Some Things John Waters Collected

a tight cluster of smallish aworks from john waters' collection on the wall of the baltimore museum of art in 2022 includes, most prominently, at the center, four warhol jackie-style black on blue or white silkscreen paintings of jonbenet ramsay by erik luken, a campbells soup can drawing that's probably mike bidlo, above a flyer for empire, the 1964 film. on the left is most recognizably, a spot painting, which is actually an eric doeringer bootleg
Installation view from Coming Attractions: The John Waters Collection, a 2022-23 exhibition of promised gifts at the Baltimore Museum of Art

Yesterday Eric Doeringer posted his discovery of his bootleg Damien Hirst spot painting among the works John Waters has promised to the Baltimore Museum of Art. It was on view at the museum in 2022-23 in a selection—curated by Catherine Opie and Jack Pierson—from nearly 400 works from Waters’ collection. It hung next to a Warhol Jackie-style grid of Jonbenet Ramsay portraits by Eric Luken. While being perfect objects on their own terms, these two works help situate Waters in the place, moment, and discourse of art. For the Doeringer, that was on the mean streets of early 2000s Chelsea. For the Luken, that was probably an emerging art fair. [His only show (so far?) was with Joel Mesler & Daniel Hug’s short-lived LA gallery that rode the 2000s art fair wave.]

a low-contrast mimeographed flyer for the premiere of andy warhol and john palmer's 1964 film empire is a horizontally oriented film still of the top half of the empire state building against an empty evening sky, with three tiers of lighting at the top. maybe that's the moon, that tiny white dot on the lower center, or maybe it's the light on top of a distant building. made by jonas mekas in 1965

Speaking of short-lived collabs you never hear about, Waters also has the best/only thing you can really collect from one of the greatest artworks of the 20th century: a flyer made by Jonas Mekas for the world premiere of EMPIRE (1964), by Andy Warhol and John Palmer.

If you think I’m leading with all this to head off criticism that I’ve become a one-topic fanblog, you’re only partially not wrong. Because this is all stuff I found along the way while trying to get a legible image of the work beneath Doeringer’s painting, which is a scrap of paper on which Cy Twombly wrote his address.

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Twombly Four Gators

a 1972 work on paper cy twombly made for robert rauschenberg is a horizontal sheet of cream paper with a row of four souvenir postcards depicting alligators, rougly evenly spaced, with variously thick or thin lines drawn above and below them. a couple are overlaid with transparent graph paper. below them, in the lower center of the sheet, a fifth postcard is mounted face down, so that the text portion is up. it reads cy twombly captiva dec 20 72, to bob r. xmas 72. two clusters of thickly drawn, diverging diagonal lines point down from the top gator row, alongside the label postcard. small numbers are written near or above the various lines, with meanings not readily apparent. the work was in the collection of rauschenberg when it was published in twombly's drawings catalogue raisonné
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1972, collage on paper, 22 3/4 x 31 inches, image via CR-Works on Paper, v6-17

You cannot fully understand Twombly’s art unless you know that there is gators.

Twombly went to Rauschenberg’s house in Captiva in November 1970 and made collages; in December 1971 and made prints, but those catalogues raisonnés were checked out, so who knows? In the winter of 1972, he made this collage as a Christmas present for Rauschenberg. It has four, possibly five, postcards of alligators on it.

I really didn’t think of collage as a Twombly thing. But it looks like a major part, maybe even most of his works on paper in the 1970s were collages. He collaged with catholic zeal: Leonardo images; mushrooms and natural history book illustrations; graph and drawing paper; fragments of other drawings; and, in Captiva, especially, touristy postcards.

Twombly’s lines here index the placement and width of the postcards, and of their crossed out captions, as if the composition is a conceptual schematic of itself. It’s still very much a drawing.

This Post Is Actually Mostly About Bob Petersen

cy twombly and rauschenberg reclining amind talk grass in 1974, probably. twombly's up on his elbow, his scrunchy hat and white blazer over a pea green sweater, looking off the left side of the image. rauschenberg is lying down, eyes closed, hands behind/under his head, in a short sleeved safari shirt. both are wearing dad jeans and brown leather shoes. bob's bf robert petersen took the photo.
The invitation postcard for the opening of Robert Rauschenberg & Cy Twombly’s two-person show at Leo Castelli Gallery, May 4, 1974, is a photo of the two lounging in Captiva by Bob Petersen, via @leomartinfaber

Bob Petersen: …is Columbia doing Cy Twombly?
Q: I don’t know. There’s a gallery at Columbia, but I don’t know.
Petersen: The oral history of Cy Twombly?
Q2: He died before—
Petersen: God, I have tons of stories from Cy.
Q: Oh, you mean as an oral history subject?
Petersen: Yes, right, just to record. God, Cy and Bob were of course so close.

