Bacchus past and present, Titian and Cy Twombly, Mar ‘23
Note: There were three paintings in the same Tate room entitled ‘Bacchus’ but I will often refer to them as if they were one for ease.
Caption by the Titian painting reads “Bacchus, god of wine, emerges with his followers from the landscape to the right. Falling in love with Ariadne on first sight, he leaps from his chariot, drawn by two cheetahs, towards her. Ariadne had been abandoned on the Greek island of Naxos by Theseus, whose ship is shown in the distance. The picture shows her initial fear of Bacchus, but he raised her to heaven and turned her into a constellation, represented by the stars above her head.”
The Tate description suggests “His rituals involved drunkenness and ecstatic dancing. In ancient myth he was also associated with violence and his followers were depicted as eating the raw flesh of animals.”
Recently after reading about the work of Cy Twombly, I intended to go to the Tate Modern to see his three ‘Bacchus’ paintings, and by coincidence during the previous evening I found myself in the National Gallery with a friend looking at a handful of paintings, one of which turned out to be Titian’s ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’.
The slightly over twelve hours gap between seeing the different paintings highlighted the stark contrast between them. It would be easy to look at the two paintings and conclude that the move towards abstraction has not been a positive one. Personally, I would have been of this opinion until fairly recently, but actually, I found the Twombly exciting, and the paintings resonated with me. What allowed me to have a different experience of Twombly’s paintings was being better equipped with more knowledge of him as a painter, reading more about the character of Bacchus and a deeper understanding of the trajectory of 20th century art.
Each of the two paintings evoke Bacchus’ domain as God of Wine and Festivities in markedly different ways. Bacchus has a much subtler effect in Titian’s work when compared with Twombly’s. In Titian’s work, the viewer needs to work to understand the painting, and the understanding of the painting, felt sense of the scene and associated emotion increasingly builds with sustained attention. Here Bacchus doesn’t overwhelm the viewer, but the drunkenness and chaos slowly emerges in a confused way. Initially I felt it seemed like Bacchus was almost banishing Ariadne, with Bacchus’ entourage advancing upon Ariadne edging closer to the cliff edge. My accompanying friend encouraged me to look at Bacchus’ expression which I then noticed was one of longing. With an additional investment of time, the details emerged which flit between the surreal such as the cheetah drawn chariot, to the more sinister and violent like the head of a wolf lying on the ground. A man clothed in a few leaves brandishes a deer’s leg, waving it at a woman that looks as if she is batting away his advances. It takes a while to unravel that the entourage isn’t necessarily the raucous party it might immediately seem. More work on the viewers part uncovers the scene as more violent and chaotic than a standard party gathering. Through the maimed animals there is concrete evidence of violence beyond the initial unusualness.
The Twombly paintings on the other hand consist of very large scale canvases that envelop the viewer. The violent, passionate red is immediately arresting, an almost violent blow to the face as the antics of Bacchus stop you in your tracks. This is more than mischievous the play of mischievous spirits, it’s a knuckle dusted donned God watching the world burn rhetoric, with ecstasy immersed within the violence. Twombly wrote that he felt the act of painting could come out of ‘one ecstatic impulse’. And you can feel the speed and uninhibitedness with which the paintings might have be made, the sweeping gargantuan brushstrokes in swishes and loops, as the violence continues on and on.. on and on.. almost in a seemingly endless cyclic existence until then the swirls meet the end of the canvas. The point of no return has been reached, the loops finish, empires fall, such as the civilisations that created the myth of Bacchus. Afterwards, the singular moment act of ecstatic violence has left its mark, and the consequences bleed down with lasting effect, to be considered as part of and in conjunction with the initial act. What’s left feels like the end of a battle, it is unknown who’s won and who’s lost, there’s just the aftermath. Hence what may have been initially felt as strong eros with a sinister tinge actually feels brutal. But there’s also passion and life present.
It’s striking to compare the Roman Empire with the Italy of today. The Twombly work points to similar tendencies of destruction and creativity across time, and whilst the figure of Bacchus may not be present in the day-to-day life of many people, his tendencies are still present. And yet, the Roman Empire has fallen, but Twombly recognises that we haven’t just come from nowhere. We don’t exist in a vacuum, we’ve always come out of a particular context, one that has been built upon over time and western culture and tradition owes significant debts to the period of Antiquity. Twombly’s art isn’t just mark making as he randomly desires but a tactile felt sense of acknowledgement to Antiquity and literature. His other works include scrawls, phrases and lines from poems often linked to Antiquity myth and literature.
There is no way the Twombly painting would have been produced during the time of Titian. Art and history needed to proceed through centuries, via the pivot of Cezanne and Picasso until the general move towards more abstraction in the latter half of the 20th century. I sense that Twombly felt that Antiquity and artistic origins need to be acknowledged, and his work also feels slightly reactionary to his Abstract Expressionist peers at the time. In addition to acknowledgement of origins, another theme might be the consistent universality of Twombly’s themes present across time from Antiquity to the present: sex, violence, death and love.
Other Twombly work using etchings, scribbles and subtle mark making point to tactile effects blocked from full blazing emotion in a similar way to how the modern world can feel sheltered and numbed which differs to the majority of human history until fairly recently. Of course, there are also significant positives to modern developments, and the western world is the most prosperous it’s ever been.
In the present day of rapid technological change and AI, one can only imagine how Bacchus might be interpreted in another five hundred years.
