Thierry Greub

This is all the more the case vis-à-vis literary cultures whose history and cultural achievements were significantly shaped and formed by the written word. In addition, Western cultures and their histories are not only archived and passed on from generation to generation by means of the written word, they are thereby also rendered into something that can be imagined. To that extent, the written letters in Cy Twombly's art, independent of how often they appear and the degree to which they are legible, represent a fundamental element of painterly articulation.

This is very difficult to describe, but it is an involvement in essence (no matter how private) into a synthesis of feeling, intellect etc. occurring without separation in the impulse of action.

The idea of falling into obscurities or subjective nihilism
is absurd-such ideas can only be held by a lack of reference or experience.

Twombly's most frequently used source of poetic fragments for his inscriptions is Rilke, followed by Keats, Sappho, Seferis, Spenser, and Mallarmé. A total of 7435 cited authors can be loosely classified according
to Twombly's stylistic development. In feverishly and briskly industrious phases, we find-to name only the most important stages-Sappho, starting in the summer of 1959 [fig. 1o], Mallarmé in December [fig. 2], Keats in August 1960 [ills. 17, 19], Pindar in November of the same year, Lorca and Neruda in the mid-1960s, and, starting in 1973, the "pastoral poets: Virgil [fig. 9], Bion of Smyrna, Spenser, Theocritus [fig. 8], and Andrew Marvell.