In 1970 Robert Rauschenberg, 45, moved to Captiva, a Florida island only then only reached by ferry, and Gemini GEL printer Bob Petersen, 25, moved with him. They lived on the beach side of the wild, 16-acre property Rauschenberg had assembled, and eventually set up an experimental print foundry, Untitled Press, in a house on the other side. That’s where a bunch of artist friends stayed, including Cy and Nicola [that’s not in the Chronology], who started coming during the winters from 1971 through 1975.

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Cy Twombly Post-It Notes

a tight photograph of two pale yellow post-it notes on the edge of a white painted bookshelf, with a somewhat unruly stack of papers, and a curled open book or magazine in two stacks. there is a third post-it note cropped out to the left, illegible. the rectangular post-ot reads the soul we once had, in sprawling, loose, and not especially straight writing with a black pen. the right post-it is square, with the word remanence written twice in all caps, once above a bisecting line, where it kind of gets cramped toward the end, and once below it.
tacita dean photographed these post-it notes in the library slash bedroom of cy twombly in gaeta italy, in 2008. they were published in a cataloge in vienna in 2009 at mumok.
Tacita Dean, Gaeta, 2008, originally published in Cy Twombly: States of Mind, MUMOK 2009

Just thinking about Cy Twombly’s Post-it Notes this morning.

When Tacita Dean made her 2008 Gaeta photos from an exhibition catalogue essay into a gallery installation (2015), she printed this picture on one of the last giant sheets of Cibachrome paper. GAETA 2015 — fifty photographs, plus one, filled the south gallery of Dean’s Spring 2016 show at Marian Goodman Gallery.

a white gallery wall covered with a freely hung array of photographs by tacita dean, printed on various endangered photochemical papers, and mounted and framed in a variety of ways, all photos were taken in 2008 at cy twombly's house in gaeta, and picture closely observed details like books, post-it notes, the landscape of a tabletop, etc. as installed at marian goodman gallery in 2016.
Tacita Dean, GAETA 2015 — fifty photographs, plus one (detail), 2015, installation view from Marian Goodman Gallery, 2016

It’s also in the upper corner of the installation at Tacita Dean. Sigh, Sigh, Sigh, her show at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio in Rome in 2021-22.

a curved temporary wall sits toward the back of a seemingly low ceilinged exhibition space, sandwiched between concrete slab floors and a concrete beamed ceiling. the wall is filled with tacita dean photos of cy twombly's house in gaeta, printed in various sizes and formats, large and small, black and white, and in color, on a variety of endagered chemical photo papers. from the fondazione nicola del roscio, in 2021
installation view of Gaeta (2015) at Tacita Dean. Sigh, Sigh, Sigh at Fond. Nicola Del Roscio in 2021-22

Heading To Bassano, Wish You Were Here

the back of a postcard from cy twombly to reiner speck where the message section is filled by a scribbly swirl of orange and black crayon, partly obscuring the florida peninsula logo but leaving the caption of the photo on the recto about depicting a startlingly beautiful florida sunset intact. AIRMAIL across the top and Speck's name and address on the right are written in Twombly's distinctive hand, which is all the signature you need, I guess. via maison d'art
The startlingly beautiful hues of a tropical Florida Sunset are depicted here in all their splendor and completeness that Cy Twombly didn’t need to add anything, not even his signature, via Maison d’Art

It’s the little differences. Where Marcel Duchamp’s letters to his collector friend Katherine Dreier are all, “shipping is $34, please send me $34,” Cy Twombly’s letters to his collector friend Reiner Speck are like, “we await you in the summer castle.” I have read the Twombly correspondence with noted urologist and Proust expert Herr Dr. Reiner Speck in the catalogue for Maison d’Art’s current exhibition, and here’s the expanded tl;dr:

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Cy Twombly—Rainer Speck at Maison D’Art

a nearly empty off white title page of an exhibition catalogue has cy twombly printed in very very small letters in the upper center, and "To Rainer, Cy T" written by hand by the artist. from the collection of rainer speck at maison d'art in los angeles in feb-may 2025
the signed title page of Rainer Speck’s copy of the 1987 exhibition catalogue for Cy Twombly Series Sobre
Paper 1959-1987, which traveled from Bonn to Fondació la Caixa. image: Maison D’Art

I’ve been hearing about it from people in LA and seeing it on various instagrams, and the Maison D’Art exhibition of Dr. Rainer Speck’s collection and correspondence with Cy Twombly sounds like an absolute winner. It runs through May; I bought the little catalogue instantly.

Speck rolled up on Twombly in Rome in 1970 as a young collector, and the two kept in touch:

A selection of letters from Twombly to Speck is the foundation of this project. For Speck, the thrill of collecting lies in interrogating the ways that art, reading, and writing influence one another; these letters are a personal manifestation of this interest. In placing these letters alongside the ephemera and artworks they discuss, this exhibition and its publication strive to materialize these conversations and to create a tangible transcript of their relationship.

