C Y T WOM BLY PA R A DI S E

C U R A T E D B Y J U L I E S Y LV E S T E R A N D P H I L I P L A R R A T T- S M I T H

E D I T E D B Y J U L I E S Y LV E S T E R

E S S A Y B Y P H I L I P L A R R A T T- S M I T H

DE SIGN BY TA K A A K I M ATSUMOTO

C Y T WOM BLY PA R A DI S E

PU BLISHED BY FU NDACIN JUME X, ME X ICO

I N M E M O R Y O F T H E L I F E A N D W O R K O F V I C T O R Z A M U D I O -T A Y L O R

Untitled (Camino Real I). 2011. Acrylic on wood panel. 252.5 x 187.2 cm (99 12 x 73 34 inches)
 CONTENTS

8 Foreword by Eugenio Lpez Alonso

10 Preface by Patrick Charpenel

12 Lenders to the Exhibition

14 Psychedelic Antiquity by Philip Larratt-Smith

35 Plates

154 List of Illustrations

158 Biographical Notes

166 One-Person Exhibitions

 The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables
evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.
John Keats

My fascination with Cy Twombly began almost at the same time that I began collecting. I was determined
to visit every exhibition and museum possible, and I came across the retrospective that Kirk Varnedoe had
curated at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. My interest was piqued and I was so intrigued that I
tried to sneak into the opening of the Twombly exhibition in Houston, but of course, I didnt get in!
This exhibition represents the first time that Cy Twomblys work is shown in Latin America and the first
major exhibition since his death, and it is a great honor to present it in our new building in Mexico City,
the Museo Jumex. It provides a unique opportunity to experience the full scope of his oeuvre; his paintings,
drawings, and sculpture, ranging from some of his very early pieces from 1951 to the last paintings he ever

FOR EWOR D made.

Full of gesture, mythology, color, light, and poetry, Twomblys workswhich seem to be at once minimalist
BY
and baroque, and somewhat violent compositionsbeckon to be deciphered. You can see in them what you
EUGENIO LPEZ A LONSO
have experienced, what you imagine; and every piece inspires a different reaction. The paintings, drawings
and sculptures depict what is within rather than what we can see outside. And what better way is there to
get to know ones self?
For the great opportunity to experience in person the work of one of the most important artists of the
second half of the twentieth century, I would like to thank Nicola Del Roscio, President of the Cy Twombly
Foundation, and the many institutions who have kindly lent us these inspiring works of art.
I am also deeply grateful to the curators, Julie Sylvester and Philip Larratt-Smith, for accepting to embark
upon this project, which has resulted in one of the most thorough curatorial investigations of the artists life
and work. I would like to dedicate this exhibition to my great colleague and collaborator, Vctor Zamudio-
Taylor, who was one of the initiators of this project but was, regrettably, unable to see it come to fruition.
As Arthur C. Danto rightfully stated, Context gives the same component different and distinct identities,
swan or serpent as the case may be.1 And I am thrilled and anxious to see Twomblys work in a new context,
in a new lightin a Mexican lightand discover what transformations may arise.
Notes
1. Arthur C. Danto, Monuments and Metamorphoses: The Sculptures of Cy Twombly in Cy Twombly, Catalogue Raisonn of Sculpture, Vol. 1, ed. Nicola del
Roscio (Munich: Schirmer Mosel, 1997), 13.

9
 The cognitive act begins with the recognition of a sign. The sign, the basic element of language, operates
within a fluid interaction. Its almost worth comparing it to an economic transaction through which one
thing is exchanged for another. The act of supplanting transferring one defined thing to the world of
abstract ideasalways involves the creation of a mark, leaving a trace.
To present/represent is the relation through which linguistic systems are built and with which we develop
as human beings. These systems, or structures, of signs establish rules of operation for interaction. For this
reason, the act of sign-ing is fundamental for communication and knowledge.
The work of the American artist Cy Twombly (19282011) explores the possibilities of the sign in its
purest form. On surfaces laden with texture and color, scars and gestures reveal themselves with great poetic
force. What is initially just a mark on a canvas transforms into calligraphy that takes hold of us. These

PR E FAC E marks cease to be lines without any value to become text. In other words, they begin to operate as a group
of legible and understandable codes. Thus, through an endless number of symbols, Twombly presents an
BY
intense body of work that communicates complex and challenging facts about our human condition.
PAT R IC K C H A R PE N E L
This summer, Fundacin Jumex Arte Contemporneo presents in both galleries of Museo Jumex, its new
exhibition space in Mexico City, Cy Twombly: Paradise, an exhibition curated by Julie Sylvester and Philip
Larratt-Smith, that through paintings, drawings, and sculptures representative of different periods of his
production looks to compile and understand the complex compositions of an artist who transcended the
dogmas of his generation.
In a country characterized by social unrest in its most extreme manifestations and which is simultaneously
governed by a festive and rowdy spirit, an exhibition like Cy Twombly: Paradise becomes particularly relevant.
Through their passionate gestures, the works presented here have the potential to inspire spontaneity and
liberate the imagination. They help us experience a conceptual transition, taking us from a place full of
texture to one of emotions, and Fundacin Jumex Arte Contemporneo offers the perfect space to do so,
allowing us to relate Twomblys lines and stains with the acts of violence that occur in a place marked by
cultural conflicts and social complicity.

11
 La Coleccin Jumex
Cy Twombly Foundation
The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection, The Broad Art Foundation
Gagosian Gallery
LENDERS TO THE EX HIBITION The Menil Collection, Houston
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Barry Lowen Collection
Private Collections
Whitney Museum of American Art
David Zwirner, London/New York

13

PSYCHEDELIC A NT IQU IT Y
BY
P H I L I P L A R R A T T- S M I T H
Last night I found obscenities
Scrawled across my wall
I swear I cant repeat
The filthy words that I recall
And then the most immoral
Damned insulting thing of all
As I read each line I noticed
His handwriting was identical
With mine.1
I.
To write about the mysteries and revelations of Cy Twomblys art is to encounter the difficulty W.H. Auden
articulates in his introduction to the complete poems of C.P. Cavafy. Like Cavafys poetry, Twomblys
work revolves around the great universal themes of love, art, beauty, and death, and yet the singularity of
his artistic vision, his perspective on the world, renders his work original in the highest degree. Twomblys
artistic register, like the unique tone of voice Auden celebrated in Cavafy, cannot be described; it can only
be imitated, that is to say, either parodied or quoted.2
Artists belonging to this typology tend not to be progressive, in the sense of inaugurating a new movement
or representing a technical advance over the status quo. Consider Baudelaire, who possessed a revolutionary
poetic sensibility but who in matters of versification worked within the existing constraints of classical
French poetry. The work of such artists usually does not represent a radical break with the past, and yet
strangely cannot be easily categorized or situated within the standard flow chart of art history.
Sexuality is usually the dominant component of the work (though not the only one), and appears to lie near
the heart of its pathological singularity. There is the persistent sense that a singular lived experiencewhich
manifests itself in an intense sensualityforms the kernel of their artistic output, where it is pathologized
(Antonin Artaud), restaged as Grand Guignol (Francis Bacon), compulsively told and retold (Louise
Bourgeois), or elaborated into a myth (Joseph Beuys). Their art bears witness to an embodied intelligence:
the mind cannot be detached from the body, and the life of the flesh is valorized as a system of knowledge.
It is to this typology of the sui generis artist that Twombly belongs.
Typically, the lives of such artists are brought to bear on the interpretation of the i. We have the letters of Vincent
van Gogh to his brother Theo, the
meaning of their output and the nature of their creative process, with the artists themselves literary works and correspondence
of Artaud, the Bacon interviews
often providing the connections.i Yet this is not the case with Twombly, who mostly refused by David Sylvester, Bourgeoiss
psychoanalytic writings and
(perhaps it is more accurate to say that he politely declined) to speak about his work, diaries, and the recordings of
Beuys. There is no equivalent
saying that his imagery was private.3 Aside from a handful of laconic statements and a archive for Twombly.
few interviews, he has left the world with a minimum of commentary on his art, and that ii. Asked why he has always
been so reticent to talk about
mostly of an evasive natureas if exegesis of the work by its maker were supererogatory, his work, Twombly replied,
Its like talking about yourself
or immodest, or both.ii Almost nothing is known, therefore, of the emotional experiences really its indulgent. Nicolas
Serota, History Behind the
or psychological impulses that lie behind this or that painting. For that reason, the bulk Thought, in Cy Twombly:
Cycles and Seasons (New York:
of the existing literature is reduced to speaking about the what and the how of his art, D.A.P., 2008), 53.
but not its why.
Twombly possessed an extraordinary visual intelligence and an acute sensitivity to all forms of beauty
physical, natural, artisticresponding not only to painting and poetry but to the sea, the light of Italy,
architecture, and street life. From his work it is clear that Twombly sublimated his art and iii. Affectionately searching for
a metaphoric way of describing
life into an aesthetic existence; that he was intoxicated with the past (Greek and Roman this special blending of cultured
refinement and appreciation for the
history and mythology, Egyptian art, primitive sculpture), though equally attuned to the pithier vernacular of life, a friend
once mused that Twomblys ideal
present; that he felt elective affinities with Rilke, Goethe, Eliot, and other poets; and that abode might be in a palace, then
paused and added, but in a bad
he had a love for beautiful surfaces and a taste for decrepit splendour.iii But he never fully neighborhood. Varnedoe, 36.
explained why he was drawn to these things, nor elucidated the role they played in his iv. In contrast to Artaud,
Bacon, Bourgeois, and Beuys,
consciousness. The high degree of abstraction in his work only serves to render its origins whose work is largely figurative.
even more inaccessible and enigmatic.iv
15
 II.
In 201011, Twombly painted thirteen canvases of Baroque gestural loops in yellow, red, v. Even his decision to fasten
his brushes to wooden poles
and orange over a bright green ground (half margarita, half key lime). Unscrolling from could have been motivated by
the fact that it had become
left to right, the eccentric looping stroke is one of the artists signature motifs (see Untitled, increasingly arduous for him
to use ladders and scaffolding.
1967). Tightly coiled in some places, looser and freer in others, these broad liquid strokes, Given the dynamism of the
expansive strokes, one almost
rendered in a hard-candy palette, generate a sensation of radiant energy and controlled has the impression that Twombly
outsmarted his aging body,
frenzy. The characteristically willful mark making, eliding writing, drawing, and painting, wishing to give itas though
with a prosthetic devicean
coexists with the chance drips, splashes, and rivulets that are left to streak down the surface, expanded range of motion.
Achim Hochdrfer, How to Hold
revealing the process of its making.v For the first five paintings in the series, which were the Tension, in The Last Paintings
(New York: Gagosian Gallery,
made in late 2010, Twombly chose the title Camino Real, after the 1953 play by Tennessee 2012), 11
Williams,vi a trans-historical fantasia populated by a motley cast of famous literary characters vi. Williamss fantastical work
of poetic theatre was a departure
that doubles as an opaque allegory and turns on the fear of decline and death. These five for the playwright. The fictional
characters he chose to include
canvases were followed by the remaining eight in early 2011, when the artist was at the in the playBaron de Charlus,
Don Quixote, Casanova, Lord
physical limit of old age.vii Made a few weeks and days before his death, these hypnotic, Byron, Marguerite from La dame
aux camliasare all protagonists
glowing surfaces would be Twomblys last paintings. who suffer violent passions, like
the mythical figures to whom
How strange that the final chapter of Abstract Expressionism should turn out to be a Twombly alludes in his art. The
play bears a family resemblance to
series of psychedelic paintings executed beside the same Mediterranean sea as Archilochus satirist Max Beerbohms whimsical
short story Savonarola Brown
and Virgil. Given that the original Abstract Expressionists sought to forge an authentically (1919) about a diffident Edwardian
playwright whose unfinished
American style of painting and cultivated a muscular disdain for the European tradition, it magnum opus features a mlange
of eminent figures from the Italian
is an irony that the last major painter to extend their legacy should have been a Southerner Renaissance.
from Virginia who emigrated to Italy precisely to immerse himself in classical antiquity and vii. Twombly did not give [his last
paintings] a title, but spoke of them
the art of the Renaissance. in the same breath as the five Camino
Real panels he had done a few
In his 1948 essay The Sublime Is Now, one of the definitive statements about the months before. Hochdrfer, 9-10.
intentions and attitudes of the New York School, Barnett Newman posited a failure of content in European
Modernism, leading either to a cul-de-sac of pure rhetoric of abstract mathematical relationships la
Mondrian or to the calculated disruptions of the organizational principles of the picture plane la Picasso
and Braque. By contrast, he and his fellow New York painters were creating a new sublime image that
had been liberated from the devices of Western European painting. Their images were real and concrete
because made out of ourselves, out of our own feelings, and timeless because unencumbered by the weight
of European culture. This weight was precisely what Twombly took on. Where they fashioned their work
out of the tension of [their] private myth[s],4 Twombly reverted to the pre-existing myths of antiquity as
an indirect way of casting glancing views on his present situation. Where they were at pains to cleanse the
medium of all impurities (particularly the after-effects of Cubism and Surrealism), Twombly embraced
impuritylanguage, reference, representationand the possibilities it afforded in order viii. As also with the broader
sociopolitical concerns of the
to cross-pollinate the permissions and prohibitions of Abstract Expressionism with the European art of his time.
traditions of high European painting.viii
Any attempt to clarify Twomblys roots in Abstract Expressionism is a complex undertaking, given the
sheer heterogeneity of the artists classed as Abstract Expressionist as well as the fact that each successive
stage of his career recalibrated the relationship. Broadly speaking, he could be said to have spliced together
the two central strains represented by Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, who were themselves
16
working through the legacy of the formal innovations of Cubism and the turn towards ix. The evolution of Twomblys art
reveals many other affinities besides
the unconscious espoused by the Surrealists. Twombly absorbed de Koonings use of de Kooning and Pollock. His
earliest extant canvases in black
biomorphic imagery (both figure and landscape), his fondness for pentimenti and erasures and white hearken back to Robert
Motherwells emblematic black
(coinciding with Twomblys deeply aesthetic sense of eroded or ancient surfaces5), and forms, while his later incorporation
of the myths of antiquity chimes
the luxuriant colour of his middle period. From Pollock he adapted the use of rhythmic with Motherwells epic subject
matter, as in, for example, Elegy
gestures emanating directly from the body, the sweep of the arm that recapitulated the to the Spanish Republic (1961).
Twombly revered the biomorphic
automatic writing of Surrealism in the canvas-as-arena. Pollocks skeins informed the forms of Arshile Gorky, who had
the most European sensibility
development of Twomblys mark making, which started out as scratches but soon evolved among the artists of the New York
School. Twomblys move to Italy in
into lines, loops, shapes, letters, words, names, and eventually fragments of poetrya the late 1950s was the mirror image
of Gorkys move to America (where
pivot from nature and the personal to culture and history.ix Meanwhile, though the he settled in Virginia), though
Gorky was an migr and Twombly
violent gestures in de Koonings Picassoan women could be said to parallel a sexual an expatriate. Aaron Siskinds
semi-abstract black and white
act,6 Twomblys evocation of the body is much more explicit and idiosyncratic. It is photographs of graffitied walls
furnish another suggestive parallel.
not just the iconography of breasts, penises, and orifices that begins to emerge in 1959 Twombly would have encountered
his work in 1951-52 when, at
but the paint handling itselfhis coagulations, dry lumps, smears, overlays, stains, and Robert Rauschenbergs suggestion,
he attended two semesters at Black
emulsionsthat transmits an intense eroticism. Mountain College, where he was
exposed to contemporary trends in
poetry, painting, and culture, from
Siskind and Motherwell to Charles
Olson, John Cage, and Ben Shahn.
III.
Far from the idealization of the flesh which Twombly admired in classical antiquity, Artaudpoet, artist,
and borderline madmanwrote that nothing touches me, nothing interests me except what addresses itself
directly to my flesh. 7 For Artaud, the body was not an aestheticized ideal nor a source of sensual pleasure
but a mess of nerves and synapses with an electric capacity for intelligence and for pain.8 In his theatre
works, he proposed to replace ordinary language with a cacophonous tongue of his own invention. Grunts,
cries, shrieks, moans, and onomatopoeic sounds are the speech acts that accompany the bodily gestures
with which he sought to supplant the text-heavy theatre of European tradition. If, as Artaud held, all true
language is incomprehensible,9 then any intelligible speech is false, part of the great lie of representational
language, which purports to depict when in fact it betrays reality. His decision to forego a written script for
his theatre works meant that each performance, while not undirected, was spontaneous and unrehearsed. If
I believe neither in Evil nor in Good, if I feel such a strong inclination to destroy, if there is nothing in the
order of principles to which I can reasonably accede, the underlying reason is in my flesh.10
In one of his manifestos for the Theatre of Cruelty from 1932, Artaud clarified that his project confronted
the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions,
his savagery, his fantasies, his utopian sense of life and of things, even his cannibalism, pour out on a level
that is not counterfeit and illusory but internal . . . The theater, like dreams, is bloody and inhuman.11
Artauds conviction of the inadequacies of ordinary language and of the need to penetrate behind everyday
experience initially produced a flirtation with Andr Breton and Surrealism, with its emphasis on chance,
the absurd, the irrational, the primitive, the dream world, the art of the insane, and the emancipation of the
unconscious. As early as the 1910s, Breton had developed experiments in automatism in both writing and
drawing as well as a method for inducing hallucinations by exciting the sensibilities.12 Artaud was briefly
17
Antonin Artaud (18961948). The Soldier with a Gun (Le soldat au fusil). drawn
around October 1945. Pencil and color chalk on paper. 62.6 x 47.8 cm. Musee
National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France Muse du
Louve, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Photo: Christian Bahier/Philippe Migeat / Art
Resource, NY
18
Antonin Artaud (18961948). La maladresse sexuelle de dieu (The Sexual
Awkwardness of God). February 1946. Pencil and chalk on paper. 63 x 49 cm.
Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
Muse du Louve, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Photo: Adam Rzepka / Art Resource,
NY
Antonin Artaud (18961948). Portrait of Yves Thvenin. 2 July 1947. Pencil and
chalk on paper. 64 x 48 cm. Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris, France Muse du Louve, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Photo:
Philippe Migeat / Art Resource, NY
Antonin Artaud (18961948). Portrait of Jany du Ray. 2 July 1947. Chalk and
pencil on paper. 65 x 50 cm. Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris, France Muse du Louve, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Photo:
Christian Bahier/Philippe Migeat / Art Resource, NY
19
a member of Bretons Surrealist group but, too obstreperous for any movement, soon found x. Breton objected to the theatre
as an incorrigibly bourgeois
himself excommunicated.x The self-canceling, alienated, incantatory dialect that he went medium, while Artaud viewed
Bretons pivot towards Marxism
on to develop represents a rejection of the Surrealist notion of losing intention and control. as opportunistic, and Marxism
itself as a just another failed
Twomblys gestural abstraction may be viewed as a parallel to Artauds anti-language, utopian doctrine, the last
rotten fruit of the Western
since it too attempts to communicate the incommunicable facts about the conjoined life mentality. It is likely, too, that
Breton feared Artauds growing
of mind and body. For Twombly, each line is the actual experience with its own innate influence within the Surrealist
movement. See Stephen Barber,
history . . . the sensation of its own realization.13 This experience is an event that comes Antonin Artaud: Blows and
Bombs (London: Faber and
directly out of the body: Not as if you were painting an object or special thing, but its Faber, 1993), 28-30.
like coming through the nervous system . . . Its not described. Its happening. The line is the feeling.14 To
achieve this, Twombly experimented with chance and luck from the beginning: early on he made drawings
in the dark, and later he drew with his left-hand as a conscious strategy to unlearn his artistic training and
lose control. In his last paintings, Twombly extended the reach of his brush by attaching it to long poles.
As a result, his lines could no longer be as carefully controlled, but were left to themselves and developed
their own whims.15
This deliberate deskilling shows affinities with the pathological specificity of Artauds drawings. His
line is a highly sensitive instrument capable of capturing the most minute twitches, palpitations, and
disruptions of his consciousness, the jerks and tremors of his nervous system. In his drawings from the
asylum in Rodez (1945-46), Artauds mark making grew ever more violent: the surface of the paper
became a hide which he burnt, punctured, distressed, tore, stained, and mutilated. The air is full of
pencil strokes, pencil strokes like knife slashes, like the scratches of a magic fingernail.16 Like a surrogate
body, or the projected image of his own body, the paper provides the physical correspondence of his
mental torment. The body is grasped as a source of intense pain and suffering, and must be externalized
in order to be attacked, dismembered, and reconstituted. At the same time, any conception of reality
separate from the life of the body (that unintelligible tumulus of flesh17) is held to be a deception. An
iconography of eviscerated bodies and fractured anatomies looks as if it has been dragged through his
brutalized sensorium and detonated across the page. The prevalence of sexual organs and part-objects
points to the absence, or perhaps the trauma, of sex. These and other pictograms float in a flat pictorial
space; sometimes they are laid out as if in an inventory. Anti-form and anti-skill, Artaud made no effort
to improve his abilities lest his drawings become contaminated by an achieved style. Addicted to heroin
and opium for most of his life and subjected to electroshock therapy during his years in Rodez, Artaud
worked on a kind of mental high, often chanting poetry as he drew. I am he who, in order to be, must
whip his innateness.18
The omnipresent pain and suffering that suffuse Artauds work find no analogue in Twombly.
If there is a sensibility of the f layed19 in his art, it comes from the violence unleashed by passion
and desire, the blind and disruptive character of Will 20 where discipline is undone by the lure of
beauty. 21 An exuberant sexuality seeps into everything, and with it a heightened sense of joy, rapture,
and charm as well as melancholy and an awareness of death. The orgiastic abandon and explosion of
bodily markings in the Ferragosto works point to the disintegration and oblivion brought on by sensual
excess: Over the surfaces of his Roman paintings would thus appear so many cocks and cunts, so many
wounds and scorings, so many tatters splayed over the surface of the work, the erotics of which is that
20
its body will never be reconstituted, whole.22 Twombly is discharging a surplus of pleasure; Artaud
is relieving a burden of unpleasure. If Artaud is looking forward to that future moment when he will
be released from his suffering, Twombly looks back to an Arcadian past when body and mind were
harmoniously unified.
With a few early exceptions, the words and phrases in Twomblys work come from poets. The act of
writing out the words of others in his own hand is a way of claiming them as his own and of passing
them through his anatomy. It is both appropriation and interpretation. His quotations belong to the more
Apollonian side of his art, along with the annotations, grids, graphs, squares, and numbers that come to
the fore in the late 1960s, in, for example, his Bolsena drawings or blackboard paintings. These cerebral
markings counter the eruptive iconography and high abstract metaphor23 of the Roman period with a
cool analytic intelligence, reflecting his assimilation of the austerities of Minimalism, Arte Povera, and
Conceptual Art. Twomblys diversity of literary reference is striking, and is again evocative of Artaud,
who also referred with regularity to those artists who served as touchstones for him: Edgar Allan Poe,
Grard de Nerval, Charles Baudelaire, and especially Van Gogh, the eccentric and misunderstood artist
suicided by society with whom Artaud identified profoundly. A similar identification xi xi. Artaud sat in the Coupole
pouring out poetry, talking of
is at work in his apocalyptic novella Heliogabalus, or the Anarchist Crowned: Around the magic, I am Heliogabalus, the
mad Roman emperor, because
corpse of Heliogabalusdead without a tomb, and cut apart by his police in the latrines he becomes everything he
writes about . . . (Anas Nin,
of his own palacethere is an intense circulation of blood and excrement, while around quoted in Barber, 61.)
his cradle, there is an intense circulation of sperm.24 As with Twomblys sophisticated allusions, Artauds
invocations of kindred spirits are simultaneously art and reflections on art.25
For Twombly, a simple word or phrase is enough to open up a drawing or painting to imaginary realms.
He plays with the formal and visual qualities of the words he writes, emphasizing their status as graphic
elements in the overall composition; often the distinction between drawing and writing disappears entirely.
He has a poets feel for the weight of the word in the mouth, as a rhythmic volume of breath ejected from
the body into the air. Sometimes he chooses a word because of the associations it conjures up, sometimes
simply for the way it sounds: The sound of Asia Minor is really like a rush to me.26 A word could be
a piece of intoxicating exotica for Twombly, a spur to achieving the exalted state prerequisite to creation.
As Artaud writes, At times all I would need is a single word, a simple little word of no importance, to be
great, to speak in the voice of the prophets: a word of witness, a precise word, a subtle word, a word well
steeped in my marrow, gone out of me, which would stand at the outer limit of my being.27
Language in Twombly is always fragmentary. The fragmentwhether a piece of broken statuary or
a phrase excerpted from a poet he lovedinvites the beholder (or the artist) to enter and imaginatively
complete it. Antiquity is a source of inspiration for Twombly because it is only accessible in fragments,
and therefore can never lose its mystery and alienness. The sequencing and compositional organization of
his imagery is closer to poetry than to prose, following an intuitive logic that defies rational explanation.
In Fifty Days at Ilium (1977), for instance: the narrative sweep of the Iliad is compressed, its emotional
register distilled, into an elliptical suite of lyrical episodes. Twombly aestheticizes incompleteness, whereas
Artaud at times defiantly leaves his work incomplete in order to guarantee its unassimilability to the
history of representation and the social order.
21
 Here, then, is what I think about thought:
INSPIRATION CERTAINLY EXISTS.
And there is a phosphorescent point at which all reality is recovered, but changed,
transformedand by what??A point of magical utilization of things. And I
believe in mental meteorites, in private cosmogonies.28

