Cy Twombly, 1928 - 2011

The First Part of the Return from Parnassus, 1961
It wasn't easy for Twombly to draw this "badly." Borrowing from the Surrealists, he experimented with sketching in the dark. For a time he forced himself to draw with his left hand, which his travels in North Africa had taught him to think of as the one reserved for wiping your rear. That made it the perfect hand to bring painting back to another kind of fundamental place. The classical world that Twombly invokes in his art isn't often the white marble realm of Apollo. It's more typically the sweaty Dionysian scrimmage. His early canvases in particular can be a landing field of airborne phalluses, breasts and buttocks, of orgasmic squirts and brown excremental splats.

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