Cy Twombly

"This revelatory publication provides a comprehensive and multifaceted account of Cy Twombly's ten-painting masterpiece Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), the pinnacle of the artist's lifelong engagement with Homer's Iliad. In his introduction, Carlos Basualdo provides an account of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's acquisition of the paintings in 1989. Richard Fletcher's and Emily Greenwood's essays explore the intertextual dimension of Twombly's project and his adaptation of Homer's literary tropes as a basis for his visual metaphors. Olena Chervonik traces Twombly's engagement with the theme of the Trojan War, which first appeared in the artist's work in the early 1960s, a decade before he made Fifty Days at Iliam. French photographer Annabelle d'Huart is interviewed by Carlos Basualdo about the circumstances of her visit to Twombly's studio in 1978, and her resulting photographs capturing the moment the paintings were being completed. Finally, Nicola Del Roscio, president of the Cy Twombly Foundation, reminisces about the setting and atmosphere of Twombly's studio in Bassano in Teverina, in central Italy, where this painting cycle was created, and addresses the artist's working process and sources of inspiration"--