Cy Twombly’s Leda and the Swan

Cy Twombly – Leda and the Swan (1962), oil, lead pencil and wax crayon on canvas, MOMA, Museum of Modern Art in New York

In the original Greek legend of this work’s title, the beautiful Leda, wife of King Tyndareus of Sparta, was impregnated by Zeus who had disguised himself as a swan in order to captivate her. Leda went on to give birth to two sets of twins, including both Helen and Clytemnestra, women who would figure so tragically in the inception and unfolding of the Trojan wars. The degree to which the conception was happily consensual, or an act of pitiless and coercive brutality, has been debated and depicted in diverse ways over the centuries. In Leonardo’s portrayal, what constituted an assault or a seduction (depending on your view) has happened some time before and Leda looks down smilingly on the two cracked-open eggs containing the four babies she has birthed, while holding the neck of the swan affectionately. In Michaelangelo’s version he shows the actual act of copulation in almost pornographic detail with the swan pitching between Leda’s thighs (see Yeats’ poem below), but the figures still appear to share a loving kiss, an imagined tendresse that was emulated by Reubens too.

Michelangelo, Leda and the Swan (1535-60), oil on canvas, National Gallery London

Correggio depicts a multi-figured and idyllic scene that is more akin to a generalised social seduction than to a violation. Gericault by contrast, shows the scene in an altogether darker way, with the swan appearing far more predatory. All these paintings are clearly figurative, representational, but Twombly’s rendition, while it is obviously abstract, brings to it the full terror, brutality and shock of a rape. For me it conjures murderously overpowering wing flapping and the victim’s helpless and horrified abhorrence at it. This is the genesis of the cycle of violent vengeance that would follow, the moment when archetypal Greek Tragedy fates were sealed. At the same time, the metamorphosis of Zeus signals that appearances can never be trusted, that the powerful will always attack and overpower the weak.

Abstract works are clearly open to diverse interpretations, but the titling of the work is an important indicator of narrative intent from the artist, and it is well documented that Twombly was deeply influenced by ancient myth and legend and by how these cultural inheritances impinge on contemporary life. Like T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, in which the poet grasped magpie-like for discarded fragments of what he saw as an atomised civilisation, so Twombley reaches across the ages for a Greek myth, for something that might help make meaning out of meaningless cruelty and sexual savagery. Sex and death are to the fore here, those age-old themes. At the same time, I think that the artist is probing at the more profound idea of the unreliability of chronicle, the inconsistency of the written word and the inadequate ‘truth’ of pictorial representations of foundational allegories and artists and poets’ retellings of them. Art is shaped by myth but concocts it too.

Twombly’s trademark graffiti-like scribbles and crossings-out seem to gesture at an anger and a frenzy that is troubling; it’s like frustrated inarticulacy suddenly given voice, vented in an outpouring of rage and a torrential discharge of grievance. At the top of the work, just right of centre, a roughly drawn outline of a cross-paned window is shown, as if to suggest the idea of witnessing through or from inside, this act of transgressive and uncontrolled domination. Some heart shapes appear below this on the right, as if in mockery of romantic love for which Leda’s violation should not be mistaken, while on the lower right there hangs a distinctly phallic shape, and another (among many elsewhere) more priapically outlined in red near the centre, a reminder of Zeus’ visceral sexual cupidity. The words ‘Leda + the SWAN’ are inscribed at bottom right, with SWAN furiously scribbled out but remaining legible. It suggests that the beauty and grace that a swan normally conveys is an abhorrent fiction, that the deception of disguise is a vile subterfuge in the pursuit of dominance and forced procreation.

In the legend, the consequences of Leda’s rape were profound and Twombly seems to me to share in W.B. Yeats idea that the moment would reverberate down the ages, and repeat itself under other guises, not least perhaps in the Virgin Mary’s profoundly unfathomable conception of Christ:

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

                                  Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

It is as if Twombly finds himself in dialogue with the myth, not simply reproducing an imagined scene from it but expressing something of its frenetic, impulsive and momentous madness, just as the poem does so in its dense and ambiguously subjective style. There is understandable panicky confusion going on here, a disorienting embroilment that feels like it as much the artist’s as it is his subjects’. At the top centre of the work there are series of charcoal-coloured circles that seem reminiscent of smoke rings, the flame-like source for which lies further down. Could this be Yeats’ imagined burning roof, the idea that that the monstrous taboo-violating inter-species coition has engendered the bloodshed and pity of war? The moment detonates an outlandish and explosive combustion of beauty, divinity and the uncontrolled rampage of lust and savage barbarity that was as much a characterisation of twentieth century humanity as it was of the ancient world, and Twombly, having made the move to live in Rome some years before and able to witness firsthand there the physical proximity of violent history, was also keenly attuned to its recrudescence in his own lifetime too.

The intensity and layering of the mark-making is suggestive of scratching fingers, flying feathers, muscled brute prepotency, alarm and the loosing of mere anarchy on the world. And yet its spontaneity is orchestrated, its visual language respecting a logic that may seem intemperate, but which operates according to a code which might be solipsistic, but which is authentically the artist’s own and no one else’s. The lines are mostly thin and screechy, scribbled in a rush with a combination of apparently meaningless, discordant squiggles interspersed with occasional angry jags. There are a few breast-like softly curved shapes, particularly on the left, that are suggestive of fertility or gravidity, but these are peripheral to the pandemonium that is unfolding remorselessly and exhaustingly within.

The long and closely packed italicised marks at centre-right draw the attention. They suggest the layering of feathers, contoured for bodily protection and inadvertently delivering animal beauty, but their compaction also evokes aggregating fervour. This feels like the locus for the work’s vibrational energy and its ambiguous and vehement ecstasy.

I don’t know if you can ever fully ‘understand’ a Cy Twombly painting, and I think it wrong to over-interpret it or decode it as if it were a cipher (as I may be guilty of above) but you can certainly feel something of its maker’s affective sensibility when looking at one, particularly when it engages with universal motifs of human experience and behaviour.