Grace 2 Professor of English &
Fellow, Churchill College
Cambridge University

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An emphasis on individual sensibility and the bodily mark runs through approaches to Twombly’s work from his earliest Black Mountain College period to the present. These marks include his famously illegible handwriting--including the entire field of writing, from graffiti to autograph, inscription, and epigraph--and his employment of the sign as both bodily mark (scratch) and viscosity (drip). But Twombly’s work also appropriates a network of cultural signifiers. This project focuses on private allusions that also depend on our recognition of cultural markers: names and quotations, histories and traditions. Twombly’s work presents special interpretive problems because of his cultural allusiveness-- grafting North African primitivism, European high Modernism, and Mediterranean culture (ancient and modern, west and east) onto Anglo-American avant-garde practice. But the tussle between the illegible and the legible, the  emotional and the intellectual, plays out a larger tension in his work between intensely private significance and shared cultural reference. Naming and citation in Twombly operate as a powerful form of cultural collage.  Twombly makes art out of cultural fragments and bricolage: networks of literary quotation, cultural and geographical allusion. How do we ‘read’ a Twombly when nine-tenths of its local meaning is scattered or obscured?  How does the individual artist appropriate the literary and visual repertoire available to him or her?  How is it mediated and transformed by migration, and what must the viewer bring to this shared yet private, mobile assemblage?  These questions are crucial to any inquiry into the networks and migrations constitutive of Twombly’s complex and still evolving oeuvre.”

Mary Jacobus is Grace 2 Professor of English and a Fellow of Churchill College. She came to Cambridge after twenty years teaching at Cornell University, where she was Anderson Professor of English and Women’s Studies; prior to crossing the Atlantic, she taught at Oxford. Her work is both literary and interdisciplinary, and is currently energized by the range of projects and disciplines represented at CRASSH. She is on the Advisory Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI) and the newly founded UK Consortium of Institutes of Advanced Studies (CIAS).

Her books include, most recently, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading (1999) and The Poetics of Psychoanalysis (2005). In the past, she has published books on feminist criticism and theory and on Romanticism, especially Wordsworth. She is currently working in the field of visual art and on a book of essays, Romantic Things: A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud.

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