In 2010 MoMA went deep on Cy Twombly sculpture, purchasing five works and receiving two more as gifts. They all went on view the next year, after the artist’s death. On the far right, the Kravises have promised the earliest work, Untitled (Funerary Box for a Lime Green Python) (1954), and the Cy Twombly Foundation gave the sleekest, Untitled (1976), on the left.
Gotta admit, at the time, I did not pay it appropriate attention. In the rough, gestural, elemental, bricolaged world of Twombly sculptures, it definitely hangs back, looking sleek and a bit out of place.
It wasn’t until yesterday, in fact, that I realized there was another. In fact, there are fourteen, but that’s not important now. At some point in 1976, Twombly is sitting in Rome, and he decides to make sculptures again, for the first time in 17 years. Was he looking at the cardboard tubes he stores his drawings in, and he had an urge to stick one in the other, and paint the resulting column white, and then realized, “Oh wow, I’m making sculptures again?” Or was he jonesing to make a sculpture—after showing his 1950s sculptures for the first time in years—at the ICA in Philadelphia, and the closest material at hand was this bunch of tubes?
Because Twombly made at least four of these cardboard tube sculptures, of varying heights and diameters. Sometimes he really stuck it in there, and it was 50 inches tall. Sometimes he’d just put in the tip, like the MoMA example, which is the tallest, at 76 inches. To keep it real, he stuck them on the floor.
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