IV.
The cathartic function of art as a spell or exorcism to relieve psychic pressures and ward off fears and anxiety
is central to the Personages of Louise Bourgeois, which she began to make in the mid-1940s. Exhibited
in New York in 1949, shortly before Twomblys first visit to North Africa in 1952, the Personages show
a kinship with the sculpture he would produce upon his return. In his 1952 grant application, Twombly
teased out the connections between primitive art and classical art: Im drawn to the primitive, the ritual
and fetish elements, to the symmetrical plastic order (peculiarly basic to both primitive and classic concepts,
so relating the two).29 Twomblys drawings from the ethnographic museum made in Rome the following
year, which formed the basis of his exhibition of paintings at the Stable Gallery, were steeped in the same
primitive, fetishistic, and sexual characteristics as Bourgeoiss vertical monoliths.xii As in all xii. What Motherwell wrote of his
early paintings (which Twombly
primitive art, sexuality permeates the sculpture of both artists: in Bourgeoiss phallic shapes called those voodoo things)
could also be applied to Twomblys
and the orifices and bulges that read respectively as male and female, and in the symmetry sculpture: The sexual character of
the fetishes [lies] half-buried in his
of Twomblys botanical forms. These distinct bodies of work also share an anthropomorphic violent surface. (Serota, 16, 30.)

quality, fusing architecture and the human body, although many of the Personages are highly figurative,
whereas Twomblys sculptures retain their object-like qualities and are largely abstract. Like a primitive
totem, the Personages were carved or assembled out of wood and then painted black or white with touches
of colour. Rigid, plank-like, and essentially frontal, they taper to a point, incapable of standing on their
own. Bourgeois would carry these surrogates (presences of those she missed) around with her. Unlike the
pronounced bases in Twomblys sculptures, the Personages have no pedestals. When they were first shown,
Bourgeois bolted them into the floor in an environmental installation. It was some kind of an encounter, Louise Bourgeois. Untitled, 1947. Bronze, painted white. 57 1/2 x 12 x 12"; 146.1 x
30.5 x 30.5 cm. Collection The Easton Foundation. Photo: Christopher Burke,
stated Bourgeois; an encounter defined by Rosalind Krauss as a kind of projection of the Unconscious onto The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA

the space of the real. 30

From Dubuffet to Brancusi and Giacometti, Twomblys sculpture synthesizes a range of sources into
an idiosyncratic and original body of work.xiii The vaguely hieratic associations of some of xiii. Including Hellenic and
Egyptian sculpture.
his later sculptures recall the Talmudic sublime of Newman and Rothko. The archetypal,
static, and frontal configuration of Twomblys forms, and the prominent use of bases, makes them look like
funerary objects or votive altars from an ancient civilization, an effect reinforced by the white paint that
confers an older patina and is an ode to the marble of antiquity. Twombly painted them white to unify the
disparate found objects of which they were originally made and thereby to play down their material qualities
in favour of their formal attributes. In his words, whiteness can be the classic state of the intellect, or a
neo-romantic area of remembranceor as the symbolic whiteness of Mallarm.31 Mirroring the shift in
Bourgeoiss sculpture from wood and plaster to marble and found objects (used extensively in her theatrical

22 23
 series of Cells), Twomblys sculpture, like his painting, undergoes a transformation from the primitive and
classical to the Baroque, culminating in the sorbet palette of Turkish Delight and Untitled (both 2000) and in
the 2010 painting Ceiling for the Salle des Bronzes in the Louvre, which, in the best tradition of the Baroque
painters, opens up an architectural space to the heavens.
Twomblys early sculpture reveals him as a gifted bricoleur, and may be related to the contemporaneous
tendency of assemblage art, which was rooted in the work of Marcel Duchamp and Kurt xiv. Often mentioned in the
same breath as Rauschenberg
Schwitters and later associated with Robert Rauschenberg xiv and Beuys. But it is the intriguing and Jasper Johns, in reality
Twomblys art has little in
parallel with the art of Beuys that goes beyond mere formal affinities. Beuyss raw sculptural common with theirs, though
all three painters emerged at the
materials became magical relics produced by an alchemical transformation. Found objects same time and reacted against
the regnant tendency of Abstract
such as bread, felt, fat, blankets, flashlights, and sleds are integrated as building blocks of Expressionism. Twombly shares
with Rauschenberg and Johns
the myth of his artistic origins and endowed with spiritual properties. Their sometime status (as also with John Cage and
Marcel Duchamp) a sense of
as remnants of radical performances and actions dovetails with the utopian ramifications art as a kind of high playfulness.
To some extent he also shares
of his conception of social sculpture. Beuyss works on paper often mix poetic phrases (The Rauschenbergs stated ambition
to act in the gap between art
Impact of the Full Moon on the Sowers Head, 1972, for example) with images of stags, frogs, and life (itself a riff on Harold
Rosenbergs description of
hares, and animal beings from a distant mythological realm. His blackboard drawings, Abstract Expressionist painting
as an arena in which to act).
appropriated from Rudolf Steiners chalk drawings on black paper made from 1919 to Long overshadowed by
Rauschenberg and Johns,
1924, combine diagrammatic shapes with pedagogical language, and bear a distant family Twombly only began to receive
due recognition with the MoMA
resemblance to the elimination of ornament and the severe reduction of formal means in retrospective of 1994.

Twomblys blackboard paintings. Like Artaud, who wished to restore the old chthonic myths and travelled
to Mexico to witness an ancient peyote ritual in Tamahumara, Beuys was drawn to the idea of a return to
an earlier state of innocence and wholeness.xv Artaud and Bourgeois were trying to cure themselves through
their art, but Beuys believed that art could cure society (specifically the spiritual malaise xv. Beuyss performance I Love
America and America Loves Me
of postwar Germany). His own salvation after a near-fatal plane crash would provide the (1974) staged an encounter
between the artist and a coyote
basis for the regeneration of a sick civilization, the repair of its collective psychic wounds. (sometimes interpreted as
representing pre-Colombian
To that end, he assumed the role of shaman and healer who could effect this cure through a civilization in the Americas) in
which they gradually learn to
revolutionary utopian project grounded in the poetics of a private mythology. Rapport with inhabit the same close space.

nature allows Beuys and Twombly to find the beauty already contained within themselves. But only art helps
Joseph Beuys. Fragment for a Crucifixion. 1950. Oil and cotton wool on canvas; themand Artaud and Bourgeois tooregain what they have lost.32
139.7 x 108.5 cm. Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

V.
For Twombly, the myths of antiquity are dreams and mirrors. Mythical characters are archetypes, and the
sequence of events follows an oneiric logic that is intuitively convincing even when irreducible to reason.
Twombly finds his own passions reflected in the external patterns of myth; the mirroring effect between
aesthetic experience and psychic response is profound and generative. His works are never literary depictions
or retellings of a myth, though myth may suggestively open the work up to narrative. Myth permits emotional
expressivity without disclosing biographical origins and, conversely, provides an objective correlative to the
realm of sexuality and fantasy. As Thomas Mann wrote, [The man of antiquity] searched the past for a
pattern into which he might slip as into a diving bell, and being thus at once disguised and protected might

