Cy Twombly’s Dithyrambus, executed in 1976, is comprised of two works on paper, merging collage, watercolour, paint and pencil in his visually rich and layered surfaces. Produced just three years before the American artist’s second-ever retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art and previously housed in the Dia Art Foundation collection, the present work combines a number of Twombly’s most celebrated tropes, namely his exploration of syntax, Ancient Greek mythology and mark making.

Stylistically, Dithyrambus aligns perfectly with the visual language Twombly developed over the course of fifty years. It features loose handwriting, scrappy scribbles and other materials on an organic, sheet coloured backdrop: a hodgepodge of idiosyncratic details very much emblematic of the artist’s practice. The word ‘Dithyrambus’, hesitantly outlined and generously spanning across the top part of the left collage furthermore imbues the eponymous work with a distinctively Twomblian inflection. As one of the many materialisations of the artist’s fascination with Greek mythology, Dithyrambus invokes a joyful hymn sung in ancient times to the Greek God Dionysus, bearer of wine and fertility.

Informed by his move from New York to Rome in 1957, Twombly ceaselessly nurtured his passion for divine narratives and Greek Antiquity. Observing the significant impact of Greek culture in most of Europe’s literary, sculptural and architectural canons, the artist began materialising his observations and examinations on paper. On the subject, Twombly famously proclaimed: ‘For myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary)’ (Cy Twombly, Paris, January 1952, p. 13). Not so much looking back as attempting to include past narratives in an ever-contemporary present, Twombly thus placed his work in a temporal shell of their own, disaffecting them from the rigidity of linear structure.

After having visited Greece in 1960, references to mythology became all the more explicit in the American artist’s paintings, developing namely in monumental projects like Fifty Days at Iliam, completed just two years after Dithyrambus. Deploying Homer’s Iliad over ten large canvases, Twombly’s 1978 series epically transcribed the impossibly complex classic, one scribble and erasure at a time. In this sense, Twombly’s calligraphic gestures themselves may be interpreted narratorially; they rhythmically mirror the meaning of the words and expressions adorning them through energetic movement.

The artist’s idiosyncratic handwriting is indeed a signature trait in itself: its tentative appearance and shy demeanour reveal the essential mechanisms of pencilwork while simultaneously allowing for allegorical stories to unroll. Though often counterbalanced by the blazing energy in his works, Twombly’s signature scrawls indeed retain a candid tone of timidity and solemnity. On the American artist’s approach to pencil calligraphy, French philosopher Roland Barthes expressed: 'One might think that in order to express the character of the pencil, one has to press it against the paper to reinforce its appearance, to make it thick, intensely black. Twombly thinks the opposite: it is in holding in check the pressure of matter, in letting it alight almost nonchalantly on the paper so that its grain is a little dispersed, that matter will show its essence and make us certain of its correct name: this is pencil' (Roland Barthes, Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954-1977, Whitney Museum of Art, New York, 1979, p. 9).

The idea that Twombly’s work is raw and honest to the point of divulging truths in plain sight - the pencil’s elaborate graphite composition, for one - is truly compelling. In some ways reminiscent of Minimalism, the artist’s approach to drawing and painting seems to work upon what lies beneath the core, as though alleviating lightness, scratching the essence, unclothing the nude. In their almost nomadic aspect - informed by Twombly’s frequent travels, but also by his plural groundings, in the United States and later in Rome - the artist’s paintings are furthermore reminiscent of Agnes Martin’s metastuctured grids, equally focusing on the thinness of pencil lines, and nurtured by the memory of American and Mexican landscapes. Though her calligraphy is rigidly constructed and thus in opposition with Twombly’s free-flowing gestures, Martin’s particular examination of matter, always stripping content down to its constitutive core, aligns with Roland Barthes’s idea that the black grain is better revealed when delicately dispersed, and that the minimalist effort is aligned with a kind of formal purity.

Further comparisons could be drawn with Twombly’s Abstract Expressionist peers Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell; though perhaps a more striking example would be that of his dear friend Robert Rauschenberg. In Dithyrambus specifically, the installation’s collage-based composition is deeply reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines’ developed in the 1950s, bringing together various materials and objects on a single supporting structure. Canyon, 1959, for instance, similarly plays with the different textures laid atop it - cardboard and a stuffed eagle, among others. Its numerous iconographic references furthermore seem to deploy a coherent story in the same way Twombly’s Dithyrambus invokes narratives at once ancient and contemporary.

Cy Twombly’s Dithyrambus thus not only explores themes and gestures representative of the artist’s own body of work; it also evokes seminal historic and artistic sources. The result encapsulates a unique style in itself: a decided calligraphic movement paired with poetic intellectual drifts. In short, and as eloquently put by art historian Simon Schama, ‘twombly’ as a noun, could deploy as such: ‘(n.): A line with a mind of its own’ (Simon Schama, Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper, New York, 2004, p. 15).