It's a magical world

The American painter Cy Twombly died last month at the age of 83. He's been one of my favorites for years, since I realized that I knew enough about art to have taste in it and to realize that my taste encompasses some very contemporary work. But Twombly married his modern sensibilities to some decidedly (neo)classical subject matter in a way that was guaranteed to appeal to me, who's always straddled the ancient and the contemporary.

The series of his paintings that I know best--I make a point of going to see them every time I'm at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where they're ensconced in an out of the way gallery of their own, is Fifty Days at Illium, paintings 6-15 in this gallery on Twombly's website. The Times is right that his paintings don't reproduce well, at least not at the scales the PMA sells them at; part of the problem in this case is that they only reproduce Like a Fire That Consumes All Before It, when my favorites are the others, particularly The Shield of Achilles. The shield is supposed to be incredibly elaborate, depicting all the delights of civilization and peace in exquisite detail; in Twombly's painting it's reduced to a circular smudge with a blood-red smear of crimson at the center. There's no room for civilization on the battlefield, and violence is just violence, particularly when you're the greatest warrior in Greece--but the Illiad, and Twombly's art, are just the sort of responses around violence that are the stuff of culture, and civilization. As The New Yorker says, he brought a very human vision to some very chilly received subjects, and that sort of humanity is always a loss.

Oh man, it's been years since I'd thought about the aorist optative. I'm such a bad lapsed Classicist. But here's a line from this week's Economist about the study of ancient Greek that I thought was too damn good not to share:

Intellectual elitism, as much as an appreciation of Aristophanes’s bawdy humour, is the glue that binds Hellenists together—stoked, in some schools, by a feeling of official neglect or hostility from peers.

The article concludes by saying that the real threat to the classics in general and Greek in particular is not modernity but globlization. I could see that. In the meantime, off to the grocery store.