24 25
rush upon his present problem. Thus his life was in a sense a reanimation, an archaizing attitude. But it is just mechanism, concealing the personality of the maker behind the ironizing, erudite, world-weary tones of
this life as reanimation that is the life of myth.33 For the man of antiquity, it was only by acting within the the Roman poet. The very choice of persona is an oblique indication of his intentions and an affirmation
coordinates set by myth and history that his life could take on individual meaning. Twomblys use of myth of his sensibilitymuch as Twomblys choice of citation is itself significant for the total meaning of a given
thus resembles and complements his use of language, since both are baffles that function to displace personal work. His transcriptions of phrases are both original mark making and genuine homagethey too can be
emotion into an impersonal structure. understood as a conversion or translation.
Twomblys grasp of myth as an organizational principle for the expression of private concerns aligns
the artist with the Modernist poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Eliots prescription in Tradition and the
Individual Talent that the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who
suffers and the mind which creates34 aptly describes Twomblys genius for observation. For Eliot, the success VI.
of the work hinges on its makers capacity to preserve a distance from the material out of which he creates Bacon, whom Twombly considered the last great European painter,36 was fascinated by the animal aspects of
his artto maintain a perfectly receptive neutrality towards all experience, regardless of his own level of the human condition, the bestial drives of lust and violence, crimes of passion, masochism, and psychological
affectivity. Eliots translation of St.-John Perses Anabasis has several points of contact with Twomblys work. nakedness. (So was Twombly, as witness just two of his titles: A Murder of Passion and Crimes of Passion II
To begin with, the title: as Eliot clarifies in his preface, anabasis has no particular reference to Xenophon or (both 1960), the latter of which was originally dedicated to the Marquis de Sade.37) Bacon finds the fear
the journey of the Ten Thousand, no particular relation to Asia Minor and no map of its migrations could of deaththe slaughterhousein every image. In his Studies for the Base of a Crucifixion (c. 1944), or in
be drawn up.35 Instead, Perse used the word in the literal sense of a journey into the interior. The poem his copulating couples and screaming popes, the erotic aspect of death and the murderous aspect of sex are
contains no action, historical or otherwise, but rather a suggestive music that presents an accumulation of conjoined in the operatic mise en scne of his existential architecture. His luxuriant malerisch figures stand
densely massed imagery under the angles of war, ritual, saturnalia, and violence. Eliots peculiar verbal idiom in tension with his minimal backgrounds. A preoccupation with the brute facts of existence (Eliots birth,
inevitably transforms Perses original (itself a striking reconception of a past that is no longer xvi. According to Nicola del and copulation, and death38) and a profound historical sense unite the two artists, though where Twombly
Roscio, Twombly thought Pound
extant or accessible) into a work that closely resembles his own poetry from the same period represented the disaster that was looking to antiquity and Poussin, Bacon was studying Velzquez and Rembrandt. Bacon too insisted on
ensues when a writer becomes
(particularly Ash Wednesday and the Ariel poems). It is a double displacement. too deeply involved in politics, the presentness of the Greek mythsOedipus and the Sphinx, for exampleas a force that simplifie[d]
and felt it was a great pity that
Twombly adored Pounds Cantos, and the dramatic arc of Pounds life must have seemed the man who edited the verse his concerns into reality.39
ofW.B. Yeats and invented
like a contemporary cautionary tale.xvi Twomblys work could be said to mark a return Modernist poetry in English Violence of imagery is matched with violence of technique. By smearing or distorting the features of his
should have committed such
to that older and richer conception of the sublime in the old sense ironically elegized appalling mistakes. Del Roscio subjects or twisting their bodies into a pretzel, Bacon makes them register more powerfully and immediately
relates that once Twombly was
in the sculpted verse of Pounds Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920).xvii Certainly he shows invited to the Spoleto Festival by upon the retina and nervous system and endows them with fantastic reality. The intense physicality of his
Giancarlo Menotti and was seated
affinities with the concentrated force of Pounds images, his eclectic range of reference, his in the same box where Pound and paint handling recalls the inner circuitry of the human body: tract and bowel, vein and artery, nerve and
Olga Rudge were silently sitting.
preoccupation with culture past and present, and his immersion in classical antiquity. But Apparently Twombly and Pound bone. His rendering of the interior of the mouth (which may be a displaced fixation on the anus) has a strong
did not exchange a single word (as
it is with Pounds theory of personae that Twomblys work shows the closest connection. a self-punishment Pound refused sexual component. I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a
to speak to anybody except to
The Latin personae refers to the masks donned by actors on the Roman stage. Rather than Olga, and then in whispers). In snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime.40
conversation with the author,
speaking directly in his own voice, the Modernist poet would assume the mask of selected February 3rd, 2014. Fate and chance are given space to operate in the creation of Bacons imagery; the paint, as the physical
predecessors, imitating, translating, or directly appropriating their words in order to reflect xvii. The poems protagonist, a expression of a psychic reality,41 has a life of its own. Throwing the paint onto the canvas or wiping the
double for Pound himself, is a
indirectly on the present. very Twomblyan figure: For three image with a rag, he navigates a kind of tightrope walk between what is called figurative painting and
years, out of key with his time, /
Pounds Homage to Sextus Propertius is the leading exemplar of this practise. In it, the He strove to resuscitate the dead abstraction. It will go right out from abstraction but will really have nothing to do with it. xviii. Del Roscio relates that,
art / Of poetry: to maintain the while making his last paintings,
poet has created a text that is simultaneously an unconventional translation of the Roman sublime / In the old sense. Wrong Its an attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and Twombly encountered a difficulty
from the start and: He fished due to a strong anguished desire
elegist as well as an original Modernist poem in English. The central subject of Propertiuss by obstinate isles; / Observed the more poignantly.42 Paradoxically, then, it is precisely the surrender to the luck of chance, to accomplish something before
elegance of Circes hair / Rather it is too late. There is some fury
odes are the vicissitudes of the poets love affair with a woman to whom he gave the poetic than the mottoes on sun-dials. the submission to fate, that produces a sense of inevitability about the work. in there, and a perception of
(Ezra Pound [1920], Hugh time. He suffered a lot making
sobriquet Cynthia, but his verse also reflects the larger context of Roman poetry, culture, Selwyn Mauberley, in Diptych For Bacon as for Twombly, painting is a wager that stakes the psychic integrity of the painter and depends upon them, because of lack of breath
Rome-London (New York: New but at the same time, as in a
and mores as Rome entered its overtly imperial phase under Augustus. By stepping back Directions Press, 1996), 38. the suspension of conscious decision in favour of instinctual freedom. Loss of control is related to pleasurenot strange phenomenon, he looked
as if he were levitating and then
into the patterns laid down by Propertius, Pound gains a position from which to rush upon his present only the orgasmic release of the painterly mark, but also the voluptuous sensation of placing oneself under the collapsing, after a few strokes.
In conversation with the author,
problem, shortly after the First World War had shattered the complacencies of the belle poque and Pound xviii
As La Rochefoucauld had it, man believes he leads when in February 3rd, 2014

found himself increasingly sidelined within the London literary scene. The poets mask serves as a distancing reality he is being led.43

26 27
 VII.
Twomblys favourite short story was D.H. Lawrences The Rocking Horse Winner, in which a boy growing up
in a family that has come down in the world finds a secret way to make his own luck and earn money for his
spendthrift parents at the horse races. In the middle of the night, unbeknownst to his family, he gallops at a
wild pace on a rocking horse he has outgrown. This highly repetitive physical action ushers in a mediumistic
state of unusual lucidity, at the height of which the name of the winning horse sometimes comes to him,
though often it does not. Trusting completely in the knowledge thus secured, he places bets at the track with
the help of an adult collaborator. Yet working himself up comes with a cost, and even his inattentive mother
begins to notice that the boy is not himself. One evening she returns home early from a party and discovers
the boy rocking himself into a frenzy, desperate to overcome a recent dry spell. The name is given to him
and he wins big on the next race, but he has pushed his luck too far: he suffers a nervous collapse and dies
shortly thereafter.44
Speaking of a specific kind of . . . more extreme paintings,45 Twombly stated:

I work very fast. I sit for two or three hours and then in fifteen minutes I can do
a painting . . . A couple of hours of sitting sparks the thing for five or six minutes.
But I cant always do it . . .46

Like the boy in the short story, Twombly must enter a kind of trance, a heightened state of attention and
poise, in order to create. He worked from the euphoria induced by the sensations that stimulated him, as
well as from their complex interplay with experience, memory, and desire. Depending entirely on his present
state of inspiration, his working method proceeded in fits and starts, with long periods of observation and
absorption preceding the eruptive burst of the creative act.xix Not all of his work was produced xix. The very idea of painting as a
career was anathema to Twombly.
in this way; one thinks of the simple and stringent exercises47 of his blackboard paintings, There were years of staggering
productivity and years when he did
where the imprint of the body is reduced to a quasi-mechanical scriptive repetition. But it not make a single painting.

Francis Bacon, Lying Figure, Beyeler Foundation
Francis Bacon, Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres, 1983. Museu Coleo
Berardo. Fotografia: DMF
is this lucid frenzy that is responsible for his greatest workswhen the insights collected through reflection
and analysis are ejected outwards, and when the dominant contemplative mode gives way to a sudden spasm
of activity. It is a controlled high, an exaltation where mind and body are pulled into sync and lifted together
to the highest regions of creativity.
Twombly was the singular figure who naturalized American gestural abstraction in Europelike
the Roman elegists who came bringing the Grecian orgies into Italy, / and the dance into Italy.48 His
achievement is unprecedented and anomalous. The sheer originality of his work delayed full recognition of
its significance for a long time. Its inimitability has circumscribed his influence upon other artists. No other
painter in the history of art has succeeded in expressing such emotional and psychological specificity in the
language of abstraction. It fell to an erstwhile cryptographer in the U.S. Army who was rebuked for his
vagueness to crack the code of how to fuse the two.
With the incredible additive intelligence which finds its visual equivalent in his accretive surfaces,
Twombly merged the various strands of his eclectic influences with his extreme sensitivity to beauty and the
specificities of his private emotion into a perfect instrument. His are some of the most sensuous paintings
ever painted. The expressive qualities of paint have been deployed to evoke the life of the body. Mans erotic

28 29
life is the most singular aspect of his being; it is where the past is replayed in each fresh encounter. Twomblys
fidelity to abstraction should be understood as a method for expressing emotions that cannot be produced
by concepts or any representation derived from the empirical world.49 This eroticism is a modality that
saturates every area of his work, leavening it with the particular sensations that express a different dimension
of his being.50
Twomblys antiquity is not the subdued, sober black and white of the Germanic scholars of the 19th
century, where simplicity, grace, and harmony were the rule, but the crudity, violence, and intoxicating
vividness of full-on technicolour. It is less Winklemann than Fellini. His interest in the past is not the
disinterested inquiry of the antiquarian but the passionate involvement of the sensualist who lives squarely in
the realm of the senses. He gives the ancient world back to us raw, with latrine humour in lapidary couplets,
monkeys in the agora, psychopaths wearing the imperial purple, and statues with eyes and clothes painted
on, in radiant psychedelic colour.
Etymology teaches that culture is a garden, and Twombly elusively, nobly cultivated his plot at a remove
from the major centres and currents of postwar art. His late flower paintings often have a funereal air, as if
memorializing the dead or offered as memento mori. In The Rose (IV), for instance, three lush, overripe blooms
are loaded with dark folds and pockets seemingly freighted with intimations of mortality. Yet the mood of
Twomblys late work is not uniformly elegiac, and never portentous. Equally often, there is a recrudescence of
the carnality and randiness of his Rome paintings, as in the Indian summer of the Bacchus series; or a gallant
fury at the evanescence of things, as in the supercharged colours of the last paintings;xx or xx. According to legend, Goethes
last words on his deathbed were
the delirious sugar rush of his late sculpture, all white frosting and marzipan. Mehr licht: more light.
Twomblys flowers are instantiations of the Empyrean rose, which Dante, at the end of his Paradiso,
situates beyond the physical universe, where human love and divine love are infolded like the petals of a
flower. A final transcendent vision bursts upon the poets brain in a crescendo of epiphanies that builds to
a staggering perception of the divine plan. As the poets gaze grows more rapt and penetrates more deeply
into the light, the vision draws him in, purifying and altering him in a dialectical process, steadily lifting his
longing to its ardent limit,51 until finally he is struck by the light of revelation. Here, writes Dante, force
failed my high fantasy: his language, his power of poetic representation, has exhausted the limits of the
sayable. And yet
my desire and will were moved alreadylike
a wheel revolving uniformlyby
the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.52
Art is salvation from incompleteness, oblivion, and death, the paradiso terrestre where experiences and
emotions of the past are recovered and transfigured in the present. For Twombly as for Proust, every
paradise is a paradise lost which contains within it joys that could not be felt apart from memory.53 Love in
all its manifestationserotic, intellectual, platonic, romantic, love of culture, love of lifeis the animating
principle behind Cy Twomblys art. It is the mysterious, perfect union of dream and waking life, irretrievable
past and sensuous present, intellectual ardour and the faculty for loveparadise regained.
30
Endnotes
1. Dory Previn, Doppelganger, quoted in Gary Indiana, Three Month Fever (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), unpaginated.
2. W.H. Auden [1961], Introduction, in The Complete Poems of Cavafy, trans. Rae Dalven (1949), (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1989), xvixvii.
3. Kirk Varnedoe, Inscriptions in Arcadia, in Cy Twombly: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 28.
4. Barnett Newman [1948], The Sublime Is Now, in Art in Theory 19002000. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood (London:
Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 58182.
5. Varnedoe, 14.
6. Sidney Geist, quoted in David Joselit, American Art Since 1945 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 15. Full quote: In a gesture that parallels a sexual act,
[DeKooning] [sic] has vented himself with violence on the canvas which is the body of this woman.
7. Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), xlviii.
8. Susan Sontag, Artaud, in Artaud, xlviii. Full quote: [T]he body is always a problem. Artaud never defines the body in terms of its capacity for sensuous
pleasure but always in terms of its electric capacity for intelligence and for pain.
9. Artaud, liii.
10. Ibid., 108.
11. Margit Rowell, Images of Cruelty, in Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper, ed. Margit Rowell (New York: MoMA, 1997), 11.
12. Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern ArtA Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 372.
13. Varnedoe, 27.
14. Twombly, statement (2000) in David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (London: Chatto & Windus, 2001), 17879; cited in Richard Shiff, Charm,
in Serota, 14.
15. Hochdrfer, 10.
16. Artaud, 66.
17. Marthe Robert, I am the bodys insurgent . . ., in Rowell, 29.
18. Sontag, Artaud, xix.
19. Artaud, 353.
20. Philip Kitcher, Death In Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 34.
21. Ibid., 96.
22. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 266; cited in Nicolas Cullinan, Insinuating Elegance: The Anxiety of
Influence, in Serota, 85.
23. Varnedoe, 38.
24. Barber, 6061.
25. Artaud, xxv.
26. Twombly, in Sylvester 2001, 176; cited in Serota, 31, fn 48.
27. Artaud, 81.
28. Ibid., 82.
29. Serota, 57.
30. Rosalind E. Krauss, Magicians Game: Decades of Transformation 19301950, in 200 Years of American Sculpture (New York: David Godine, 1976), 168.
31. Varnedoe, 27.
32. I am paraphrasing Donald Meltzer and Meg Harris Williams, The Role of Aesthetic Conflict in Development, Art, and Violence (London: Karnac Books, 1988),
225.
33. Thomas Mann [1936], Freud and the Future, in Death and Venice, Tonio Krger, and Other Writings, trans. Helen Tracey Lowe-Porter (New York:
Continuum, 1999), 292.
34. T.S. Eliot [1919], Tradition and the Individual Talent, in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 47.
35. T.S. Eliot [1930], Preface, in St. John-Perse, Anabasis, trans. T.S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1949), 9.
36. Varnedoe, 37.
37. Serota, 84.
38. T.S. Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of an Agon, in Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 131.
39. David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 176. Full quote: . . . with all the mechanical means of rendering
appearance, it means that a painter, if he is going to attempt to record life, has to do it in a much more intense and curtailed way. It has to have the intensity
of . . . you can call it sophisticated simplicity. And I dont mean the kind of simplicity Cycladic sculpture has, which simplifies into banality, but the kind
Egyptian sculpture has, which simplifies into reality. You have to abbreviate into intensity.
40. Chipp, 621. The quotation continues: I think the whole process of this sort of elliptical form is dependent on the execution of detail and how shapes are
remade or put slightly out of focus to bring in their memory traces.
41. David Joselit, American Art since 1945 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 10.
42. Sylvester, 12.
43. La Rochefoucauld [1678], Maxims, trans. Stuart D. Warner and Stpane Douard (2001), (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustines Press, 2009), 11. The phrase
cited is the first half of maxim 43, which continues thus: . . . and while his mind tends towards one end, his heart insensibly draws him towards another.
French original: L homme croit souvent se conduire lorsqu il est conduit; et pendent que par son esprit il tend un but, son coeur lentrane insensiblement un autre.
44. See D.H. Lawrence, The Rocking-Horse Winner, in Selected Stories (New York: Penguin Books, 2007). I am indebted to Angela Westwater for drawing my
attention to this story.
45. Serota, 51.
46. Ibid., 51.
47. Robert Pincus-Witten [1968], Learning to Write, in Writings on Cy Twombly, ed. Nicola del Roscio (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2002), 60.
48. Ezra Pound [1917], Homage to Sextus Propertius, in Diptych Rome-London (New York: New Directions Press, 1996), 8.
49. Irving Singer, The Nature of Love in The Modern World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 164. Singer uses these words to describe Henri
Bergsons conception of love vis--vis Marcel Proust.
50. Ibid., 164.
51. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 538. Italian original: lardor del desiderio in me finii.
52. Ibid., 541. Italian original: Allalta fantasia qui manc possa; / ma gi volgeva il mio disio e l velle, / s come rota ch igualmente mossa, / lamor que move il sole e
laltre stelle.
53. Singer, 208. Here the author is speaking about Proust, memory, and the subjectivity of love.
31
PL ATE S
Landscape, 1951. Oil-based house paint, oil paint, paper collage on wooden panel. 27.9 x 53.3 cm (11 x 21 inches)

35
Untitled, 1951. Oil based house paint on canvas. 101.6 x 121.9 cm (40 x 48 inches)

36
Untitled (New York City), 1955. Oil-based house paint and lead pencil on canvas. 109.9 x 128.9 cm (43 14 x 50 34 inches)

39
Panorama, 1955. Pencil on paper. 55.8 x 76.5 cm (22 x 30 18 inches)

42
The Castle, 1958. Oil-based house paint and lead pencil on canvas. 121.9 x 153 cm (48 x 60 14 inches)

45
Untitled, 1959. Collage: (shredded paper, shredded pink type writing paper, glue), pencil, ballpoint pen. 36.7 x 30.4 cm (14 716 x 12 inches) Untitled, 1959. Collage: (shredded paper, shredded pink type writing paper, glue), pencil, ballpoint pen. 36.7 x 30.4 cm (14 716 x 12 inches)

46 47
Untitled, 1960-63. Oil, wax crayon, color pencil and graphite on paper. 85.5 x 115 cm (33 58 x 45 14 inches)

49
Untitled (Roma), 1961. Colored crayons, graphite and oil on canvas. 96.5 x 126.4 cm (38 x 49 34 inches)

52
First Part of the Return from Parnassus, 1961. Oil, crayon and pencil on paper mounted on canvas. 69.8 x 100 cm (27 12 x 39 38 inches)

55
Untitled, 1961. Pencil and colored Crayon on paper. 58.4 x 68.6 (23 x 27 inches)

56
Notes from a Tower, 1961. Colored chalk and pencil on paper. 33.8 x 36 cm (13 14 x 14 18 inches)

59
Ilium (One Morning Ten Years Later) [Part I], 1964. Oil paint, lead pencil and wax crayon on canvas. 200 x 210.2 cm (78 34 x 92 34 inches)

60
Untitled (Greetings From Gorgo), 1966. Pencil, wax crayon on paper. 41.8 x 34 cm (16 716 x 13 38 inches)

63
Untitled (Greetings From Gorgo), 1966. Pencil, wax crayon on paper. 41.8 x 34 cm (16 716 x 13 38 inches) Untitled (Greetings From Gorgo), 1966. Pencil, wax crayon on paper. 41.8 x 34 cm (16 716 x 13 38 inches)

64 65
Untitled, 1967. Oil and crayon on canvas. 147.3 x 177.8 cm (58 x 70 inches)

