Chariot and Ship Motifs

Both movement and stasis are indicated by Twombly's chariot imagery, which derives from his interest in the Homeric epic The Iliad. The stylized chariot (or its wheel) has often served as visual shorthand for warfare in the artist's work, and there are five examples of chariots in this exhibition. Anabasis is titled after Greek soldier/historian Xenophon's fourth-century BC chronicle of an arduous military campaign. Its heroic elegance recalls ancient battle chariots, as does Untitled of 1978, which in its makeshift simplicity is also reminiscent of a child's toy. Several chariots of 1979 employ plaster and sand for a very different effect, and their rough surfaces recall the deliberately crude materiality of paintings by Jean Dubuffet, a postwar French artist whose work was well known to Twombly. The crumbling edges of these sculptures lend an appearance of worn frailty, even when the work is cast in bronze (right).

The ship--another elegiac symbol of transport--is a prevalent motif in Twombly's work of the last twenty years. His boats derive from notable sources in ancient Egyptian art: tomb paintings of the voyage of the dead across the Nile to the afterworld, and wooden model boats that served as burial offerings. Winter's Passage: Luxor of 1985, with its succession of horizontal planes, employs the Egyptian practice of rendering the water beneath these funerary vessels as a narrow rectangle. The gentle curve of this masted "ship" thus appears to float on tranquil water with a stateliness appropriate to its mortal cargo. Twombly's interest in Egypt is not merely metaphorical; he first visited in 1962, and this sculpture was made following a 1985 sojourn in Luxor, where temples and tombs adjoin the Nile.

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