Episode No. 378 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features historian Richard Fletcher and artist Sadie Barnette.

Yale University Press has just published “Cy Twombly: Fifty Days at Iliam,” a monograph about Twombly’s famed 1978 paintings series at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The book features the paintings and related works, as well as a conversation with Annabelle D‘Huart and essays by Carlos Basualdo, Emily Greenwood, Olena Chervonik, and Nicola Del Roscio and this week’s guest, Richard Fletcher. Amazon offers it for $32.

Over the course of the ten paintings of “Fifty Days at Iliam,” Twombly addresses the Trojan War through Alexander Pope’s 18th-century translation of Homer’s Iliad. Fletcher is a professor at The Ohio State University. His previous work has examined how contemporary artists have engaged with classical antiquity.

On the second segment, Sadie Barnette discusses her Dear 1968… on the occasion of an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego last year. The installation was the result of Barnette’s research into her family history, specifically her father’s participation in the Black Panther Party and the FBI’s surveillance of him. For images, please see the show page for Episode No. 350. Barnette is an Oakland-based artist whose work often explores urbanity, architecture, resistance and survival. “Phone Home,” an exhibition of Barnette’s recent work, is on view at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco through April 14.

Air date: January 31, 2019.

“Cy Twombly: Fifty Days at Iliam” cover, courtesy Yale University Press.

All Twombly images have been removed because of a cease-and-desist received from the Twombly Foundation. We believe that their use is covered by fair-use law, but we don’t have the resources to fight a wealthy foundation.

Louise Lawler, Birdcalls, 1978, and via UbuWeb.

Cy Twombly, Nine Discourses on Commodus [series at the Guggenheim Bilbao], 1963.