67
Untitled, 1968. Oil, house paint, and wax/oil crayon on canvas. 202 x 262.9 cm (79 12 x 103 12 inches)

68
Untitled, 1969. Pencil, wax crayon on paper. 70.3 x 99.8 cm (27 58 x 39 14 inches) Untitled, 1969. Colour pencil, wax crayon, felt-tip pen, pencil on paper. 70.3 x 100 cm (27 58 x 39 14 inches)

70 71
Untitled, 1969. Colour pencil, wax crayon, felt-tip pen, pencil on paper. 70.3 x 100 cm (27 58 x 39 14 inches) Untitled, 1969. Colour pencil, wax crayon, felt-tip pen, pencil on paper. 70.3 x 100 cm (27 58 x 39 14 inches)

72 73
Untitled, 1971. Oil paint, wax crayon, pencil on paper. 70.3 x 100.1 cm (22 1116 x 39 38 inches)

76
Untitled, 1971. Oil paint, wax crayon, pencil on paper. 70.3 x 100.1 cm (22 1116 x 39 38 inches)

79
Ninis Painting (Rome), 1971. Oil-based house paint, wax crayon, lead pencil on canvas. 239 x 300.4 (94 14 x 118 14 inches)

80
Gladings (Loves Infinite Causes), 1973. Collage: (lithography, rectangular strips of drawing paper, handmade paper,

transparent adhesive tape, staples), oil, ink, wax crayon, pencil. 100.2 x 80.7 cm (39 716 x 31 34 inches)

83
Orpheus (Napoli), Sweep to Oblivion, 1975. xxxxxxxxxxx. 140 x 100 cm (55 18 x 39 716 inches)

84
Untitled, 1978. Bronze, edition 3/3. 44 x 225.5 x 18 cm (17 14 x 87 12 x 7 inches)

87
Leda and the Swan, [six parts]. 1980. Oil paint, acrylic, oil paint on verso of a print proof, poster reproducing a white and black image of a work dated

1975, grid paper, transparent adhesive tapel. 252.5 x 187.2 cm (99 12 x 73 34 inches)

88
Untitled, 1983/1998. Bronze. 185.7 x 160 x 34.9 cm (73 18 x 63 x 13 34 inches)

91
Paessaggio, 1986. Oil paint, acrylic on wooden panel. 175.7 x 128.1 cm (69 18 x 50 38 inches)

94
Paessaggio,1986. Oil paint, acrylic on wooden panel. 175.5 x 128.3 cm (69 x 50 12 inches)

97
Gaeta Set VIII, 1986. Oil and crayon on paper. a.) 26 x 29 cm (10 14 x 11 38 inches); b.) 27 x 29.5 cm (10 58 x 11 58 inches); c.) 27 x 29.5 cm (10 58 x 11 58

inches); d.) 25 x 28 cm (9 78 x 11 inches); e.) 25.5 x 28 cm (9 78 x 11 inches); f.) 25 x 28.5 cm (9 1316 x 11 14 inches); g.) 27 x 30 cm (10 58 x 11 1316 inches)

98
Toilette Di Venere, 1988. Collage: (one sheet of paper, staples) acrylic, house paint, wax crayon, felt tip pen.220 x 150 cm (86 58 x 59 116 inches)
 Untitled. 1989. Collage: (one sheet of paper, circular tracing paper, paper shred, Untitled. 1989. Collage: (one sheet of paper, circular tracing paper, paper shred,

transparent adhesive tape, glue) acrylic, wax crayon. 104 x 74.5 cm (40 1516 x 29 38 inches) transparent adhesive tape, glue) acrylic, wax crayon. 104 x 74.5 cm (40 1516 x 29 38 inches)

108 109
 Untitled (A Rose), 1989. Acrylic, wax crayon on paper. Title: 58.5 x 44 cm (23 116 x 17 516 inches), 1 of 6; 56.7 x 43.5 cm

(22 516 x 17 38 inches), 2 of 6; 59 x 44 cm (23 14 x 17 516 inches), 3 of 6; 58.2 x 44 cm (22 1516 x 17 516 inches), 4 of 6; 57.2 x 44 cm

(22 12 x 17 516 inches,) 5 of 6; 58 x 45 cm (22 1316 x 17 34 inches), 6 of 6; 58.1 x 44.9 cm (22 78 x 17 1116 inches)

110
Untitled (Gaeta), 1989. Acrylic, tempera on paper mounted on wooden panel. 203.2 x 148.9 cm (80 x 58 58 inches)

115
Untitled. 1992. Acrylic, oil stick, coloured pencil, lead pencil on wooden panel. 235 x 172.2 cm (92 12 x 67 34 inches) Untitled. 1992. Tempera, acrylic, oil stick, wax crayon, lead pencil on wooden panel. 234 x 172.2 cm (92 18 x 67 34 inches)

118 119
Lepanto I, 1996. Monotype. 99.1 x 62.9 (39 x 24 34 inches)

121
Lepanto II, 1996. Monotype. 99.1 x 62.9 (39 x 24 34 inches) Lepanto III, 1996. Monotype. 99.1 x 62.9 (39 x 24 34 inches)

122 123
Untitled. 2000. wood, plaster, acrylic, paper, metal, staples. 59 x 37.5 x 28 cm (23 14 x 14 34 x 11 inches)

125
Turkish Delight. 2000. Wood, plaster, and paint. 115.6 x 45.7 x 41.9 cm (45 12 x 18 x 16 12 inches)

128
Untitled. 2002. Plywood, acrylic painting. 00 x 000 x 00 cm (00 x 00 x 00 inches)

131
A Time to Remain, A Time to Go Away. 2002. Plywood, wood, white paint, acrylic, pencil, iron wires. 00 x 000 x 00 cm (00 x 00 x 00 inches)

132
Untitled. 2005. Mixed media on paper. 57 x 39 cm (22 12 x 15 38 inches) Untitled. 2005. Mixed media on paper. 57 x 39 cm (22 12 x 15 38 inches)

136 137
Untitled. 2005. Mixed media on paper. 57 x 39 cm (22 12 x 15 38 inches) Untitled. 2005. Mixed media on paper. 57 x 39 cm (22 12 x 15 38 inches)

138 139
The Rose (IV), 2008. Acrylic on wooden panel, Four panel. 252 x 740 cm (99 316 x 291 516 inches)

140
Untitled (Camino Real IV). 2011. Acrylic on wood panel. 252.5 x 187.2 cm (99 12 x 73 34 inches)

144
Untitled (Camino Real VII). 2011. Acrylic on wood panel. 252.5 x 187.2 cm (99 12 x 73 34 inches)

147
Untitled (Camino Real VIII). 2011. Acrylic on wood panel. 252.5 x 187.2 cm (99 12 x 73 34 inches)

148
Untitled (Camino Real X). 2011. Acrylic on wood panel. 252.5 x 187.2 cm (99 12 x 73 34 inches)

151
CHECKLIST
BIOGR A PHIC A L NOTES
ONE-PER SON E X HIBITIONS
Checklist Page 00 Page 00 Page 00
Landscape, 1951 Untitled, 1961 Untitled, 1969
Oil-based house paint, oil paint, paper collage on wooden panel Pencil and colored Crayon on paper Colour pencil, wax crayon, felt-tip pen, pencil on paper
27.9 x 53.3 cm (11 x 21 inches) 58.4 x 68.6 (23 x 27 inches) 70.3 x 100 cm (27 58 x 39 14 inches)
Private Collection La Coleccin Jumex Cy Twombly Foundation
Photography by Francisco Kochen
Page 00 Page 00
Untitled, 1951 Page 00 Untitled, 1969
Oil based house paint on canvas Notes from a Tower, 1961 Colour pencil, wax crayon, felt-tip pen, pencil on paper
101.6 x 121.9 cm (40 x 48 inches) Colored chalk and pencil on paper 70.3 x 100 cm (27 58 x 39 14 inches)
Cy Twombly Foundation 33.8 x 36 cm (13 14 x 14 18 inches) Cy Twombly Foundation
La Coleccin Jumex
Page 00 Page 00
Untitled (New York City), 1955 Page 00 Untitled, 1971
Oil-based house paint and lead pencil on canvas. 109.9 x 128.9 cm Ilium (One Morning Ten Years Later) [Part I], 1964 Oil paint, wax crayon, pencil on paper
(43 14 x 50 34 inches) Oil paint, lead pencil and wax crayon on canvas 70.3 x 100.1 cm (22 1116 x 39 38 inches)
The Eli and edythe L. Broad Collection, The Broad Art Foundation 200 x 210.2 cm (78 34 x 92 34 inches) Cy Twombly Foundation
The Eli and edythe L. Broad Collection, The Broad Art Foundation
Page 00 Page 00
Panorama, 1955 Page 00 Untitled, 1971
Pencil on paper Untitled (Greetings From Gorgo), 1966 Oil paint, wax crayon, pencil on paper
55.8 x 76.5 cm (22 x 30 18 inches) Pencil, wax crayon on paper 70.3 x 100.1 cm (22 1116 x 39 38 inches)
Cy Twombly Foundation 41.8 x 34 cm (16 716 x 13 38 inches) Cy Twombly Foundation
Cy Twombly Foundation
Page 00 Page 00
The Castle, 1958 Page 00 Ninis Painting (Rome), 1971
Oil-based house paint and lead pencil on canvas Untitled (Greetings From Gorgo), 1966 Oil-based house paint, wax crayon, lead pencil on canvas
121.9 x 153 cm (48 x 60 14 inches) Pencil, wax crayon on paper 239 x 300.4 (94 14 x 118 14 inches)
David Zwirner, London/New York 41.8 x 34 cm (16 716 x 13 38 inches) The menil Collection, Houston
Cy Twombly Foundation Photo: Hester and Hardaway ?
Page 00
Untitled, 1959 Page 00 Page 00
Collage: (shredded paper, shredded pink type writing paper, glue), Untitled (Greetings From Gorgo), 1966 Gladings (Loves Infinite Causes), 1973
pencil, ballpoint pen Pencil, wax crayon on paper Collage: (lithography, rectangular strips of drawing paper,
36.7 x 30.4 cm (14 716 x 12 inches) 41.8 x 34 cm (16 716 x 13 38 inches) handmade paper, transparent adhesive tape, staples), oil, ink, wax
Cy Twombly Foundation Cy Twombly Foundation crayon, pencil
100.2 x 80.7 cm (39 716 x 31 34 inches)
Page 00 Page 00 Cy Twombly Foundation
Untitled, 1959 Untitled, 1967
Collage: (shredded paper, shredded pink type writing paper, glue), Oil and crayon on canvas Page 00
pencil, ballpoint pen 147.3 x 177.8 cm (58 x 70 inches) Orpheus (Napoli), Sweep to Oblivion, 1975
36.7 x 30.4 cm (14 716 x 12 inches) The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The BarryLowen xxxxxxxxxxx
Cy Twombly Foundation Collection 140 x 100 cm (55 18 x 39 716 inches)
Photo by Squidds and Nunns Collection Thomas Muller
Page 00 Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn
Untitled, 1960-63 Page 00
Oil, wax crayon, color pencil and graphite on paper Untitled, 1968 Page 00
85.5 x 115 cm (33 58 x 45 14 inches) Oil, house paint, and wax/oil crayon on canvas Untitled, 1978
La Coleccin Jumex 202 x 262.9 cm (79 12 x 103 12 inches) Bronze, edition 33
The Menil Collection, Houston 44 x 225.5 x 18 cm (17 14 x 87 12 x 7 inches)
Page 00 Photo: Hickey-Robertson The menil Collection, Houston
Untitled (Roma), 1961 Photo: xxxxxxxx?
Colored crayons, graphite and oil on canvas Page 00
96.5 x 126.4 cm (38 x 49 34 inches) Untitled, 1969 Page 00
La Coleccin Jumex Pencil, wax crayon on paper Leda and the Swan, [six parts]. 1980
Photography by Francisco Kochen 70.3 x 99.8 cm (27 58 x 39 14 inches) 1; Oil paint, acrylic. 2; Oil paint, acrylic. 3; Oil paint on verso of
Cy Twombly Foundation a print proof. 4; Poster reproducing a white and black image of a
Page 00 work dated 1975. 5; Grid paper. 6; Oil paint, transparent adhesive
First Part of the Return from Parnassus, 1961 Page 00 tapel
Oil, crayon and pencil on paper mounted on canvas Untitled, 1969 Over all; 252.5 x 187.2 cm (99 12 x 73 34 inches) 1; 121.4 x 75 cm
69.8 x 100 cm (27 12 x 39 38 inches) Colour pencil, wax crayon, felt-tip pen, pencil on paper (47 1316 x 29 12 inches) 2; 121.2 x 75 cm (47 1116 x 29 12 inches) 3;
La Coleccin Jumex 70.3 x 100 cm (27 58 x 39 14 inches) 64.7 x 50.3 cm (25 12 x 19 1316 inches) 4; 45.2 x 48.4 cm (17 1316 x
Cy Twombly Foundation 19 116 inches) 5; 43.5 x 34.4 cm (17 18 x 13 916 inches) 6; 35.8 x 33.5
cm (14 18 x 13 316 inches)
Cy Twombly Foundation

154 155
Page 00 Page 00 Page 00
Untitled, 19831998 Untitled (Gaeta), 1989 Untitled. 2005
Bronze Acrylic, tempera on paper mounted on wooden panel Mixed media on paper
185.7 x 160 x 34.9 cm (73 18 x 63x 13 34 inches) 203.2 x 148.9 cm (80 x 58 58 inches) 57 x 39 cm (22 12 x 15 38 inches)
Gift of The American Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc., Cy Twombly Foundation Cy Twombly Foundation
Leonard A. Lauder, President Photo Rob McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Whitney Museum of American Art Page 00
Page 00 Untitled. 2005
Page 00 Untitled. 1992 Mixed media on paper
Paessaggio,1986 Acrylic, oil stick, coloured pencil, lead pencil on wooden panel 57 x 39 cm (22 12 x 15 38 inches)
Oil paint, acrylic on wooden panel 235 x 172.2 cm (92 12 x 67 34 inches) Cy Twombly Foundation
175.5 x 128.3 cm (69 x 50 12 inches) Cy Twombly Foundation
Cy Twombly Foundation Page 00
Page 00 Untitled. 2005
Page 00 Untitled. 1992 Mixed media on paper
Paessaggio, 1986 Tempera, acrylic, oil stick, wax crayon, lead pencil on wooden 57 x 39 cm (22 12 x 15 38 inches)
Oil paint, acrylic on wooden panel panel Cy Twombly Foundation
175.7 x 128.1 cm (69 18 x 50 38 inches) 234 x 172.2 cm (92 18 x 67 34 inches)
Cy Twombly Foundation Cy Twombly Foundation Page 00
Untitled. 2005
Page 00 Page 00 Mixed media on paper
Gaeta Set VIII, 1986 Lepanto I, 1996 57 x 39 cm (22 12 x 15 38 inches)
Oil and crayon on paper Monotype Cy Twombly Foundation
a.) 26 x 29 cm (10 14 x 11 38 inches); b.) 27 x 29.5 cm (10 58 x 11 58 99.1 x 62.9 (39 x 24 34 inches)
inches); c.) 27 x 29.5 cm (10 58 x 11 58 inches); d.) 25 x 28 cm (9 78 Whitney Museum of American Art Page 00
x 11 inches); e.) 25.5 x 28 cm (9 78 x 11 inches); f.) 25 x 28.5 cm (9 The Rose (IV), 2008
13
16 x 11 14 inches); g.) 27 x 30 cm (10 58 x 11 1316 inches) Page 00 Acrylic on wooden panel, Four panel
Transparencies are from Karsten Greve Lepanto II, 1996 252 x 740 cm (99 316 x 291 516 inches)
Private Collection Monotype Cy Twombly Foundation
99.1 x 62.9 (39 x 24 34 inches) Photo Mike Bruce. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Page 00 Whitney Museum of American Art
Toilette Di Venere, 1988 Page 00
Collage: (one sheet of paper, staples) acrylic, house paint, wax Page 00 Untitled (Camino Real IV). 2011
crayon, felt tip pen Lepanto III, 1996 Acrylic on wood panel
220 x 150 cm (86 58 x 59 116 inches) Monotype 252.5 x 187.2 cm (99 12 x 73 34 inches)
Cy Twombly Foundation 99.1 x 62.9 (39 x 24 34 inches) Cy Twombly Foundation
Whitney Museum of American Art
Page 00 Page 00
Untitled. 1989 Page 00 Untitled (Camino Real VII). 2011
Collage: (one sheet of paper, circular tracing paper, paper shred, Untitled. 2000 Acrylic on wood panel
transparent adhesive tape, glue) acrylic, wax crayon wood, plaster, acrylic, paper, metal, staples 252.5 x 187.2 cm (99 12 x 73 34 inches)
104 x 74.5 cm (40 1516 x 29 38 inches) 59 x 37.5 x 28 cm (23 14 x 14 34 x 11 inches) Cy Twombly Foundation
Cy Twombly Foundation Cy Twombly Foundation
Page 00
Page 00 Page 00 Untitled (Camino Real VIII). 2011
Untitled. 1989 Turkish Delight. 2000 Acrylic on wood panel
Collage: (one sheet of paper, circular tracing paper, paper shred, Wood, plaster, and paint 252.5 x 187.2 cm (99 12 x 73 34 inches)
transparent adhesive tape, glue) acrylic, wax crayon 115.6 x 45.7 x 41.9 cm (45 12 x 18 x 16 12 inches) Cy Twombly Foundation
104 x 74.5 cm (40 1516 x 29 38 inches) Cy Twombly Foundation
Cy Twombly Foundation Page 00
Page 00 Untitled (Camino Real X). 2011
Page 00 Untitled. 2002 Acrylic on wood panel
Untitled (A Rose), 1989 Plywood, acrylic painting 252.5 x 187.2 cm (99 12 x 73 34 inches)
Acrylic, wax crayon on paper 00 x 000 x 00 cm (00 x 00 x 00 inches) Cy Twombly Foundation
Title: 58.5 x 44 cm (23 116 x 17 516 inches), 1 of 6; 56.7 x 43.5 cm Cy Twombly Foundation
(22 516 x 17 38 inches), 2 of 6; 59 x 44 cm (23 14 x 17 516 inches), 3
of 6; 58.2 x 44 cm (22 1516 x 17 516 inches), 4 of 6; 57.2 x 44 cm (22 Page 00
1
2 x 17 516 inches,) 5 of 6; 58 x 45 cm (22 1316 x 17 34 inches), 6 of 6; A Time to Remain, A Time to Go Away. 2002
58.1 x 44.9 cm (22 78 x 17 1116 inches) Plywood, wood, white paint, acrylic, pencil, iron wires
Cy Twombly Foundation 00 x 000 x 00 cm (00 x 00 x 00 inches)
Cy Twombly Foundation

