concept:era contemporary
Leda and the Swan
Oil, house paint, crayon on canvas by Cy Twombly, 1962. 190.5 × 200 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Twombly's raw, sexually charged engagement with the Greek myth of Zeus transforming into a swan to assault Leda — rendered in frenzied gestural marks and scrawled text.
Scholarly Significance
Twombly mythological series — canonical example of his engagement with classical myth via raw, visceral mark-making.
Notes
- ·The myth: Zeus transformed into a swan and raped Leda, who later laid eggs from which Helen and the Dioscuri were born.
- ·Twombly approaches the subject not through illusionist representation but through the raw energy of the act itself: frenzied, looping marks, charged with violence and eroticism.
- ·The work belongs to a series of paintings on mythological subjects made in Rome in 1962.
- ·W.B. Yeats's sonnet 'Leda and the Swan' (1923) is a clear intertext; Twombly often worked in dialogue with literary as well as visual sources.
- ·The painting was gifted to MoMA by the artist's estate; MoMA holds one of the largest institutional collections of Twombly's work.