Jumpsuits & Teleporters

I am currently reading W. Raymond Drake’s Spacemen in the Ancient East about the ancient astronaut theory, which raises the question of whether Earth was visited by celestial beings (extra-terrestrials) who influenced the evolution of our civilization. A very interesting read—so far—with speculation and investigation of world religions and the mythology/legends that we have been taught since childhood.

There is a brief mention of archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of the ruins of Troy where his findings included a headdress believed to worn by Helen of Troy. Schliemann believed in the existence of a Homeric Troy as accounted in The Iliad existing beyond the written account of the Trojan War. Which brings me to Cy Twombly’s paintings on the subject. I took the above photo as I sat in an entire room featuring Twombly’s Fifty Days at Illiam paintings in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The paintings are breathtaking in person. I hope to visit that room on several occasions during my lifetime!

Cy Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam is a rare type of work for a twentieth-century artist—a painting that illustrates a narrative. Long inspired by classical antiquity, Twombly here pays homage to what is perhaps the definitive narrative of Western literature: Homer’s Iliad, the tragic story of the final fifty days of the Trojan War, probably written before 700 B.C. Twombly’s series in ten parts progresses from the fiery moment when the Greek warrior Achilles is inspired to join the fight against Troy (Iliam) to an almost blank canvas filled with the silence of death. The installation develops in both diachronic and synchronic fashion: the story unfolds chronologically, while simultaneously one wall presents a predominantly Greek mood, passionate and explosive, as the facing wall depicts an essentially Trojan attitude, more contemplative and cool. Twombly uses the visual language he had derived over twenty years earlier, full of scrawling marks, seemingly random brushstrokes, and legible numbers and letters, to create his own tribute to an anchor of Western culture. Ann Temkin, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 340.