156 157
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 1928
Edwin Parker Twombly is born in Lexington, Virginia, on April
25. His father, Edwin Parker Twombly, Sr., was born in Groveland,
Massachusetts, and his mother, Mary Welma Richardson, came
from Bar Harbor, Maine. Edwin Twombly, Sr. was a professional
baseball player who once pitched for the Chicago White Sox in
the American League. He later taught intercollegiate athletics at
Washington and Lee University in Lexington. The artist inherited
his fathers baseball nickname Cy, after the baseball player Cy
Cyclone Young.
1942
From the age of 14 to 18, Twombly attends lectures on painting
given by the artist Pierre Daura. Daura is a Spanish artist, a
refugee in Paris during the Spanish Civil War, who had married
a woman from Virginia and come to live in Lexington. His lectures
and studio classes focus on European contemporary art and
its history.
1946
After graduating from Lexington High School, attends Darlington
School for Boys in Rome, Georgia.
1947
Spends summer in Ogunquit, an art colony in Maine, and in
Groveland, Massachusetts. In the fall, he enrolls in the Boston
Museum School where German Expressionism is the primary
influence. His grandfather lives in Boston. Twombly is greatly
interested in the Dada movement, Surrealism, the art of Kurt
Schwitters, Chaim Soutine, and Lovis Corinth. The works of
Alberto Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet also impress him. He
visits the Frick Collection in New York to study the old masters.
1948
Continues his study in Boston.
1949
Enters the newly established department of art at Washington
and Lee University in Lexington. His teacher, Marion Junkin,
immediately recognizes his talent and encourages him to apply
for a scholarship at the Art Students League of New York, where
she had studied. He receives a $1,000 grant from the Virginia
Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.
1950
On a tuition scholarship, he continues his studies at the Art
Students League in New York. His teachers are Will Barnett,
Morris Kantor, and Vaclav Vytlacil. During the second semester
he meets another young artist, Robert Rauschenberg, with whom
he shares the same intellectual interests and goals as an artist.
In New York he is able to see the avant-garde shows of Jackson
Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and Robert
Motherwell at Betty Parsons and Samuel Kootz Gallery, as well as
the work of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline at Egan Gallery
1951
Attends summer and winter semesters at Black Mountain College,
North Carolina, where Ben Shahn, Robert Motherwell, and the
poet Charles Olson are artists in residence. He captures Shahns
attention, becoming his favorite pupil that year. Motherwell doesnt
comment much on the work of the young Twombly, apart from
saying that he has nothing to teach him. Twombly also studies
photography with Hazel-Frieda Larsen with fellow students
Robert Rauschenberg and Dorothea Rockburne, and he makes
photographs using a pinhole camera.
158
In November, Twombly has his first one-person exhibition at
The Seven Stairs Gallery in Chicago, arranged by the photographer
Aaron Siskind and the curator Noah Goldowsky, and he exhibits
paintings completed that summer at Black Mountain College. At
the end of the year, Robert Motherwell writes an enthusiastic text
for the exhibition leaflet and initiates Twomblys first exhibition in
New York at Samuel Kootz Gallery, a two-person exhibition with
Brody Gandy.
1952
He makes trips to the southern United States, to Charleston,
New Orleans, Key West, and from Key West on to Cuba. Works
in Virginia during the summer, visiting Black Mountain College,
where Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Jack Tworkov, and
John Cage are residing. He engages in photography with a pinhole
camera and photographs Franz Kline and John Cage. In the fall,
Twombly receives a traveling scholarship of $1,800 from the
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and leaves New York by boat for his
first visit to Europe and North Africa with Robert Rauschenberg.
He disembarks in Palermo, visits Naples and reaches Rome in the
first days of September. Later that month, he travels to Florence,
Siena, Assisi, and Venice. In October, he departs from Rome
to Morocco for the winter months, traveling in Casablanca,
Marrakech, the Atlas Mountains and Tangier. He visits Paul
Bowles in Ttouan and takes day trips with him to surrounding
villages in December.
1953
Returns to Rome by train, visiting Spain en route. In February,
Twombly has his first show in Italy at the Galleria di Via della
Croce 71. On March 14, in Florence at the Galleria dArte
Contemporanea, he exhibits tapestries made in Tangier and
Ttouan.
In the late spring he returns to America to work on paintings,
sculptures, and monoprints, using Robert Rauschenbergs New York
studio at 61 Fulton Street.
He has a group show in September at the Stable Gallery,
founded by Eleanor Ward.
In October, he shows at the Little Gallery, Princeton, New
York, owned by Larom Munson and, according to Thomas Wilber,
exhibits paintings from 1949 with small collages and sculptures.
Drafted into the United States Army, he completes his basic
training at Camp Gordon near Augusta, Georgia, and is stationed
in Washington, D.C., as a cryptologist. On weekends in Augusta,
he rents a hotel room to produce drawings at night in the dark in
order to obliterate any graphically expert routine. These drawings
form the basis for his first one-man show at the Stable Gallery in
1955, as well as the new direction in his work from then on.
1954
Twombly is still stationed in Washington D.C., signed to the
militarys cryptography department. He often travels to New York
during periods of leave, working on the paintings that are shown at
the Stable Gallery the following year.
In August, Twombly is discharged from the army. He takes a
small apartment on 263 William Street in Manhattan, New York.
He begins work on a group of six or eight grey-ground paintings, as
documented in photographs taken at Rauschenbergs Fulton Street
studio, where they are painted. He starts working on Panorama.
He also makes plaster sculptures in the sand in Staten Island, all
of which are now lost.
1955
Twombly has his first solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery in
New York.
159
In February he accepts a teaching position at the Art
Department of Southern Seminary and Junior College in Buena
Vista, Virginia, for a half of this year and one semester of 1956.
An exhibition is held at Catholic University, Washington,
D.C., of Twomblys early works in conjunction with African
sculptures. The show, organized by a priest, Father Alexis
Robertson, includes eight paintingsTiznit, A-Oe, Solon I, Solon
II, Quaday, La-La, Volubilius, Marrakech, and four drawings.
In April Eleanor Ward of the Stable Gallery tries to aid
Twomblys attempt to obtain a grant from the Virginia Museum
of Fine Arts. She, along with Thomas B. Hess, executive editor
of Art News, and Conrad Marca-Relli write the recommendation
letters.
In the fall, he returns to his apartment in New York on 263
William Street, where he paints Criticism, Free Wheeler, Academy,
The Greeks, and other paintings and sculptures.
Since his attempt to obtain a grant from the Virginia
Museum of Fine Arts has failed, he agrees to renew his teaching
position at the Southern Seminary until the spring semester of
1956.
1956
Second one-person exhibition at the Stable Gallery in January.
He is in Lexington, Virginia, in February.
Twombly tries one again to obtain a travel fellowship from
the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, this time to visit Paris, Egypt,
Athens, Crete, and Mykonos. This application is also unsuccessful
and he moves back to his William Street apartment in New York
for the rest of the year. Twombly visits his friends and fellow
artists Conrad Marca-Relli and Joseph Cornell on Long Island.
1957
Twombly has his third one-person show at the Stable Gallery in
January, where Panorama is shown. Seven or eight paintings are
shown, along with six drawings.
In February, he leaves New York to spend the time in Italy at
the suggestion of the Italian painter Toti Scialoja. He also works
on drawings in Grottaferrata for two months in a friends house
near Rome. In the summer, he takes a house on the island of
Procida, in the bay of Naples, and continues to work on drawings.
The artist destroys these drawings later in the year.
He rents an apartment in Rome facing the Coliseum where
Olympia, Arcadia, Blue Room, and Sunset were painted. Twombly
reads Stphane Mallarm, who will become an influence on later
drawings. Later in the fall, he works in the studio of Salvatore
Scarpitta in the Via Margutta in Rome.
1958
Works in an empty house in the Via Appia Pignatelli in Rome.
Has his first exhibition in Rome at the Galleria la Tartaruga of
Plinio De Martiis, showing a selection of paintings. He remains
in Italy, and the exhibition of the Galleria la Tartaruga travels to
the Galleria del Cavallino, Venice, and the Galleria del Naviglio,
Milan. At the end of November the artist returns to New York as
planned. In New York, he signs up with the Leo Castelli Gallery.
1959
Returns to the United States. In early spring he marries Luisa
Tatiana Franchetti in New York on 20 April.
He works in a studio in Lexington on ten large paintings for
an exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, but the
works are never shown.
After a second trip to Cuba, just after the revolution, he visits
Yucatn, Mexico, and returns to Rome in June.
He rents an apartment for the summer in Sperlonga, a small
white-washed fishing village on the Tyrrhenian Sea between Rome
and Naples. Here Twombly draws Poems to the Sea, influenced by
Mallarms poetry.
In December, his son, Cyrus Alessandro, is born in Rome on
18 December.
Twombly lives in Rome in the Via Belsiana near Piazza
di Spagna, where he makes sculptures. After completing three
sculptures that year, he stops working in that medium until
1976. He paints Age of Alexander on New Years Eve in the Via
Monserrato.
1960
Twombly and his family move to the Via Monserrato, where he
paints to Leonardo, Crimes of Passion I and II, Odeion, Sunset
Series, Garden of Sudden Delight (to Hieronymus Bosch), School of
Fontainebleau, Sahara, and Herodiade. Around this time, he leaves
for a one-month trip to the Sahara Desert.
He has a second exhibition at the Galleria la Tartaruga at the
end of April.
He works on a group of drawings during July in SanAngelo
on the island of Ischia, traveling in August to Greece and in
September to Castel Gardena in the Italian Dolomites.
In October, he has his first one-person exhibition at the Leo
Castelli Gallery.
1961
Works for the next five years in a studio he rents in the Piazza del
Biscione near the Campo deFiori in Rome, where, at that time, it
was possible to find a big and reasonable space for an artist. That
year, among other works, he paints Triumph of Galatea, Empire
of Flora, and Bay of Naples. He works on the series of the five
Ferragosto paintings in his Via Monserrato house, where he also
paints School of Athens and Bay of Naples.
June and July are spent on the Greek island of Mykonos,
working on a large group of drawings titled Delian Odes. Some
of these drawings are destroyed by neighborhood children who
have come to the studio drawn by curiosity in his absence. He
returns to Italy and spends September in Castel Gardena in the
Dolomites.
The Galleria La Tartaruga publishes a selection of works from
1954 to l960 in the first comprehensive catalogue of Twomblys
work. One-person exhibitions are held in October at the Galerie
Rudolf Zwirner, Essen, Germany, and in November at the Galerie
J in Paris. The Paris exhibition catalogue includes an essay by
Pierre Restany.
1962
In January and February, takes a sailing trip down the Nile as far
as Wadi Halfa in the Sudan. He spends the summer sailing in the
Dodecanese Islands of Samos, Patmos, and Rhodes in Greece and
the towns Ephesos and Didim along the coast of Turkey.
In the Piazza del Biscione studio he paints Birth of Venus,
two versions of Leda and the Swan, Hero and Leander, Hyperion (to
Keats), Second Voyage to Italy, and Dutch Interior.
1963
Visits Sicily during January and February, staying in the towns
of Menfi and Selinunte on the southwestern coast of Sicily. He
works on drawings from March until May in Rome. Spends the
summer in Sperlonga, working on drawings. He goes to a car rally
in Rome,
Paris, and London; when he stops at Paris, he makes some
drawings. Returns to Rome, continues working on drawings. In
December, he paints a cycle of paintings in nine parts, the Nine
Discourses on Commodus in the Piazza del Biscione studio.
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1964
In March, at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, Twombly
exhibits Nine Discourses on Commodus, the cycle that refers to the
complex psychological stag es in the life and death of the emperor
Commodus.
Makes another trip to Greece during the spring months.
In July and August, works on a series of drawings called Notes
from a Tower in the Castel Gardena, paints Ilium, the second version
of School of Athens, and Il Parnasso in Rome.
In the autumn, he goes to Munich to prepare a show for Galerie
Friedrich + Dahlem. One of the owners of the gallery is Heiner
Friedrich, who later has great influence in forming the Dia Art
Foundation and the Twombly Pavilion in the Menil Collection,
Houston. Twombly titles the series of paintings exhibited in Munich
The Artist in the Northern Climate.
1965
The first large museum show of Twomblys work opens at the
Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld. The exhibition is shown
subsequently at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels and at the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Spends the summer traveling in Mykonos, Delos, Patmos, Samos
and along the Turkish coast.
In November, works in New York at a studio on 52nd Street,
where he makes a series of drawings.
1966
On returning to New York from a visit to Lexington, Twombly
exhibits drawings at the Leo Castelli Gallery. The exhibition features
drawings done in New York the previous year.
Travels back to Rome by boat in the spring and starts to work on
the gray paintings, the iconography of which becomes the theme of
the work of the next several years.
After spending the summer in Castel Gardena and SantAngelo
in Ischia, he returns to New York in the fall, working at the 52nd
Street studio.
1967
In January Twombly uses the loft of David Whitney at II Canal
Street in New York to work on a second series of grey paintings.
Galleria Notizie in Turin shows the first group of grey paintings
completed in Rome the year before.
Returns to Italy to spend the summer months in Castel
Gardena. In October Leo Castelli Gallery exhibits the artists
new gray paintings, which are seen for the first time in the United
States. Twombly spends October and November working in New
York and Lexington, as well as executing a series of etchings at
Tatyana Grosman of Universal Limited Art Editions in Long Island.
Twombly returns by boat to Italy on 24 November.
1967
In January the Milwaukee Art Center presents the first large museum
show in the United States, Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings,
which provides a comprehensive selection of Twomblys works
from 1956 to the present. His recent works receive positive critical
responses.
In May Twombly takes a studio on 356 Bowery in New York,
which he keeps for a number of years. There he paints the series
of three Orion paintings, Synopsis of a Battle, Veil of Orpheus, and
Treatise on the Veil.
Spends August in Castel Gardena, returning in the fall to New
York to work in the Bowery studio.
In November, spends a short rime on Captiva Island, Florida, at
Robert Rauschenbergs house, working on a series of collages that use
motifs from Leonardo da Vincis studies of anatomy and weather.
Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles shows the gray
paintings from the Bowery studio in December and Twombly
travels to Los Angeles on this occasion.
From Los Angeles, Twombly travels to Mexico, visiting
different archaeological sites and staying in a small coastal village,
Yalapa, in the jungle along the Pacific coast.
1969
Returning from Mexico to New York, Twombly travels to the
Caribbean Island of St. Martin, spending part of January and
February in the village of Grand Case. Here he makes a series of
drawings, the images of which he later develops into the paintings
of the Bolsena series.
The following summer he rents an apartment in Palazzo
del Drago on Bolsena Lake, north of Rome, where he paints the
fourteen large paintings of the Bolsena series.
1970
Works in New York at the Bowery studio, visits Lexington, and
spends the month of March on Captiva Island. In May, he makes a
series of Untitled (Study for Treatise of the Veil) drawings in Rome.
He lives in Anacapri from June to July where he continues working
on drawings.
He visits Ireland in the summer, returning to Rome where he
paints the second version of Treatise of the Veil in Via Monserrato.
1971
In February Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone in Turin shows Twomblys
new works. Twombly also has a show in Paris at Yvon Lambert that
includes paintings and gouaches.
He spends the summer in Anacapri at the Villa Orlando,
working on drawings and collages.
In the fall, he works in Rome on the group of five Ninis
paintings, in response to the tragic death of Nini Pirandello, the
wife of his first gallerist in Rome, Plinio De Martiis.
Twombly returns to New York in November and spends the
rest of the year on Captiva Island making a series of lithographs for
Untitled Press.
1972
In January, three large untitled paintings are shown at Leo Castelli
Gallery.
On his return to Rome in the spring, Twombly stars work on a
very large canvas titled Anatomy of Melancholy, in reference to the
seventeenth century book written by Robert Burton. He will finish
this painting twenty-two years later in 1994 in Lexington, Virginia,
and give it the new title Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the
Shores of Asia Minor).
He spends the summer in Capri and the winter on Captiva
Island, working on drawings.
1973
A retrospective exhibition is organized in April at the Kunsthalle of
Bern, and it travels to the Lenbach Haus in Munich. At the same
time, the Kunstmuseum Basel organizes a comprehensive show of
drawings of the previous twenty years.
In the summer in the Castel Gardena, he completes the
drawings titled 24 Short Pieces.
He travels in November to northern and central India.
1974
Stays February on Captiva Island, then returns to Rome and
works on a portfolio of twelve prints titled Natural History Part I
Mushrooms.
He has gallery exhibitions in Munich, Turin, Paris, and Naples.
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1975
Works during the winter in the attic of the Hotel Excelsior in
Naples, preparing for a show at Galleria Lucio Amelio. Spends the
winter months on Captiva Island.
The artist purchases a fifteenth-century house in Bassano in
Teverina, north of Rome, near Bomarzo, and starts its restoration,
making it his summer studio for the following years.
In March, a representative group of paintings, drawings and
sculptures is shown at the Institute for Contemporary Art in
Philadelphia. The exhibition travels to the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art. Upon his return to Rome, makes a trip to Tunisia
in the spring. At the end of May, returns to Rome, working on two
large-scale collages titled Mars and the Artist and Apollo and the
Artist.
1976
At the end of February, Twombly travels to Captiva Island where
he works on drawings.
He has a retrospective exhibition of drawings, Cy Twombly:
Dessins 19541976, at the Muse dart moderne de la Ville de
Paris, ARC 2, in the summer. He also completes a portfolio of
prints titled Natural History Part IISome Trees of Italy, which
is exhibited at the Galerie Schellmann und Klser, Munich, in
September. Also in September, Leo Castelli Gallery exhibits a
group of watercolors that Twombly painted in New York in May.
He spends the summer months in Rome and Bassano in
Teverina.
In November Galleria Sperone shows the large-scale works on
paper, Leda & the Swan, Idilli (I am Thesis of Etna with a tuneful
voice), and Narcissus.
The artist begins to work on sculptures again.
1977
During the summer in his studio in Bassano in Teverina, Twombly
finishes a large triptych-painting titled Thyrsis. Reading Alexander
Popes translation of the Iliad inspires him to work on Fifty Days at
Iliam, a monumental ten painting cycle.
1978
Received the Skowhegan Meal for Drawing from the Skowhegan
School for Sculpture and Painting in Maine in May. During the
summer in Bassano in Teverina, the cycle of ten paintings, Fifty
Days at Iliam, is completed. The paintings are shown in November
in New York at the Lone Star Foundation, organized by Heiner
Friedrich.
That same summer, he paints Goethe In Italy and works on
sculpture in Rome and Bassano in Teverina.
In the fall, Heiner Bastian publishes the first monograph on
Twombly paintings for Propylen Verlag.
1979
Stays in New York in March and April for the opening of a
retrospective exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art
of works created from 1954 to 1977. Roland Barthes writes the
introduction to the catalogue of the Whitney retrospective.
In May, Galleria Lucio Amelio of Naples organizes the first
show of Twombly sculptures, consisting of a selection of eleven
sculptures from his work of the previous years.
In May, Twombly travels from New York to Paris, where he
meets Roland Barthes. Yvon Lambert publishes the first volume
(VI) of the Catalogue Raisonn of Twomblys drawings with a new
essay by Barthes.
He works in Bassano in June and July and travels in the fall to
Russia, Central Asia, and Afghanistan. He spends the months of
December and January 1980 on the Caribbean islands of Iles des
Saintes and Antigua working on watercolors.
An exhibition of paintings is held in Cologne at the Galerie
Karsten Greve.
1980
Participates in the 39th Venice Biennale with a cycle of drawings
made in Rome in spring titled Five Days Wait at Jiayuguan. Gabriele
Stocchi publishes a monograph on this series. Twombly works on a
series of sculptures in July and August at his Bassano studio and in
Rome, then travels to Greece in September.
1981
Works on drawings and sculptures in a studio that he rents in late
spring in Formia on the Gulf of Gaeta. In Bassano that summer
he prepares for a show of works on paper that will take place the
following year at Sperone Weswtater Fischer Gallery in New York.
In September, he starts work on Hero and Leandro, a painting in
four parts.
The first museum show of his sculptures, consisting of twenty-
three works from 1958 to 1981, opens at the Museum Haus Lange
in Krefeld. A catalogue is published with an essay by Marianne
Stockebrand.
An exhibition of works on paper from 19541976 is held at
Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California, which
then travels the following year to the Elvehjem Museum of Art,
