Rewriting History: Cy Twombly's Discursive Drawings

Nicholas Cullinan, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Thaw Senior Fellow, Drawing Institute, will consider the complicated relationship between title, image, and word in the work of Cy Twombly. Taking Clement Greenberg's 1940 essay "Towards a Newer Laocoon" as a restatement of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's foundational discussion of word versus image, this lecture shows how this particular tension was at the heart of Twombly's ''classicizing'' and also that of his American contemporaries Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Willem De Kooning, and Robert Motherwell. This lecture is cosponsored by the Morgan Drawing Institute.