The Visual Field

doi:10.1017/9781108614719.006

Chapter 5 - The Visual Field

Beyond Vorticism

from Part I - Pound’s Texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 October 2019

Rebecca Beasley

Edited by

Mark Byron

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Mark Byron: Affiliation:
University of Sydney

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Summary

In the introduction to her recent study Reading Cy Twombly, Mary Jacobus sets her interpretation of the artist’s work against those of critics who read the names, titles and quotations in his paintings as, on the one hand, self-expressive (‘sighs, expressions of pleasure or regret’), and on the other, directed towards the creation of a repository of cultural memory. ‘As opposed to a high-humanizing reading of Twombly’s art’, she writes, ‘I want to sidestep the debate in order to recover the specifically twentieth-century avant-garde context for his practice of quotation and allusion – his anthology – by tracing its relation to American literary Modernism, and in particular, Ezra Pound’. Twombly briefly attended Black Mountain College, encountering Pound’s writings and ideas through Charles Olson, and Jacobus turns to Pound’s ABC of Reading (1934) as a particularly clarifying lens through which to read Twombly..

Keywords

Vorticism visual culture Cold War art objects museum gallery architecture propaganda modernist sculpture

Type: Chapter
Information: The New Ezra Pound Studies , pp. 72 - 87

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2019

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