Madison; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and to the
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
He travels to the Greek island of Samos in September and
returns to Rome where he paints the three large Bacchus works.
1982
He spends time in New York and Lexington where he works on a
series of gouache drawings called Notes from Silverwood.
He works in Bassano, beginning on the Naxos, Suma, Lycian,
and Nymphidia drawings.
Shows paintings and four new sculptures at Documenta 7 in
Kassel from June to September.
1983
Travels to Key West, where he works on drawings such as Pseudo
Protea. Returns to Rome via New York in late March. Works in
Gaeta during the spring.
He travels to Yemen with his son Alessandro in June and works
on the Anabasis series during August in Bassano in Teverina.
He concentrates on sculptures at the studio in the Via
Monserrato, Rome.
1984
During the winter in Key West, he completes a set of drawings
called Proteus. Has an exhibition at Galerie Karsten Greve in
Cologne in January which travels on to Mayor Gallery London, and
Galerie Ulysses, Vienna, in the spring.
In May, the Muse dArt Contemporain of Bordeaux
inaugurates an exhibition of Twomblys works on paper. He remains
in Gaeta and continues to work on sculpture.
In the summer months he works in Bassano on the three-part
painting Hero and Leander.
In September the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden presents a large
retrospective exhibition of paintings and drawings. Organized by
Katharina Schmidt, it focuses on mythological themes in his work.
At the same time Twombly receives from the state government of
Baden-Wrttemberg the Internationaler Preis fr bildende Kunst
des Landes Baden-Wrttemberg.
In October, a show of his sculptures opens in Rome at the
Galleria Sperone.
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1985
Spends the winter months in Egypt in Luxor. In the spring he stays
in Gaeta, working on sculpture. In the summer Twombly works in
Bassano, where he works on a second version of Hero and Leandro
(to Christopher Marlowe). The large series titled Analysis of the Rose
as Sentimental Despair is also painted there. It is a five-part painting
based on fragments of poems by Rilke, Rumi, and Giacomo
Leopardi.
The rest of the year is spent in Gaeta, using the house of a
friend to work on sculptures. At the same time, he purchases
a house on a hillside, overlooking the harbor of Gaeta, that he
restores, expands, and uses as a studio in the following years.
1986
Twombly spends the spring and winter months in his new house
in Gaeta. The retrospective exhibition Cy Twombly: Drawings,
Collages, and Paintings on Paper 19551985 opens at Gagosian
Gallery in February.
He works in Bassano on a number of paintings in two parts
and on a series of four untitled landscape paintings. He designs and
supervises the painting of the stage curtain for the Opra Bastille
in Paris.
He lives in Geneva during the fall and winter, supervising the
restoration of the house and the creation of a garden of lemon trees,
conceived as a collection of rooms.
1987
Harald Szeemann organizes a large retrospective of Twombly work,
including paintings, sculptures, and drawings at the Kunsthaus
Zrich. The exhibition travels to the Palacio de
Velzquez / Palacio de Cristal, Madrid; the Whitechapel Art
Gallery London; the Stdtische Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf; and the
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
An exhibition of works on paper, organized by Katharina
Schmidt, opens at the Stdtisches Kunstmuseum Bonn in June and
travels to the Centre Cultural de la Fundaci Caixa de Pensions,
Barcelona, in November.
Twombly works on sculptures in the summer in Bassano, in
particular on a commissioned sculpture of Victory for a square in
Paris, a project that was never realized.
He is elected a member of the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters in New York, and the city of Siegen
in Germany awards him the Rubens Preis on the occasion of an
exhibition at the Stdtisches Galerie Haus Seel.
In September and October the Anthony dOffay Gallery,
London, holds an exhibition of paintings and works on paper,
including the North African Sketchbook drawn in 1953 during his
trip to North Africa.
The artist spends the fall and winter in Gaeta and works on
sculpture.
1988
Twombly works in the spring in Gaeta on two large paintings on
paper called Venere Sopra Gaeta, which are shown in Naples at the
Galleria Lucio Amelio. One of these now exists as two fragments.
The Dia Art Foundation in Bridgehampton, New York, shows
Poems to the Sea in May and June. He works on sculptures in Gaeta
and in Rome and on a cycle of nine green paintings conceived to be
displayed together in one room. The cycle is later shown at the 43rd
Venice Biennale. Now they are permanently on display at the Cy
Twombly Gallery of the Menil Collection in Houston.
Twombly receives the Chevalier dans lOrdre des Arts et des
Lettres from the French government.
He spends the fall in the United States and the winter in
Gaeta.
1989
In February, an exhibition of Twomblys early paintings and
sculptures from 1951 to 1953 opens in New York at the Sperone
Westwater Gallery.
In September, the Menil Collection in Houston inaugurates
a large exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculptures. The
exhibition travels to the Des Moines Art Center in April 1990.
In October, the large work of ten paintings Fifty Days at Iliam
is acquired and installed in a special room at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art. Twombly spends the month of October in the
Seychelles.
In December, Gagosian Gallery in New York assembles a show
featuring eight of the fourteen Untitled (Bolsena) paintings from
1969, exhibiting them together for the first time.
Twombly travels to Istanbul at Christmas.
1990
Return to the Seychelles to spend the months of January and
February, first on the island of la Digue, then on DArros island,
where he work on a series of drawings.
He spends the spring in Gaeta working on drawings. Two series
of drawings were shown with the 1989 drawings and a selection
of sculptures in Zurich at the Thomas Amman Fine Art AG that
summer. Souvenirs of dArros and Gaeta edited by Thomas Ammann
was published later in 1992.
Twombly travels in March to Zurich, Paris, and Madrid. In
April, he receives the 44th Annual Skowhegan Medal for Painting.
In Gaeta, he paints works titled, Summer Madness, finishing them
in August in Bassano. In both places, he works on sculpture in
spring and autumn.
He spends December in Sorrento.
1991
In Gaeta, he works on sculptures such as Thermopylae, which is
shown in Paris at the Galerie Pice-Unique later that fall. During
the summer he retraces the poet Lord Byrons itinerary in Greece as
far as Epirus, and travels further to the island of Syros. He starts to
work in July in Bassano on the two sets of the Quattro Stagioni.
Volume VII of the Catalogue Raisonn of drawings 19771982
is published by Yvon Lambert with an essay by Philip Sollers. He
works on sculptures in Gaeta in the fall.
The Kunsthaus Zrich dedicates a space in the museum to the
permanent display of ten of his sculptures.
1992
Spends the beginning of the year on Jupiter Island, Florida, where
he works on sixteen sculptures. He returns for the summer to
Gaeta to complete a three-panel painting using the motif of sea and
boats, which would become a recurrent subject for his works. The
first volume of the Catologue Raisonn of Twomblys paintings, by
Heiner Bastian, is published in the fall. In the following years, other
volumes of the catalogue raisonn covering the entire production of
paintings will be published with essays by Heiner Bastian.
1993
Spends the beginning of the year on Jupiter Island. In the spring,
nostalgic for his hometown of Lexington, he takes a house in
Lexington, where he will spend the spring and fall regularly over
the next years.
He works during the summer in Gaeta finishing Autunno and
Inverno of the first set of the Quattro Stagioni.
In October, his first exhibition of photographs opens in New
York at the Matthew Marks Gallery.
He receives an honorary doctoral degree from Washington and
Lee University, Lexington, in the fall.
163
1994
The artist resides in Lexington in the winter and in Gaeta in the
spring and summer where he completes the first set of Quattro
Stagioni and some sculptures.
On returning to Lexington in the fall, he rents an empty
warehouse where he finishes the large painting he had begun in
Rome twenty-two years earlier: Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to
the Shores of Asia Minor). In September, Gagosian Gallery in New
York shows the three-panel painting Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus,
to the Shores of Asia Minor) for the first time, although at this stage,
it is called Untitled Painting. In September, a major retrospective of
Twomblys paintings, drawings, and sculptures, organized by Kirk
Varnedoe, opens in New York at The Museum of Modern Art. The
show travels to the Menil Collection in Houston, to the Museum
of Modern Art, Los Angeles, and to Bcrlins Neue Nationalgalerie.
After his return to Italy, he travels in early November to Munich,
Berlin, Prague, and Paris. Twombly works on and completes the
second version of the Quattro Stagioni in Gaeta.
1995
Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) is
shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Twombly travels to
Houston in February for the opening of the second venue of the
Museum of Modern Art retrospective and for the inauguration of
the Cy Twombly Gallery a museum founded by thc Menil family,
sponsored by Philippa and Heiner Freidrich and curated by Paul
Winkler. Renzo Piano designs the museum based on plans made
together with the artist. The museum is a permanent installation of
paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from 1954 to the present.
At the same time, a show of photographs by Twombly and a drawing
show are held at two different galleries in Houston. Twombly spends
the spring in Lexington and the summer in Gaeta, where he givcs
thc last touch to the second version of the set of Quattro Stagioni
without changing the date of execution. He receives the Kaiserring
award from the city of Goslar, Germany. Twombly travels to Berlin
in August for the last venue of his retrospective, visits St. Petersburg,
and then returns to Italy.
1996
After spending the winter in Lexington, he travels to Paris in June.
In the summer in Gaeta, he works on sculptures and three sets of
monoprints, portraying for the first time motifs influenced by the
Battle of Lepanto, which are shown in December in New York at the
Whitney Museum of American Art.
In May, Twombly is included in the exhibition L informe: Mode
demploi, organized by Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, at
Centre Pompidou, Paris, which is structured around the theories
of Georges Bataille. In the same month, Cy Twombly: Photographs
opens at the Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles.
He travels to Japan in October to receive the Praemium
Imperiale. He spends the winter in Lexington and on St.
Barthlmy in the Caribbean.
1997
Spends the winter months in St. Barthlmy, spring in Lexington,
and the summer in Gaeta. A one-person exhibition opens at Galerie
Karsten Greve, Cologne.
In November, his first one-person sculpture exhibition in the
United States, Cy Twombly: Ten Sculptures, opens at the Gagosian
Gallery New York, on the occasion of the publication of the
catalogue raisonn of sculpture by Nicola Del Roscio.
1998
The artist spends the winter in Lexington, where he concentrates on
sculpture.
 In May, he exhibits eight sculptures at the American Academy
in Rome.
1999
He travels in Iran and spends some time staying in Isfahan in
May. In Gaeta he paints Three Studies for the Temeraire, now in
the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney,
Australia. It is a new interpretation of J.M.W. Turners The Fighting
Temeraire and is made for the group exhibition Encounters: New Art
From Old, organized by the National Gallery London, to open in
2000.
Twombly works on sculptures in Bassano in Teverina and
Gaeta in August, and he spends the autumn months and winter in
Lexington. December in St. Barthlmy.
2000
In March, Twombly returns to Gaeta via Basel, where the
retrospective exhibition of sixty-six sculptures made between
1948 and 1998, Cy Twombly: The Sculpture, opens in April at
the Kunstmuseum Basel. The exhibition is curated by Katharina
Schmidt in collaboration with Paul Winkler, and is presented
over the following year at the Menil Collection, Houston, and the
National Gallery in Washington, D.C.
In the summer, Three Studies for the Temeraire is shown
alongside the Turner painting at the National Gallery London.
The series Coronation of Sesostris is shown at the Gagosian
Gallery from November to January 2001. The ancient legendary
Egyptian king, as well as the myth of the sun god Ra, inspires
Coronation of Sesostris.
2001
Spends winter months in the Caribbean.
Spring in Lexington where he works in a small studio on
sculptures, photographs and the series of Lepanto paintings, which
are presented at the 49th Venice Biennale where he is awarded
the Golden Lion. For lack of space, he works on a panel and nails
another panel atop of the previously finished one. The Lepanto
paintings depict the sea battle waged by the Holy League against
the Ottoman Empire in the Strait of Lepanto.
At the same time, ten untitled paintings and sculptures are
shown at the Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich.
During the summer and autumn, Twombly works on
paintings, sculptures and photography.
2002
In the winter he receives the Premio Constantino Nivola for
sculpture. In January the Gagosian Gallery, New York, exhibits
the Lepanto paintings, which are exhibited again in Munich in
the autumn. He returns to Lexington, where he works mainly
on sculptures and photography. He travels to receive the Julio
Gonzlez Prize in Valencia, Spain, with Laudatio on the occasion
of the award by Katarina Schmidt.
The exhibition Audible Silence: Cy Twombly opens in Zurich
in May with sculptures and drawings from the Daros Collection. In
the summer Twombly works on paintings and sculptures.
A one-person works-on-paper exhibition opens at Inverleith
House Royal Botanical Garden, Edinburgh. Twombly receives
the Bank of Scotland Herald Angers 2002 Award. The first
comprehensive catalogue of photographic work, Cy Twombly.
Photographs 19511999, edited by Nicola Del Roscio, is published
in the fall.
2003
He spends part of the winter in St. Barthlmy, returning in the
spring to Lexington, wherc he paints the series A Gathering of Time,
164
which is shown at the Gagosian Gallery in New York in May.
Travels in July to St. Petersburg in Russia where, on the
occasion of the 300th anniversary of the founding of the city, the
State Hermiage Museum Cy Twombly at the Hermitage: Fifty Years
of Works on Paper, curated by Julie Sylvester. The retrospective
exhibition travels to the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung,
Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich in October. Twombly spends
most of the summer and autumn in Gaeta working on sculptures.
Spends the winter in the Seychelles.
2004
He spends part of winter in the Seychelles.
Cy Twombly at the Hermitage: Fifty Years of Works on Paper,
curated by Julie Sylvester, travels to Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris, in January and to the Serpentine Gallery in London in
April, and Twombly is present on both occasions.
Returns to Gaeta. Works on ten paintings that are later
shown in London on the occasion of the opening of the new
Gagosian Gallery in May.
Exhibition at the Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich, in
June. Fall in Lexington, working on photography.
2005
During winter, he works in Gaeta on the Bacchus series of
paintings which are shown in November at the Gagosian Gallery,
New York. The Hermitage drawing retrospective, Cy Twombly
at the Hermitage: Fifty Years of Works on Paper travels to the
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in January and
to the Menil Collection, Houston, in May. The Lepanto paintings
are shown simultaneously at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
During spring, an archive of the drawings is established by
Nicola Del Roscio in Rome.
He stays in Lexington, working on sculptures for the rest of
the year.
The show titled Bacchus, Psilax, Mainimenos opens at the
Gagosian Gallery, New York.
2006
Twombly spends January, February and March on the island of
La Digue, Seychelles.
Spring months are spent in Gaeta where he works mainly on
sculptures.
In April, an exhibition of recent sculptures made in
Lexington in previous years is shown at the Alte Pinakothek in
Munich.
In May he receives the McKim Prize at the American
Academy in Rome. He spends the summer in Syrros, Greece.
He works on a new group of paintings and photographs in
the autumn in Lexington.
In late November he returns to Gaeta where he starts a new
series of paintings, Blooming: A Scattering of Blossoms and
Other Things, based on Japanese haiku on the peony.
2007
Spends the first part of the year in Lexington and Boston,
where he works on photography.
Returns to Gaeta, where he finishes the series of Blooming
paintings, which are exhibited in June at the Muse dart of the Gagosian Gallery in Paris in April. Spends winter between
contemporain, Collection Lambert in Avignon.
Also in June, he shows the group of paintings done in
Lexington in the autumn of 2006 at the Thomas Ammann Fine
Art AG on the occasion of its 30th anniversary.
The artist spends July and August in Abruzzi and Gaeta
working on photographs.
Twombly travels to Paris to prepare the project of the
ceiling painting for the Salle de Bronze, Muse Louvre. Returns to continues to the Museum fr Gegenwartskunst in Siegen, and
Lexington and remains until November. travels to the BOZAR (Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels) in
For the rest of the year, he stays in Gaeta. The Blooming February 2012.
paintings are shown at the Gagosian Gallery, New York, in In June a show dedicated to Twombly and Poussin opens at the
November. Dulwich Picture Gallery in London.
The Gagosian Gallery inaugurates a new space in Rome Cy Twombly dies on July 5th in Rome.
in December with an exhibition of the artists Three Notes from Several shows planned in conjunction with the artist open
Salalah, which is executed in Lexington. after his death:
Turner, Monet, Twombly starts in Stockholm in the Moderna
2008 Museet in October, traveling in 2012 to the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
In March he make trips to Maastricht and San Moritz. He travels to and Tate Liverpool.
Paris to continue work on the Louvre ceiling project. The Collection Lambert dedicates an exhibition of his
In June the Tate Modern retrospective Cy Twombly: Cycles photographs in the month of August in Avignon.
and Seasons opens; the exhibition will travel to the Guggenheim The Gagosian Gallery of Los Angeles shows his last eight
Museum, Bilbao, and the Galleria Nazionale dArte Moderna e paintings, starting in April 2012 and travelling to Hong Kong,
Contemporanea, Rome. He travels to London for its inauguration London, and New York.
and then to Madrid, where an exhibition of the Lepanto paintings In April 2012 the Art Institute of Philadelphia dedicates a
opens at the Museo National del Prado. show of sculptures to him.
In July the artist spends time between Gaeta and Abruzzi,
where he takes photographs.
His first one-person museum show of photographs opens
in September at Huis Marseilles, Amsterdam. He travels to the
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, in October for the opening of the
second venue of the Tate Modern retrospective. During November,
in Gaeta, the artist works on the Rose paintings for the Museum
Brandhorst.
2009
In late winter he works on photography and sculptures in
Lexington. The last venue of the tate Modern retrospective at the
Galleria Nazionale dArte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome,
opens. He returns to Lexington after the opening, and there he
begins work on Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves.
Twombly travels to Chicago for the exhibition Cy Twombly:
Natural World, Selected Works 20002007 on the occasion of
the inauguration of the Art Institute of Chicagos Modern Wing
designed by Renzo Piano. He travels to Munich for the opening of
the Museum Brandhorst via New York where the Lepanto paintings
are installed permanently in the museum. In June he travels to
Vienna for the opening of the exhibition Sensation of the Moment
at Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna. He spends
August between Abruzzi and Gaeta.
In late September the artists travels to Athens for the opening
exhibition of the Paphos paintings at the new Gagosian Gallery. He
travels to Lexington from Athens.
In late October Cy Twombly: Treatise of Veil opens at the
Menil Collection, Houston.
2010
Receives the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in March.
Travels to Paris to oversee the Louvre ceiling. In spring he
works on photography in Munich, where an exhibition opens
during the summer months at the Schirmer/Mosel showroom.
Attends the inauguration of the ceiling of the Salle des Bronzes
at the Louvre and receives the Lgion dhonneur.
Spends the month of July in Abruzzi. Finishes a group of five
paintings called Camino Real which are shown for the inauguration
Lexington, St. Barthlmy, and Gaeta working on photography.
2011
Works on eight paintings Untitled (Camino Real) during the
month of March.
The Museum Brandhorst in Munich dedicates a special
exhibition to his photographic work in April. The exhibition
165
ONE-PERSON EXHIBITIONS 1951
Chicago, The Seven Stairs Gallery. Cy Twombly. November. 2-30.
1953
Rome, Galleria Via della Croce 71 - Int. 2. Arazzi di Cy Twombly.
March 7.
Princeton, The Little Gallery. Cy Twombly. Drawings, Paintings,
Sculpture, October 25November 7.
1955
New York, The Stable Gallery. Cy Twombly. January 10-29.
1956
New York, The Stable Gallery. Cy Twombly. January 2-19.
1957
New York, The Stable Gallery. Cy Twombly. February.
1958
Rome, Galleria La Tartaruga. Cy Twombly. Opened May 17.
Venice, Galleria del Cavallino. Cy Twombly. August 18-27.
Milan, Galleria del Naviglio. Cy Twombly. November 1-10.
1960
Rome, Galleria La Tartaruga. Cy Twombly. Opened April 26.
New York, Leo Castelli Gallery. Cy Twombly. October 18
November 5.
1961
Milan, Galleria dArte del Naviglio. Cy Twombly. March 29April
7.
Essen, Galerie Rudolf Zwirner at Folkwang-Museum. Cy Twombly.
October 3.
Paris, Galerie J. Cy Twombly. La rvolution du signe. Opend
November 15.
1962
Venice, Galleria del Leone (in association with Galleria La
Tartaruga, Rome). Cy Twombly. Opened June 11.
Brussels, Galerie Aujourdhui. Cy Twombly. January 27February
10.
1963
Rome, Galleria La Tartaruga. Twombly. Opened March 5.
Cologne, Galerie Rudolf Zwirner. Cy Twombly. Opened April 4.
Cologne, Galerie nne Abels. Cy Twombly. April 20May 15.
Turin, Galleria Notizie. Dipinti di Cy Twombly. May 14June 15.
