Achilles, The Fire that Consumes All before It and Shades of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector · oil, oil crayon and graphite on canvas · 1978 · Philadelphia Museum of Art, in a gallery given to the cycle alone · all ten surviving and kept together
Mode
History painting remade as handwriting; a Homeric cycle of ten canvases in which names, scrawl and bare ground carry the war
Mythos
The Iliad laid out as a room: two hosts facing, the shield that holds the world, the wrath, the friend’s death, the burning, and enemy and victor equal among the dead
Phase
Dated 1978, the late summit of a Homeric subject the painter had taken up in 1962 to 1964
Presentation
Ten canvases numbered I to X: four titled for the Greeks with the shield of the Greek hero, three for the Trojans, one for the fire and one for the dead of both sides
Register
Heat and tumult in the battles and the fire, a cool roll call in the lists of names, severity in the shield, thinning toward the shades
Scale
Ten canvases in one room, two armies, three named heroes, the walk from shield to shades
Governing Proposition
Ten canvases carry the Iliad as a modern hand can hold it: a shield, the names of the heroes written out, two battles in scrawl, a house, a mourning, a fire that belongs to neither army, and at the end the shades of the victor, his friend and his enemy in one painting. The wager of the cycle is that the epic now survives as writing over erasure, that history painting can be remade as the trace of a hand remembering, and that a room of canvases can set the visitor between two armies who are written in one hand and burn in one fire.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The title is spelled as no scholar would spell it. Fifty Days at Iliam: the city’s name as a hand writes it, not as the classicists give it. Cy Twombly (1928 to 2011) painted the cycle in 1978, ten canvases in oil, oil crayon and graphite, and it belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which shows it in a gallery given to it alone. The ten are one work. No canvas is weighed apart, and the room the museum gives them is how they are met.
Homer was not new to the painter. In 1962 he had painted Vengeance of Achilles and Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus, and in 1964 Ilium (One Morning Ten Years Later). Those are separate works and stand outside this one, as does the rest of his career. What they show is that the manner and the subject were his own sixteen years before the cycle: the mark taken from the gestural painting of New York in the 1950s, the large field, and the turn of both toward script, the written name set in the field of a painting.
The ten are numbered I to X and titled. Four are given to the Greeks by title: Heroes of the Achaeans, Vengeance of Achilles, Achaeans in Battle and Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus, with the shield of the Greek hero besides. Three are given to the Trojans: Ilians in Battle, House of Priam and Heroes of the Ilians. One is given to the fire that takes both, and one to the dead of both. Achilles is named in four titles, Patroclus in two, Hector in one. Titles and names are written on the canvases, and writing is a material of the work.
Movement II
In the order usually given, the cycle opens with Shield of Achilles. In Homer the shield holds the whole world. Here it is a circle, severe and emblematic, and it stands for the whole of what follows. Whether it is Homer’s world, a target or an emblem of art itself the canvas does not settle, and the question has stayed open.
By the usual account, which is not confirmed here, the arrangement of the room is the painter’s: the shield at the threshold, the Greek canvases along one wall and the Trojan along the other, so that the visitor walks between the two armies. The titles themselves make the division: four canvases and the shield for one side, three for the other, one for the fire and one for the dead. On that division the cycle builds its argument, and the subtractive test runs along it. Take away the Trojan roll call and the Greek one faces nothing; take away either battle and one side of the war is gone.
The inheritance is history painting, the oldest high genre, which took the Trojan War as a stock subject and the cycle of canvases as its grand form. In 1978 such a cycle ran against the field. Narrative cycles, classical subjects and the written name stood far from Minimal and Conceptual art, and Twombly’s standing in New York was then low. The stake was real, though it was placed on a path the painter had already cut.
