Cy Trombly Drawings Paintings Sculpture

a detail of a yellowed newspaper from nov 8, 1953, the princeton town topics, showing an ad for a cy trombly exhibition at the little gallery, in between ads for clothing [top] and used rugs [below]
cy trombly drawings paintings sculpture, detail from the princeton town topics, nov. 7, 1953

This weekend I heard from George Lyle, who has been researching one of the least known aspects of Cy Twombly’s early career: a 1953 “retrospective” of “drawings, paintings & sculpture” at The Little Gallery in Princeton, NJ.

Twombly’s two-artist show with Robert Rauschenberg at Stable Gallery in New York opened at almost the same time, in the fall of 1953, and was extensively documented and reviewed—mostly negatively, but at least people noticed. The Princeton show, meanwhile, left almost no trace, except for a couple of letters at the AAA, in the papers of Larom “Larry” Munson, the fresh Princeton grad who ran The Little Gallery with his wife.

a full page of a yellowed 1953 local newspaper from princeton, which is mostly ads for local businesses, including one from the little gallery, for a show by cy trombly, the misspelled name of cy twombly, via princeton town topics
page 13 of the nov. 8, 1953 issue of the princeton town topics, with the little gallery’s ad for a cy trombly exhibition

But Lyle found advertisements for the show in the Princeton Town Topics, a free weekly newspaper, in both the Nov. 8 and 15, 1953. Which is interesting because the Twombly Foundation lists the show as ending on Nov. 7. What’s more interesting, of course, is that the ad misspelled Twombly’s name, two weeks in a row.

[next morning update: turns out the ads for the weeks preceding Trombly’s show are for picture framing, and encouraging folks to order their Christmas cards, so however embedded in the cultural life of Princeton, I’m gonna guess The Little Gallery was not much involved in the heated discourse of the Manhattan art village.]