Geneva, Galerie D. Benador. Cy Twombly. Peintures, dessins.
Opened December 6.
1964
Lausanne, Galerie Bonnier. Cy Twombly. Peintures rcentes.
JanuaryFebruary. travelled to: Basel, Galerie Handschin. Cy
Twombly. March 13April 30.
New York, Leo Castelli Gallery. Nine Discourses on Commodus by
Cy Twombly. March 14April 9.
Munich, Galerie Friedrich + Dahlem. Cy Twombly. Notes from
a Tower/The Artist in the Northern Climate. November 7
December 15.
1965
Brussels, Galerie Aujourdhui. Cy Twombly. February 20March 6.
Krefeld, Museum Haus Lange. Cy Twombly. October 3
November 21. travelled to: Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts.
December 2-26, Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum. January 14,
166
1966February 27, 1966. Freiburg, Der Kunstverein Freiburg.
March 19, 1966April 17, 1966.
Turin, Galleria Notizie. Cy Twombly. Opened October 5.
1966
New York, Leo Castelli Gallery. Cy Twombly. Drawings. February
12March 2.
1967
Turin, Galleria Notizie. Opere di Cy Twombly. Opened February 15.
Rome, Galleria La Tartaruga. Cy Twombly. Opened April 3.
New York, Leo Castelli Gallery. Cy Twombly. October 7-26.
1968
Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Center. Cy Twombly. Paintings and
Drawings. January 19February 18.
Rome, Galleria La Tartaruga. Disegni e collages di Cy Twombly dal
1954 al 1968. Opened February 26.
Cologne, Galerie Hake. Cy Twombly. Zeichnungen. November
27December 14.
New York, Leo Castelli Gallery. Cy Twombly. Paintings. November
30December 21.
Los Angeles, Nicholas Wilder Gallery. Cy Twombly. Recent
Paintings.
1969
Cologne, Galerie Rudolf Zwirner. Cy Twombly. JanuaryFebruary.
1970
Rome, La Tartaruga. Cy Twombly, una mostra di opere ricenti.
Opened February 28.
Stockholm, Svensk-Franska Konstgalleriet. Cy Twombly. Paintings.
March 1April 10
Cologne, Galerie Neuendorf. Cy Twombly. Roman Notes. 24 neue
Arbeiten. April 22May 20.
Frankfurt, Galerie Ursula Lichter. Cy Twombly. May 27June 20.
Geneva, Galerie Bonnier. Cy Twombly. Peintures, dessins, lithogra-
phies. June 430.
1971
Turin, Galleria Sperone. Cy Twombly. Opened February 22.
Cologne, Galerie Mllenhoff. Cy Twombly. Bilder, Zeichnungen.
May 3-24.
Paris, Galerie Yvon Lambert. Cy Twombly. Opened June 10.
Dsseldorf, Galerie Denise Ren/Hans Mayer, Kunstmarkt fr
Grafik und Objekte. Cy Twombly. 8 Gouachen aus dem Jahr
1971. Opened September 3.
Berlin, Galerie Folker Skulima. Cy Twombly. 8 Gouachen 1971.
September.
Milan, Galleria dellAriete. Cy Twombly. Opened October 7.
1972
New York, Leo Castelli Gallery. Cy Twombly. January 15February
5.
Milan, Galleria dellAriete. Cy Twombly. April.
Toronto, Dunkelman Gallery. Cy Twombly. Paintings and Works on
Paper.
Dallas, Janie C. Lee Gallery. Cy Twombly. Opened April 22.
Rome, Galleria dellOca. Disegni di Cy Twombly dal 1960 al 1965.
Opened May 26.
Naples, Lucio Amelio - Modern Art Agency. Cy Twombly.
Ramifications. Opened November 18.
Minneapolis, Locksley-Shea Gallery. Cy Twombly. Opened
December 2.
167
1973
Turin, Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone. Cy Twombly. January 8-29.
New York, Visual Arts Museum. Cy Twombly. Drawings. January
11February 6.
Zurich, Galerie Art in Progress. Cy Twombly. Bilder, Zeichnungen,
Grafiken. February 23March 22.
Bern, Kunsthalle. Cy Twombly. Bilder 1953-1972. April 28June 3.
travelled to: Munich, Stdtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus. July
10August 12.
Basel, Kunstmuseum. Cy Twombly, Zeichnungen 1953-1973. May
5June 24.
London, The Mayor Gallery. Cy Twombly. May 16June 9.
1974
Munich, Galerie Heiner Friedrich. Cy Twombly. Roman Notes,
Gouachen 1970. March 7April 7.
Turin, Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone. Cy Twombly. March 12April
7.
Brussels, Galerie Oppenheim. Cy Twombly. April 2-27.
Paris, Galerie Yvon Lambert. Cy Twombly. April 18May 14.
Naples, Lucio AmelioModern Art Agency. Cy Twombly,
Portfolio tecnica mista, collage, disegno, Natural History, Part I.
December 13, 1974January 10, 1975
1975
Berlin, Galerie Georg Nothelfer. Cy Twombly - graphic-works.
January 17February 27.
Geneva, Galerie Jacques Benador. Cy Twombly. Dessins. February.
Naples, Lucio Amelio - Modern Art Agency. Cy Twombly. Allusions
(Bay of Naples). February 21March 21.
Cologne, Galerie Karsten Greve. Cy Twombly. Bilder und
Zeichnungen. March 1April 15.
Munich, Galerie Art in Progress. Cy Twombly - Graue Bilder und
Gouachen. March 6April 14.
Philadelphia, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of
Pennsylvania. Cy Twombly. Paintings, Drawings, Constructions
19511974. March 15April 27. travelled to: San Francisco,
San Francisico Museum of Art. May 9June 22.
Munich, Galerie des Verlages Schellmann & Klser. Cy Twombly.
Graphische Zyklen. October 2-30.
1976
Dsseldorf, Galerie Art in Progress. Cy Twombly. Bilder und
gouachen. January 30March 4.
Hannover, Kestner-Gesellschaft. Cy Twombly. May 7June 20.
Paris, Galerie Jacques Bosser. Cy Twombly. Editions rcentes. June
22September 30.
Paris, Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris, ARC 2. Cy
Twombly, Dessins 1954-1976. June 24September 6.
Munich, Galerie Schellmann & Klser. Cy Twombly. Six Latin
Writers and Poets. Some Trees of Italy. September 1-30.
New York, Leo Castelli Gallery. Cy Twombly. Watercolors.
September 25October 16.
Rome, Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone. Cy Twombly. November
23December 17.
1977
Karlsruhe, Galerie Haus 11. Cy Twombly. January 21March 5.
New York, Visual Arts Museum. Cy Twombly: Paintings. March
8-30.
Paris, Galerie Yvon Lambert. Cy Twombly. Three Dialogues. May
17June 15.
Cologne, Galerie Karsten Greve. Cy Twombly. Bilder und
Zeichnungen. May 20July 15.
1978
The Hague, Artline. Cy Twombly. January 1February 6.
Munich, Galerie Klewan. Cy Twombly. Bilder, Collagen,
Zeichnungen. March 2-31.
New York, The Lone Star Foundation at Heiner Friedrich, Inc. Cy
Twombly. 50 Days at Iliam. November 18, 1978January 20,
1979
1979
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art. Cy Twombly.
Paintings and Drawings 1954-1977. April 10- June 10.
Naples, Galleria Lucio Amelio. Cy Twombly. 11 Sculture. Opened
May 25.
Lund, Galleriet. 12 lithografier av Cy Twombly. September 29
October 24.
Cologne, Galerie Karsten Greve. Cy Twombly. Bilder 1957-1968.
November 6, 1979January 20, 1980
1980
Dallas, The University Gallery, Meadows School of the Arts,
Southern Methodist University. Cy Twombly. Paintings and
Drawings. January 15February 26.
London, The Mayor Gallery. Cy Twombly. Paintings and Drawings
1959-1976. March 18April 19.
Spoleto, Palazzo Ancaiani, 23 Festival dei Due Mondi. Cy
Twombly. Disegni 1955-1975. June 26July 13.
Seattle, Richard Hines Gallery. Cy Twombly. Paintings & Drawings
1956-1975. July 24August 30.
Milan, Padiglione dArte Contemporanea. Cy Twombly. 50 Disegni
1953-1980. OctoberNovember.
Hamburg, Galerie Munro. Cy Twombly. Malerei-Zeichnung-Grafik.
October 9December 20.
Paris, Galerie Yvon Lambert. Cy Twombly. October 18November
20.
Madrid, Galeria Heinrich Ehrhardt. Cy Twombly. Dibujos.
December 15, 1980February 15, 1981.
1981
New York, Castelli Graphics. Cy Twombly. Natural History. Part I:
Some Trees of Italy, Part II: Mushrooms. June 6-27.
Krefeld, Museum Haus Lange. Cy Twombly. Skulpturen. 23
Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1955 bis 1981. September 27
November 15.
Newport Beach, Harbor Art Museum. Cy Twombly. Works on
Paper 1954-1976. October 2November 29. travelled to:
Madison, Elvehjem Museum of Art. January 24March 18,
1982; Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. June 15July
18, 1982; Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario. September 4
October 17, 1982.
Lund, Galleriet. Cy Twombly. Natural History. Part I: Some Trees of
Italy, Part II: Mushrooms. October 31November 25.
1982
New York, Sperone Westwater Fischer. Cy Twombly. XI Recent
Works. April 1May 8.
Rome, Il Ponte. Cy Twombly, opere su carta. Opened April 22.
Cologne, Galerie Karsten Greve. Cy Twombly. Arbeiten auf Papier.
June 4July 31.
London, The Mayor Gallery. Cy Twombly. An Exhibition of
Paintings. September 28November 6.
Paris, Galerie Yvon Lambert. Cy Twombly. October 16November
18.
Vancouver, The Vancouver Art Gallery. Cy Twombly: Prints.
December 11, 1982January 30, 1983.
168
1983
New York, Stephen Mazoh & Co.. Cy Twombly. Paintings. April
19May 27.
1984
Cologne, Galerie Karsten Greve. Cy Twombly. January 28March
25. travelled to: London, The Mayor Gallery. April 2May 4.
Vienna, Galerie Ulysses. May 24June 23.
Naples, Galleria Lucio Amelio. Cy Twombly. Opened February 8.
Bordeaux, capc. Muse dArt Contemporain. Cy Twombly. uvres
de 1973-1983. May 19September 9.
Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle. Cy Twombly. September
23November 11.
New York, Hirschl & Adler Modern. Cy Twombly. Paintings and
Drawings: 1952-1984. October 11November 3.
Rome, Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone. Cy Twombly. Sculture. Opened
October 25.
1985
New York, Dia Art Foundation. Cy Twombly. Paintings and
Drawings. October 31, 1985March 15, 1986.
Cologne, Galerie Karsten Greve. Cy Twombly. November 16, 1985
January 8, 1986.
Zurich, Galerie & Edition Sthli. Cy Twombly. Drawings and Prints.
November 23, 1985January 18, 1986.
1986
Paris, Opra Bastille. Rideau de Scne for the theatre.
New York, Larry Gagosian Gallery. Cy Twombly. Drawings, Collages
and Paintings on Paper: 1955-1985. February 22April 5.
New York, Hirschl & Adler Modern. Cy Twombly. April 12May 7.
Cologne, Galerie Karsten Greve. Cy Twombly. August 29October
16.
Cologne, Galerie Karsten Greve. Cy Twombly. Paintings. September
2November 6.
1987
Zurich, Kunsthaus. Cy Twombly. Bilder, Arbeiten auf Papier,
Skulpturen. February 18March 29. travelled to: Madrid,
Palacio de Velzquez/Palacio de Cristal. Cy Twombly. Cuadros,
trabajos sobre papel, esculturas. April 22July 30, London,
Whitechapel Art Gallery. Cy Twombly. Paintings, Works on
Paper, Sculpture. September 25November 15, Dsseldorf,
Stdtische Kunsthalle. Cy Twombly. Bilder, Arbeiten auf Papier,
Skulpturen. December 11, 1987January 31, 1988. Paris, Muse
national dart moderne, Galeries Contemporaines, Centre
Georges Pompidou. Cy Twombly. Peintures, euvres sur papier,
Sculptures. February 16April 17, 1988.
Genoa, Galleria La Polena. Cy Twombly, Natural History, Part II,
Trees. February 26.
Bonn, Stdtisches Kunstuseum. Cy Twombly. Serien auf Papier
1957-1987. June 2August 9. travelled to: Barcelona, Centre
Cultural de la Fundaci Caixa de Pensions. Cy Twombly. Sries
sobre papel 1959-1987. November 30, 1987January 17, 1988.
Siegen, Stdtische Galerie Haus Seel. Cy Twombly. June 28August
2.
London, Anthony dOffay Gallery. Cy Twombly. Paintings and
Works on Paper and the North African Sketchbook 1953.
September 26October 31.
1988
New York, The Pace Gallery. Cy Twombly. Works on Paper. January
8-30.
Munich, Galerie Klewan. Cy Twombly. Grafik der Siebzigerjahre.
February 4March 31.
Bridgehampton, Dia Art Foundation. Cy Twombly. Poems to the
Sea. May 28June 30.
New York, Vrej Baghoomian, Inc. Cy Twombly. September
24October 22.
St. Louis, The Greenberg Gallery. Cy Twombly. Works on Paper.
October 7November 12.
1989
New York, Sperone Westwater. Cy Twombly. Paintings and
Sculptures 1951 and 1953. February 1-28.
Cologne, Galerie Karsten Greve. Paintings of Cy Twombly.
Spring.
New York, Marisa Del Re Gallery. The Linear Image. American
Master Works on Paper. April 25May 27.
Houston, The Menil Collection. Cy Twombly. September 8.
1989March 4, 1990. travelled to:
>Des Moines, Des Moines Art Center. April 28, 1990June 17,
1990
Paris, Galerie Di Meo. Twombly. September 29December 23.
New York, Susan Sheehan Gallery. American Prints from the
Sixties. NovemberDecember.
New York, Gagosian Gallery. Cy Twombly. Bolsena Paintings.
December 12, 1989January 20, 1990.
1990
Zurich, Thomas Ammann Fine Art. Cy Twombly. Drawings and
8 Sculptures. June 11September 1.
Paris, Ameliobrachot/Pice Unique. Cy Twombly. Summer
Madness. October 23November 24.
1991
Paris, Ameliobrachot/Pice Unique. Cy Twombly. Thermopylae.
October 2December 20.
New York, Hirschl & Adler Modern. Cy Twombly. Prints 1952-
1983. November 21, 1991January 4, 1992
1992
Paris, Galerie Vidal - Saint Phalle. Cy Twombly - uvres graves.
September 12November 4.
1993
Paris, Galerie Karsten Greve. Cy Twombly. Peintures, uvres sur
papier et Sculptures. May 29October 20.
Paris, Pice Unique. Cy Twombly. October 2November 30.
New York, Matthew Marks Gallery. Cy Twombly. Photographs.
October 15December 4.
Bonn, Kunstmuseum Bonn. Cy Twombly - Octavio Paz.
November 5, 1993January 9, 1994.
1994
Milan, Galleria Karsten Greve. Cy Twombly. April 9May 25.
Zurich, Thomas Ammann Fine Art. Cy Twombly. June 15
September 15.
New York, The Museum of Modern Art. Cy Twombly. A
Retrospective. September 21, 1994January 10, 1995.
travelled to: Houston, The Menil Collection. February
12, 1995March 19, 1995 Los Angeles, The Museum of
Contemporary Art. April 9June 11, 1995 Berlin, Neue
Nationalgalerie. Cy Twombly. Retrospektive. August 31,
1995November 19, 1995
New York, Gagosian Gallery. Cy Twombly. Untitled Painting.
September 24, 1994December 17.
New York, C&M Arts (in association with Galerie Karsten
Greve, Cologne/Paris/Milan). Cy Twombly. September
27November 12.
169
1995
Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts. Cy Twombly. Untitled Painting,
Say Goodbye Catullus to the Shores of Asia Minor. February
4-19.
Houston, Texas Gallery. Cy Twombly. Photographs. February 8
March 25.
Houston, Robert McClain & Co. Cy Twombly: Works on Paper from
Four decades. February 9March 11.
Goslar, Mnchehaus Museum fr Moderne Kunst. Cy Twombly.
Prints. May 11June 29.
Berlin, Galerie Max Hetzler. Cy Twombly. Skulptur, June 3July 22.
1996
Seoul, Kukje Gallery. Cy Twombly. 1960s. April 19May 19.
New York, Peder Bonnier Gallery (in association with Leonard
Rosenberg Fine Art Inc., Piqua, Ohio). Cy Twombly. May 2
June 1.
Los Angeles, Gagosian Gallery. Cy Twombly Photographs. May
11June 15.
Salzburg, Rupertinum. Cy Twombly. Drawings and Lithos. May
18July 7.
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art. Cy Twombly.
Lepanto (three cardboard plate engravings printed as monoprints).
Opened December 2.
1997
Rome, Galleria S.A.L.E.S. Cy Twombly. Photographs. June 5July
15.
Cologne, Galerie Karsten Greve. Cy Twombly. June 25September.
Brussels, Galerie Xavier Hufkens. Cy Twombly. September 4
October 4.
New York, Cheim & Read. Cy Twombly. October 18November 15.
New York, Gagosian Gallery. Cy Twombly. Ten Sculptures.
November 5December 20.
1998
Aspen, Baldwin Gallery. Cy Twombly: Eight drawings plus one large
painting. August 1-30.
Rome, American Academy. Cy Twombly. Eight Sculptures.
September 28November 15.
1999
New York, Hirschl & Adler Modern. Cy Twombly: Selected prints
and drawings. April 24June 12.
2000
Houston, Brazos Projects. Cy Twombly. Photographs. September
18November 25.
New York, Gagosian Gallery. Coronation of Sesostris. November 11,
2000January 27, 2001
Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel. Cy Twombly: Die Skulpture. April
15, 2000July 30, 2000. travelled to: Houston, The Menil
Collection. Cy Twombly: The Sculpture. September 20, 2000
January 7, 2001 Washington, D.C., The National Gallery of
Modern Art. May 6, 2001July 29, 2001.
Schleswig (Schleswig-Holstein), Schlo Gottorf / Stiftung
Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesmuseen. Cy Twombly. Idilli.
Vier Graphikzyklen und eine Collage aus der Sammlung Reiner
Speck, Kln. July 2September 3.
2001
Zurich, Thomas Ammann Fine Art. Cy Twombly. June 11
September 28.
2002
New York, Gagosian Gallery. Lepanto. January 19February 23.
Passau, Museum Moderner Kunst - Stiftung Wrlen. Cy Twombly.
Acht Graphikzyklen und vier Papierarbeiten aus der Sammlung
Grohaus. April 20June 9.
Zurich, The Daros Collection. Audible Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros.
May 3-September 7.
Edinburgh, Inverleith House. Cy Twombly. August 9October 27.
Munich, Alte Pinakothek. Cy Twombly. Lepanto. September 4
November 24.
Munich, Schirmer/Mosel Showroom. Cy Twombly: Photographs
2002. September 5October 22.
Cagliari, EXM Centro dArte e Cultura. Cy Twombly. Sculture.
November 6December 8.
New York, Zwirner & Wirth. Cy Twombly. Letter of Resignation.
November 8, 2002January 4, 2003.
2003
New York, Gagosian Gallery. A Gathering of Time. May 12July 21.
St. Petersburg. The State Hermitage Museum. Cy Twombly
at the Hermitage: Fifty Years of Works on Paper. July 8,
2003September 21, 2003. travelled to: Munich, Staatliche
Graphische Sammlung, Pinakothek der Moderne. October 7,
2003November 21, 2003. Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou.
January 21, 2004March 29, 2004, London, The Serpentine
Gallery. April 17, 2004June 13, 2004, New York, Whitney
Museum of American Art. January 27, 2005May 8, 2005,
Houston, The Menil Collection. May 27, 2005September 4,
2005.
2004
London, Gagosian Gallery. Ten Paintings and a Sculpture. May
27July 31.
Zurich, Thomas Ammann Fine Art. Cy Twombly. June 14
September 30.
Luxembourg, MUDAM Muse dArt Moderne Grand-Duc Jean.Cy
Twombly: Natural History Part II, Some Trees of Italy, 1975-1976.
June 30September 12.
2005
Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts. Cy Twombly: Lepanto. May
27September 11.
New York, Gagosian Gallery. Cy Twombly. Bacchus. November 2,
2005January 21, 2006.
2006
Munich, Alte Pinakothek. Cy Twombly. Sculptures 1992-2005. April
5July 30.
2007
New York, L&M Arts. Cy Twombly: Selected Works. April 11June 2.
Zurich, Thomas Ammann Fine Art. Cy Twombly. June 1September
28.
Avignon, Collection Lambert. Muse dArt Contemporain. Cy
Twombly. Blooming. A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things.
June 5October 14.
Munich, Schirmer/Mosel Showroom. Cy Twombly: Photographs II.
September 14 -November 22.
New York, Gagosian Gallery. Cy Twombly. Bloomimg. A Scattering of
Blossoms and Other Things. November 8December 22.
Rome, Gagosian Gallery. Cy Twombly. Three Notes from Salalah.
December 15, 2007February 16, 2008.
2008
Munich, Schirmer/Mosel Showroom. Cy Twombly: Photograph III,
170
April 3-May 25.
London, Tate Modern. Cy Twombly. Cycles and Seasons. June ACK NOW L EDGM EN TS
19September 14. travelled to: Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum.
October 28, 2008February 15, 2009, Rome, Galleria
Nazionale dArte Moderna e Contemporanea. March 4, 2009
May 24, 2009. We would like to thank the following galleries and cultural institutions for making this exhibition and
Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado. Lepanto. Cy Twombly. June
26September 28. catalogue possible: The Cy Twombly Foundation, David Zwirner Gallery, The Broad Art Foundation,
Amsterdam, Huis Marseille Museum for Photography. Cy
Gagosian Gallery, The Menil Collection, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) and
TwomblyPhotographs 1951-2007. September 6November 23.
the Whitney Museum of American Art. For their invaluable help and support we would like to give special
2009
London, Gagosian Gallery. The Rose. February 12April 9. thanks to: Naomi Abe, Vernica Anaya, Celine and Heiner Bastian, Ben Berlow, Will Berry, Thierry Cabot,
Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago. Cy Twombly: The Natural David Chipperfield, Nicola Del Roscio, Eleonora Di Erasmo, Jina Dishman, Anita Duquette, Vicki Gambill,
World, Selected Works, 20002007. May 14October 11.
Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien. Cy Gabriela and Jos Ramiro Garza, Viorel Grassu, Rebekah Kim, Takaaki Matsumoto, Marcelino Menndez,
Twombly. Sensations of the Moment. June 3October 11.
New York, Gagosian Gallery. Eight Sculptures. September 15
Thordis Moeller, Francisco Pla Chvez, Kelly Reynolds, Rysia Reynolds, Alma Ruiz, Yumiko Saito, Heather
December 23. Schweikhardt, Barbi Spieler, Evelyn Stern, Raffaele Valente, Jo Walton, Amy Wilkins and Maggie Wright.
Athens, Gagosian Gallery. Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves.
September 25December 19.
Houston, The Menil Collection. Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil.
October 30, 2009January 14, 2010.
2010
Portland, Portland Art Museum. Cy Twombly. February 6May
16.
Paris, Muse Louvre, Salle de Bronzes. Inaugration of the painted
ceiling [permanent work]. March 25.
Munich, Schirmer/Mosel Showroom. Cy Twombly: Tulips. Fifteen
Photographs. June 8August 31.
Paris, Gagosian Gallery. Camino Real. October 20December 23.
2011
Avignon, Collection Lambert. Le temps retrouv. Cy Twombly
photographe et artistes invits. June 21-November 20.
London, Dulwich Picture Gallery. Twombly and Poussin. Arcadian
Painters. June 29September 25.
Munich, Museum Brandhorst / Bayerische
Staatsgemldesammlungen. Cy Twombly. Photographien
1951-2010. April 7, 2011July 10, 2011. travelled to: Siegen,
Museum fr Gegenwartskunst. July 17, 2011October 30,
2011. Brussels, BOZAR, Centre for Fine Arts. Cy Twombly.
Photographs 1951-2010. January 31, 2012April 29, 2012.
2012
London, Eykyn Maclean, Ltd. Cy Twombly: Works from the
Sonnabend Collection. February 7March 17. travelled to: New
York, Eykyn Maclean, LP. April 5May 19.
Los Angeles, Gagosian Gallery. Cy Twombly. The Last Painitngs.
Cy Twombly. Photograph. April 27June 9. [Photographs
exhibition do not travel] travelled to: Hong Kong; Gagosian
Gallery, June 28August 11; London, Gagosian Gallery,
September 629; New York, Gagosian Gallery, November
1December 22
Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Cy Twombly: Sculptures.
Opened April 30.
London, Gagosian Gallery. A Survey of Photographs. 19542011.
September 6 29. travelled to: New York, Gagosian Galler,
November 1December 22.
Berlin, Galerie Bastian. Cy Twombly. A Mediterranean World.
September 8November 10.
171
Fundacin Jumex Arte Contemporneo
Founders Eugenio Lpez Alonso
Eugenio Lpez Rodea & Isabel Alonso de Lpez
Directors Oce Patrick Charpenel, Director
Rosario Nadal, Deputy Director
Patricia Marshall, Collection Advisor
Ana Luisa Prez, Assistant to the President
Edith Martnez, Assistant to the Director
Collection and Exhibitions Magal Arriola, Curator
Michel Blancsub, Curator
Luz Elena Mendoza, Registrar
Humberto Moro, Collection Coordinator
Lorena Moreno, Curatorial Assistant
Javier Rivero, Curatorial Assistant
Oscar Daz, Exhibition Designer
Jos Juan Ziga, Exhibition Designer
Alejandra Lanzagorta, Assistant Registrar
Education Samuel Morales, Educational Programs
David R. Hernndez, School Programs
Design and Publications Maricris Herrera, Design and Publications
Natalie Espinosa, Editorial Coordinator
This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition
Cy Twombly: Paradise
June 4October 12, 2014
Jumex Museum, Mexico
Curated by Julie Sylvester and Philip Larratt-Smith
Published by Jumex Museum, Mexico
First edition 2014
2014 Jumex Museum, Mexico
All artwork Cy Twombly Foundation
Psychedelic Antiquity 2014 Philip Larratt-Smith
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.
Editor: Julie Sylvester
Creative Direction and Design: Takaaki Matsumoto,
Matsumoto Incorporated, New York
Design Assistant: Robin Brunelle, Matsumoto Incorporated, New York
Copy Editor and Production Manager: Amy Wilkins,
Matsumoto Incorporated, New York
Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro
Printed on Phoenix Motion Xantur, 170 gsm
Color separations and printing by Damiani, Italy