Movement III
Two of the canvases are rolls of heroes, one for each army. The epic is reduced to its roll call and written out by hand on open ground, so that names hold a wall. These are the coolest parts of the cycle and the most legible, writing at its plainest. They ask little of the hand, and their effect is reading rather than transport; they are the canvases most often charged as thin. But they are paired, and the pairing is the room’s premise: two hosts named and facing.
Between them stand the battles. Achaeans in Battle and Ilians in Battle give a frenzy of marks across wide ground, scrawl in crayon and graphite that reads as tumult at the scale of the body. The line is the cycle’s whole voice, its speed and pressure visible, and graphite is drawn into the paint and rubbed back. In places the line is mannered rather than urgent. The same hand writes both armies, and the cycle means it to: the Greek and the Trojan are written alike.
The middle of each side yields. Vengeance of Achilles and House of Priam could be lost and the argument would stand, and the sequence along each side could be shuffled in places without the work knowing less. The city and the family enter by the title of the House of Priam, named rather than painted, and much of the cycle holds its orders so: the archetype carried by titles and written names, the particular thin. A viewer without the titles would see red, scribble and white ground.
Movement IV
One canvas belongs to neither army. The Fire that Consumes All before It is a mass of red worked as if burning outward, and it is the height of the cycle. It is the hinge between the two sides and the one place where the war is shown as a single force, taking both. Red is held back elsewhere, for fire, blood and the hero’s wrath against pale ground, so that here, where it is spent, it tells.
The fire and the roll of names are the cycle’s two most distant elements, the most violent mark and the most legible writing, and they obey one law. The hand writes the war on bare ground, where a name and a burst of fire are both marks made at speed, and legibility is only a degree. The shield’s circle, the battle scrawls and the faint end obey the same law. Nothing in the ten breaks it; what weakens it is that the law is broad enough to admit thin canvases without testing them.
What the cycle says can be stated. The epic survives as a list of names and a fury of marks, and what a modern hand can hold of Homer is the writing of the names, the circle of the shield and the colour of fire: remembering heroic war is a kind of writing over erasure. And war consumes both sides alike. The second meaning is the Iliad’s, carried by title; the first is the cycle’s own, and it is a meaning, not a mood.
Movement V
The cycle walks toward one painting: Shades of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector, the victor, his friend and his enemy in one field among the dead. After the fire the register turns, and grief arrives as thinning and quiet; the colour of the canvas is described as draining, which is not confirmed here. The man who killed and the man he killed stand in one picture, and the war that was written in one hand ends in one ground.
All ten canvases survive together in one collection, never dispersed, and are shown together; no part is known to be lost or replaced, and no restoration is recorded. Nothing stands where an original stood. The surfaces are the fragile ones of oil crayon and graphite on largely bare canvas, easily abraded. Forty-eight years on, the cycle’s standing has risen with its maker’s, and the elevation it gives is the room’s: in reproduction most of it is lost.
A body of writing on Twombly, his classicism and his painting as writing returns to this cycle as the summit of his Homeric work, and the questions stay open: history painting or its ruin, words to be read or seen, violence enacted or remembered. Its reach is harder to show. The return of myth and the classical in painting around 1980 is often traced in part to Twombly, but what can be shown belongs to his work as a whole, not to these ten. The cycle stands as the late summit of a turn he had made twenty years before, and the shades are still at the end of the room.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the configuration, as the room presents it. The paired parts resist removal: take away Heroes of the Ilians and the Greek roll call faces nothing, and the premise of two armies with the visitor between them falls. Take away Achaeans in Battle or Ilians in Battle and one side of the war is gone. The Fire that Consumes All before It is the hinge, the one canvas belonging to neither army, and the shades are the end the cycle walks toward. What yields is the middle of each side: Vengeance of Achilles and House of Priam could go with the argument intact. Within canvases the bare ground is a wager the subtractive test cannot always decide.
