My Love-Hate Relationship with Cy Twombly’s “Fifty Days at Iliam”
Despite missing the bus, my first solo (sans my parents) trip to Philly with my then girlfriend, Rowan, had been nothing but an enjoyable time. As we made our way up the stairs leading to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I readied myself for an entertaining and educational trip through the world of art. And with Rowan being a very passionate artist, I was sure to learn even more. But when I stumbled across Cy Twombly’s “Fifty Days at Iliam”, my expectations were shattered.
My ex had left me alone so I could finish staring at “Nude Descending a Staircase, №2”, which wasn’t nearly as perverted as it sounds. Marcel Duchamp’s work is abstract, and as such I initially struggled to find the woman in the painting. One of the museum attendants approached me (perhaps because he was desperate to speak to another black person who wasn’t also an attendant), and we had a very pleasant discussion in which he helped me discover the elusive nude. When Rowan finally returned, I bid the attendant ado, and we headed down a hallway that I had almost entirely missed.
We stepped into a room with ten separate but contextually connected canvases covering the walls, and I was left dumbstruck. Rowan scoffed like the art snob she is and said, “Now this art is objectively bad,” (a reference to a playful argument we frequently had as to whether art could be objectively bad) and exited the room. And despite my continued argument that art isn’t objectively bad, I struggled to disagree with her point.
This isn’t at all an attempt to “drag” or demean the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In fact, I would recommend that everyone go visit the museum. I was captured by the beauty and scope of the Chinese exhibits (which included a room that showcased the design of an ancient Chinese house surrounded by what I assumed to be a garden of sorts), and I even discovered my now favorite painting in Léon Frédéric’s “Four Seasons”, which is a beautiful depiction of the four seasons in the forms of four young angels (my words will never do this work justice). But how this museum could be home to artwork that looks like a small child projectile vomited on a canvas and an artist tried to dab it up with a moist towelette was beyond me.
Somehow, I could make out that the imagery in front of me was supposed to represent a war scene. I interpreted the phallic-looking objects to be cannons (even though they still look more like a middle schooler’s crude drawing of male genitalia) and the smudges and scribbles on the canvases to be destruction and explosions. It was only after I got home that I truly discovered what I was looking at. The drawings were a series known as “Fifty Days at Iliam” by Cy Twombly. The series, completed in 1978 after around a year’s worth of work, was meant to reflect Homer’s Iliad. The drawings are hung covering all four walls allowing them to be consumed as a panorama, sequentially, or out of order. But regardless of how someone chooses to consume Twombly’s creations, I couldn’t understand how an art museum can let these lousy excuses for artistic talent into their premises.
To this day, “Fifty Days at Iliam” still confounds me as my natural response to looking at is to tear up out of disgust, but that seems to be the point! During the aforementioned two or three minutes I stood in the exhibit, I kept thinking to myself, “I could do this. My work could be in an art museum.” And to some extent I think that that observation was true. Especially considering the inclusion of two pieces called “Heroes of the Achaeans” and “House of Priam”. They are a series of sloppily written names of characters and gods featured in The Iliad. Although I, admittedly, don’t know the context of these fictional figures to put them on these lists like Twombly does, I could just as easily scrawl the names of a bunch of Harry Potter characters on a canvas and call it a day.
The only works that I feel like I couldn’t recreate are “The Fire that Consumes All before It” (yes, the capitalization is somehow correct), “Achaeans in Battle”, and “Ilians in Battle”. The first piece isn’t exactly what I would call interesting or pretty, but I most definitely wouldn’t raise my nose at it either. The use of the color red (my favorite color so I am a bit biased) is appealing to me, and the ways that the shade morphs as well as how the paintbrush strokes simulate flames just are not things that I would be able to reproduce. If you ignore the weird smudges and crude writing of the title I could easily see this image being hung in a museum or at least being used as an iPhone wallpaper. The two “in Battle” pieces are entirely different beasts. They are a hodgepodge of erased/faded shapes behind seemingly randomly drawn triangles These were the pieces covered in penis-looking shapes that I misidentified as cannons (because there wouldn’t have been cannons in the Trojan War), but correctly recognized as moments of violence. The fact that these shapes aren’t cannons only makes me more confused about Twombly’s creation.
And despite all of these negatives feelings I have towards “Fifty Days at Iliam”, I continue to think about it fairly regularly almost a year after I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Many of the other absolutely beautiful and intricate pieces I saw that day have eluded my memory, and I am left with only vague memories. Although the piece that sticks out the clearest still is “Four Seasons” a close second is “Fifty Days at Iliam”. It would dishonest of me to say that I hate this piece. To hate the piece would imply that it angers me greatly or that I find it offensive. Neither of which are true. I think it Twombly’s series is simple and messy, like the work of a child. The difference is that the artwork of a child is innocent and cute. “Fifty Days” was created by a grown man (who I feel uncomfortable defining as “innocent and cute”), so the similarities between the two make it difficult for me to understand why it’s acceptable to have the work in a museum. Unless there was a display surrounding the wonders of being a kid, their work would never be put in a gallery like those in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Nevertheless, the added context that I gained from looking up the collection online has helped me be more understanding of the piece.
It might sound like I’m confused about my feelings toward Cy Twombly’s “Fifty Days at Iliam”, and that’s because I am. And maybe that was his intent. So if it was to Twombly I say, “Good on you, pal because you’ve made me contemplate my own philosophy regarding the subjectivity of art”. But if he believed that his artwork was the best possible way of displaying the feelings of being in the Trojan War, then I’d say that the Philadelphia Museum of Art must’ve thought that the people who hang their art were the custodians.