Research Jos Esparza Chong Cuy Jacket: Untitled (detail), 1989. Collage: (one sheet of paper, circular tracing
paper, paper shred, transparent adhesive tape, glue) acrylic, wax crayon. 104 x
Press and Communication Mariana Huerta 74.5 cm (40 1516 x 29 38 inches)
Front endpaper: Untitled (detail), 1959. Collage: (shredded paper, shredded pink
Grants and Scholarships Sara Cordero type writing paper, glue), pencil, ballpoint pen. 36.7 x 30.4 cm (14 716 x 12
inches)
Library Cristina Ortega Frontispiece: Stream Continue (detail), 1983. Graphite pencil and white spirit
on paper and stone. 59 x 393 inches (150 x 1,000 cm). Performance at Gallery
Operations and Finance Roberto Velzquez, Planning and Operations Marina Dinkler, Berlin, 1983.
Rafael Sevilla, Projects and Facilities Manager Pages 4849, 16263, 18485: Above the Horizon (details), 1983. Vinyl adhesive,
Arturo Quiroz, Accounting graphite pencil, cord, and Japanese paper on canvas. 63 x 51 x 1 inches (162
Begoa Hano, Special Events Coordinator x 130 x 3.8 cm).
Laura Vieco, Planning and Operations Assistant Back endpaper: Stream, Hauser & Wirth, London (detail), 19842013. Graphite
Daniel Ricao, Systems and Audiovisual Coordinator pencil on paper and turpentine. 59 x 393 inches (150 x 1,000 cm).
Miguel Jurez, Security
Rodrigo Flores, Maintenance Photograph Credits
Sergio Garca, Maintenance All images not otherwise listed courtesy of Cy Twombly Foundation
Vctor Hernndez, Maintenance Francisco Kochen: pp, 50-51, 52, ; Sebastiano Luciano: pp. Front end paper, Back
Jos Escrcega, Driver end paper, 40-41; Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zurich: pp. 32-33, 63, 64, 65,
Erika vila, Reception 74-75, 83, 92-93, 116-117, 118, 119, 126-127, 129, 134-135, 152-153,
Fabiola Chapela, General Services
Sal Ocampo, General Services ISBN 978-607-8335-05-3
Directors Grupo Jumex Manuel Vicente Martnez Distributed by
Miguel ngel Autrique JRP|Ringier
Jos Luis de Baro Letzigraben 134
Juan Carlos Blanco CH-8047 Zurich
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