Saying goodbye to something and coming back on a boat.” 7 According to Twombly, the painting should be read, contrary to Western convention, from right to left-from east to west, that is, like Catullus’s solitary return from Asia Minor to Rome, or like Twombly’s own journey with his monumental painting from Rome to Lexington. I found the idea of Asia Minor extremely beautiful.
“Catullus went to Asia Minor to see his brother, and while he was there his brother died, and he came back on this little boat. 4 Even its title is a quotation: “Say good-bye, Catullus, to the plains of Asia Minor” is a line from “Carmen 46” (Song 46), titled “Farewell to Asia,” by the first-century-BC Roman poet Catullus, though Twombly replaces the original word “plains” with the liminal “shores.” 5Ĭatullus’s verse virtually electrified Twombly: “The sound of ‘Asia Minor’ is really like a rush to me, like a fantastic ideal.” 6 Yet the painting itself, he said, referred not to “Carmen 46” but to “Carmen 101,” an elegy for the poet’s brother. it becomes so much a part of the image it isn’t a distinct separate thing.” 3 Begun in Rome in 1972, completed in Lexington, Virginia, in 1994, and first exhibited at Gagosian, New York, that same year, the work carries ten inscriptions from eight sources. 1 Speaking of the inscriptions in Untitled ( Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor), 2 the painter Brice Marden has said, “I find that reading really informs the rest of the image. From 1953 until his death, in 2011, Cy Twombly inscribed handwritten notations into his works, and from 1959 onward these were mainly literary quotations from 111 different authors.