Naming the Gods: Cy Twombly’s Passionate Poiesis concerns itself with the contemporary art work of Cy Twombly and his radically innovative and necessary forms of creating for our times as seen against the deep background of classical Greek mythology.
In particular, the two entwined figures and images of Orpheus, lyre player, lover and journeyer to the underworld, and Dionysos/Bacchus, god of wine, ecstasy and madness, are taken up as the two principal thematic leitmotifs which animate and overarchingly inform Twombly’s entire artistic oeuvre across all the mediums in which he worked, both literally and symbolically, from the early 1950’s until the last series of brilliantly colored paintings he made just before his death in 2011.
“Gary Astrachan literally gathers the reader up into an entrancing meditation on the transformative power of art to change our minds. His book evokes the healing poiesis of art and is a precious gift to our troubled and chaotic times.” –Murray Stein, Ph. D., author of The Mystery of Transformation
Gary D. Astrachan, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and Jungian psychoanalyst in private practice in Portland, Maine. He is a faculty member and supervising and training analyst at the C.G. Jung Institutes in Boston and in Switzerland and lectures and teaches widely throughout North America, Latin America and Europe. He is a founding member of the C.G. Jung Center of Brunswick, Maine, and is also an independent curator of contemporary art installations and exhibitions. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles in professional journals and books and writes particularly on the relationship between analytical psychology and Greek mythology, poetry, painting, film, postmodernism and critical theory.