Contemporary critic Mary Jacobus takes us to a place where poetry and canvas meet, sharing insights on the artist Cy Twombly’s inspiration in his abstract works.
Her new book Reading Cy Twombly (Princeton University Press; August, 2016), is an illuminating study that focuses on the artist’s use of poetry in his paintings and drawings, many of which include handwritten words and phrases—naming or quoting poets ranging from Sappho, Homer, and Virgil to Mallarmé, Rilke, and Cavafy. The careful examination of Twombly’s scrawled quotations and verbal scribbles allows us to have a captivating conversation with the artist’s imagination. In the artist’s own words, he “never really separated painting and literature.”
Mary Jacobus is professor emerita of English at the University of Cambridge, Anderson Professor of English and Women's Studies at Cornell from 1980-2000, and Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall at the University of Oxford. In 2011-12, she returned to Cornell as M. H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor. She has written widely on visual art, Romanticism, feminism, and psychoanalysis. Her recent books include The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein and Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud.
In a Chats in the Stacks book talk hosted by Olin Library, discover how poetic reference affects the interpretation of works of art.
