Leda and the Swan

Cy Twombly, 1962

There's supposed to be a swan in here. That's what the title says, anyway. Leda and the Swan. It goes... Zeus wants Leda. So, he turns himself into a swan and rapes her. Painters had been painting that story for centuries. A beautiful woman. A beautiful white bird. Lovely feathers. You could almost forget what the bird was doing. Twombly gives you six and a half feet of paint, pencil, and crayon going every which way. Red that could be blood or lipstick. Hearts, too. Which is a strange thing to find in this story. Something over there might be a wing. Just when you think you've found a body, another line goes right through it. You're doing a lot of looking for a painting that already told you who's in it. He's an American. Came up in New York with Rauschenberg and Johns. Then he moved to Rome. While New York went Pop, he went back about two thousand years. Marble gods everywhere. Beautiful old paintings. His lines look more like the stuff people scratched into the walls. But he worked at that. Years earlier, in the Army, he practiced drawing in the dark. On purpose. "My line is childlike but not childish," he said. "It is very difficult to fake." He didn't paint every day. He'd wait. Travel. Read. Copy lines of poetry onto scraps of paper. Until he got, as he put it, into a state. Then he'd go. By this point, mostly with his hands. Paint straight from the tube, or by the fistful. Fingers. Palm. No stopping to reload a brush. All that paint, and still no swan. There's one place where he spells it out. Down in the bottom right. Leda and the Swan. He wrote that on the canvas. Then he scribbled out Swan.

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