Murdered men: Cy Twombly’s abstract history paintings
Murdered men: Cy Twombly’s abstract history paintings

Summary/Abstract: In 1962 the American artist Cy Twombly painted a series of six canvases titled Death of Giuliano de Medici. Seventeen years later the collage Death of Holofernes followed. In these works, Twombly channels his knowledge of and emotive response to a historical and a mythological murder. In this paper the development of crucial elements of the genre history painting is traced through the theoretical writings of Werner Busch and Edgar Wind and through the paintings Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David and Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi. Twombly builds on the tradition embodied in these works through his choice of historical and mythological themes and his demand on the viewer to draw upon their own knowledge in order to understand the work. This necessity for an informed beholder is a through-line in this paper, spanning from Busch‘s and Wind‘s examination of 18th century history paintings, to the understanding of Twombly as history painter. It will be argued that in Twombly‘s ecstatic visual language in the works Death of Giuliano de Medici and Death of Holofernes historical and mythological knowledge merges with emotive response to create a new and abstract form of history painting.

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