Sublime

“Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history,” writes Twombly in that sole essay from 1957. “It does not illustrate—it is the sensation of its own realization.”3 Said another way, Twombly’s pictures never seem far from their making. An immediacy even after the ink or paint dries.

Twombly’s love of nature, at least in his work, is filtered through books and myths. A lens of words to see the shapes and shadows of his hills. There are no flowers, only the bodies of boys transformed, a purple hyacinth, trampled by shepherds, staining the ground. There are no winds, only lyre songs, dead-men laments, ghosts. There are no

That old story: two young lovers, star-crossed, perish together rather than live apart. Twombly named multiple paintings after doomed pairs who have lost each other, or are just about to: Orpheus and Eurydice, Narcissus and Echo, Acis and Galatea, Achilles and Patroclus.

Inside his Gaeta house, Twombly displayed two photographs of an elderly Matisse taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson, a knowing nod to this good and possible model for his own late-life exuberance.