Cyhaus: Bela Lugosi’s Bed

the brightly lit salon of cy twombly and tatianna franchetti's apartment in rome has six whilte leather breuer wassily chairs around a large coffee table or perhaps it's a mattress, covered with a recently unfolded, unprimed cotton canvas. a twombly painting lies unstretched and unrolled on the lower fore edge of the composition. the green marble doorway on the right wall echoes the dark warhol painting of tuna fish cans on the left. the two windows on the back wall, on either side of a crushed galvanized steel john chamberlain sculpture, are open to the view of the via di monserrato. by ugo mulas, the hidden historian of 20th century art
Ugo Mulas, c. 1969/70, the Twombly/Franchetti salon in Rome, with Warhol and Chamberlain installed properly, and a Bolsena painting, off its stretcher and unrolled ON THE FLOOR WTF, via Cy Twombly Homes & Studios

We still live in a Cy Twombly world Horst built. His European dealers made their own versions of via di Monserrato to live in. And whether it’s to identify works in the background, or to copy the floor, we’re all left poring over the same few photos, a dozen or so slivers from which we try to construct some meaning, to conjure a view of a place and a moment. We make do with what history has left.

Except there’s more. Photographer Ugo Mulas was everywhere in the art world in the 1960s and 70s, taking pictures of everyone and where they worked and everything they made there. Mulas published a couple of books early on, hard to find and expensive; fact is, we haven’t really seen Mulas’s world or processed it. And it feels like every one of his thousands of photos could change Art History forever, yet his only apparent option is to try to sell a dozen of the aesthetic ones as editioned prints.

There are a dozen Ugo Mulas photos of c. 1969/70 via di Monserrato in the Cy Twombly Homes & Studios book, including the one above. There’s another photo of the same room in which the large table covered with an unprimed canvas looks like a mattress. In a third photo, there are instead two acrylic coffee tables covered with photos and art tchotchkes, so the mattress was a choice, or a moment.

Those spindly floor lamps are everywhere in Mulas’ Twombly photos, and nowhere in Horst’s. So is non-Twombly artwork. Warhol, Chamberlain, Johns, Alex Hay, Picasso, the Franchettis didn’t just have an artist in the family; they had direct access to Castelli’s backroom—and a guy who could get it for them wholesale.

But when I say every single Ugo Mulas photo could change Art History, this is what I mean:

a dramatically lit bed with a green velvet cover, green pillows, and a tan fur throw sits on a green wall-to-wall carpet, lit by two chrome floorlamps. behind the bed, a warhol screenprint of a promotional still from bela lugosi's dracula about to bite the neck of a swooning white lady hovers in the blackness. a 1969/70 photo of cy twombly's bed by ugo mulas
Bela Lugosi, Bed

Is this where the mattress ended up? The bedroom is not in Horst, and this Mulas is not in Homes & Studios. The carpet, the velvet, the sheets, Twombly’s love affair with green didn’t start in Bassano. The Kiss (Bela Lugosi) is one of Warhol’s earliest screenprints, which he made himself, on paper. On November 22, 1963.

Previously, related: Cy Twombly’s Homes, Picassos