Score: 7.7 / 10
What is brought into the open can be stated, through image and script together. First: the epic survives as a list of names and a fury of marks; what a modern hand can hold of Homer is the writing of the names, the circle of the shield and the colour of fire, and remembering heroic war is a kind of writing over erasure. Second: war consumes both sides alike; the fire has its own canvas between the armies, and victor, friend and enemy share one painting at the end. These are meanings, and they hold. What holds the axis is that the condition disclosed is largely the Iliad’s, carried by title, and much of what the canvases give is a state: heat, agitation, pallor.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Elevation is real and recurs, and it is violent and scattered. The fire canvas, a mass of red worked as if burning outward, is the cycle’s height. The battle canvases give a frenzy of marks across wide ground that reads as tumult at the scale of the body. The shield’s circle has a severe, emblematic grandeur. The end gives the opposite register, grief as thinning and quiet, so that the elevation runs from fire to ghost, warm to cold, and the walk from canvas to canvas gives it duration. What holds the axis: between the summits stand canvases of lists and sparse marks whose effect is reading rather than transport, and the elevation depends on the room; in reproduction most of it is lost.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Here myth is built, not only summoned. The cycle is the Iliad’s structure: two hosts facing, named heroes listed on each side, the shield of Achilles, which in Homer holds the whole world, as emblem of the whole, then the wrath, the death of Patroclus, the burning, and the shades of three men held together at the end. The archetypes of the hero’s wrath, the friend’s death, and enemy and victor made equal in death are load-bearing in the arrangement. What holds the axis is that the particular is thin. The archetype is carried by titles and written names rather than acquired by a painted particular, and a viewer without the titles would see red, scribble and white ground.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is double: history painting, the oldest high genre, which took the Trojan War as a stock subject and the cycle of canvases as its grand form; and the gestural painting of New York in the 1950s, from which Twombly took the mark and the large field and turned them toward script. The departure is a Homeric cycle made of handwriting, names, crayon scrawl and bare ground, history painting remade as the trace of a hand remembering. In 1978 that ran against the field: narrative cycles, classical subjects and the written name stood far from Minimal and Conceptual art, and the painter’s standing in New York was then low. The stake was real. But the manner and the subject were his own and proved by 1962 to 1964.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Would another form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is that the epic now exists as names, marks and erasure, and the form is that knowledge: writing on canvas, in graphite and crayon that can be rubbed out and written over, by a hand whose speed is visible. A battle painted in the old manner would know the opposite, that the war can be seen. The cycle is knowledge too: the war is walked through, side against side, from shield to shades, so that sequence and confrontation are made bodily. The open ground is the forgetting the names float on. Held below the top because the sequence could be shuffled in places without loss, and some canvases carry their part chiefly by title.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence over promise: forty-eight years, most of them on view in one room, and a body of writing on Twombly, his classicism and his painting as writing that keeps returning to this cycle as the summit of his Homeric work. The questions stay open: whether the cycle is history painting or its ruin; how far the words are to be read and how far seen; whether the shield is Homer’s whole world, a target, or an emblem of art itself; whether the marks enact violence or record its memory. The canvases shift on return between reading and seeing. Held below the top because much of the return concerns the painter’s whole classical project rather than this room, and the span is short.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The field is American and European painting of the later 1970s. Intrinsic force is real and partial: the cycle restores the classical subject and the narrative cycle to large abstract painting at a moment that had largely left both, and makes writing a material of epic painting, which reorganises what such painting could do. But it is the late summit of a reorganisation Twombly had made in the 1950s and 1960s, and the discount for that is large. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the return of myth, history and the classical in painting around 1980 is often traced in part to Twombly, but what can be shown belongs to his work as a whole, and that this cycle redirected others is not shown. Its reach is narrower than its maker’s.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at forty-eight years. Form: whole. All ten canvases survive together in one collection, never dispersed, and are shown together in a gallery given to the cycle alone; no part is known to be lost or replaced, and no restoration is recorded. Presence: long on view in a major museum, and its standing has risen rather than fallen, which lifts the figure a little, since fame is presence and not proof. Fabric: oil crayon and graphite on largely bare canvas are fragile surfaces, easily abraded, and that general risk is charged lightly. The span is short of fifty years, and the figure stands near the top of what that span allows.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as command of oil, oil crayon and graphite on canvas at large scale. The making is load-bearing: the speed and pressure of the line, which is the cycle’s whole voice; the placing of written names on open ground so that they hold a wall; the restraint of colour, red for fire, blood and the hero’s wrath against pale ground, so that the few strong colour events tell; and the control of density from the crowded battles to the near-empty shades. Graphite drawn into paint and rubbed back gives a surface that is the painter’s own and exact. The costs: some canvases are thin to the point of seeming unresolved, the line is in places mannered rather than urgent, and the lists ask little of the hand.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the list of the Greek heroes’ names, writing at its most legible and cool, and The Fire that Consumes All before It, mark at its most violent and least legible. They obey one law: the hand writing the war on bare ground, where a name and a burst of fire are both marks made at speed, and legibility is only a degree. The same law governs the shield’s circle, the battle scrawls and the faint shades at the end. The range is wide, list to fire, emblem to ghost, Greek to Trojan, and nothing breaks it; the two armies are written in one hand, which is the cycle’s point about war. Held below the top because the law admits thin canvases without testing them.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The orders held: war, in the battle canvases; the hero and his rage, in Achilles; friendship and grief, in Patroclus; the city and the family, in the House of Priam; death and the dead, in the shades; the cosmos, in the shield, which in Homer carries the whole world; fire as the natural order turned destructive; and memory and writing, the order the cycle adds. The Iliad’s structure, laid out as a room, integrates them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that most of these orders are held by title and name rather than realised in paint: the city, the family and the sacred are named, not painted. The cycle holds more than a single canvas could; that it holds them chiefly through Homer is the limit.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Living Form and The Made at 8.2. Ten canvases whole and together in one collection after forty-eight years, their standing risen, against fragile surfaces of crayon and graphite; a form in which writing over erasure is the knowledge and the walk from shield to shades makes sequence and confrontation bodily; and a line whose speed and pressure are the cycle’s whole voice, with colour held back until the fire.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2: war, the hero, friendship, the city, the family, death, the cosmos and memory are held through the Iliad’s structure, most of them by title and name rather than in paint. Next above it, The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6: a disclosure resting heavily on its source, and a force that is the late summit of the painter’s own earlier turn, whose reach cannot be separated from his. Then The Inevitable at 7.7: the middle of each side could go, and the bare ground is a wager the subtractive test cannot always decide.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, The Swerve at 7.8, The Unconcealment at 7.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 94.5, an average of 7.88 that displays 7.9. The work stands where its aggregate places it: at the top of the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires. What holds it there is the Epochal Gate: a disclosure, a myth and a swerve carried largely by Homer and by the painter’s earlier work, and a reach that belongs to his career more than to this room.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Fifty Days at Iliam, ten paintings by Cy Twombly dated 1978, in oil, oil crayon and graphite on canvas, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art: well in its titles and general look, less well in detail; not from standing before it, and no image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the cycle of ten canvases as one work, as the museum shows it, in a gallery given to it alone. All ten survive together; nothing in them is known to be lost, replaced or reworked, and nothing stands in place of an original. Twombly’s earlier Homeric paintings, Vengeance of Achilles and Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus (1962) and Ilium (One Morning Ten Years Later) (1964), and the rest of his work are context and are not scored. No words of the painter’s are quoted, and none of the writing on the canvases; titles alone are given. The arrangement of the room, the order of the titles and the draining of colour in the shades are given as usually described. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions of each canvas, the words written on each, the colours of particular passages, the place and years of painting, the first exhibition, the year the museum acquired the cycle, the meaning of the fifty days in the title, and the translation of Homer the painter is said to have used.