With their layers of text and imagery, Twombly’s works function as another kind of transcript, merging poetic and painterly elements and creating subtle visual palimpsests. Twombly’s works evoke the literary, mythical, and historical worlds of Western culture and interweave them with his abstract gestures and contemporary reflections. These works reveal Twombly’s artistic depth and highlight the integral role of language and literature to his process—a pursuit that resonates with Speck’s devotion to literature.

This relationship between drawing and writing, art and poetry, is an endlessly rewarding way into Twombly’s work. Poet Dean Rader talked about this last year at the Nicola del Roscio Foundation; and Tacita Dean spent part of her night in the Menil’s Twombly Pavilion trying to replicate words from his paintings. As with his photographs, bringing Twombly’s letters and books into consideration of his project feels long overdue.

NGL, the way the jpg above was cropped in my browser left me reeling as I imagined Twombly breaking out his sickest, most stripped back letterhead to write Speck the most stripped back letter: “To Rainer, Cy T.” But it turns out to be the title page dedication of an exhibition catalogue. Which is still great, but it does mean I don’t have to jump on a plane to LA this second; I can plan a little.

Cy Twombly—Reiner Speck: Fragments of an Adoration, curated by Donald Ryan and Sabine Schiffer, is at Maison D’Art in LA through 24 May [maisondart]

What Are These Statues In Cy Twombly’s Library

manfredi gioacchini's photo along the open enfilade doorways of cy twombly's house in gaeta, where the library dominates between two sets of doors. along the left wall are tables and a pedestal with white classical sculptures on them, surrounded by crystals, shells, and other tchotchkes. beyond the library through the farther doors is what looks to be table with hats on it, and another door beyond that. the sculpture closest to the foreground was photographed head-on by tacita dean in 2008, and is the subject of this whole effort. though it is also interesting to look through all the photos gioacchini made for other details.
Manfredi Giaocchini, Cy Twombly Gaeta, c.2009 2020? via

I promise this site is not just a Cy Twombly fanblog, but after greg.org hero Claudio Santambrogio found a previously unknown photo of the artist’s house in Gaeta, I tracked it back to a whole previously unknown set of photos, made by World of Interiors contributor Manfredi Gioacchini in, I think, 2009. [next day update: I remembered this wrong; in a now-deleted tweet Gioacchini announced them as new in November 2020, so almost a decade after Twombly’s death.]

a plaster or white painted terra cotta statue of a male nude figure twisting to hold a tablet while billows of drapery surround him sits on a table in front of a wall of books in cy twombly's living room slash bedroom in gaeta. tacita dean made this photo in 2008 but did not publish it, though poet mary jacobus used it in a presentation, from whence this screengrab was made in 2023, in order to identify the statue.
screenshot from Mary Jacobus’s presentation on her Twombly book, via

What jumps out at me? Well, there are additional views of the (plaster? painted terra cotta?) statue Tacita Dean photographed in Twombly’s library, which I’d wondered about in December 2023. [It’s feeling harder and harder to claim this isn’t a fanblog…]

a dark interior and bright sunny window view in manfredi giaocchini's photo of cy twombly's library in gaeta. in the shadow, two white classical style sculptures stand, the arger one on a pedestal, on the left, and the shorter one, on a tchotchke-filled table, on the right. a dark tabletop in the foreground reflects a little sunlight, but is out of focus
mood lighting in Manfredi Gioacchini’s 2009 photo of Cy Twombly’s library/bedroom, via

Anyway, point is, the statue is one of three. Actually, there are more throughout Gioacchini’s photos of the house, but there are three in this library grouping. At the center, in front of the window, is a larger, dramatically unfinished twisting satyr or something. Maybe it’s leaning on an unfinished stump.

Whether they’re actually a pair, another similarly scaled male figure, with its arm raised, sits on a matching table. The contortion and billowing cloak/drapery make me think they’re connected. From the top photo, the 2023 sculpture in profile shows how deep the drapery goes, too. It would be unusual for this to be on a frieze or in a niche; these may be meant to stand free and be seen in the round. Though here Twombly has arranged them in a triptych, with his view of the bay behind.

[April 2025 update: While world’s going to hell, I went to the National Gallery library, where a quick turn through the photos of Twombly, Tacita Dean, and Sally Mann confirm that the large center statue in the Gaeta trio was the Pan statue Twombly often photographed in Bassano in Teverina. Here is a 1998 photo exhibited at Gagosian Roma in 2021, for example, that shows it in profile through a doorway.]

a color photocopy of a polaroid by cy twombly from 1998 of a plaster statue of pan perched or leaning on a tree stump or rock or something is atop a heavy, dark credenza or chest shaped furniture, lit from behind. the pale arms of a french style fauteuil are next to the cabinet, cropped by the heavy rustic dark wood door which frames the scene of the sculpture in the room behind it. behind the door, that is, not the sculpture. nicola del roscio has been named the copyright holder of all of twombly's photographic oeuvre, including this image, which was exhibited at gagosian in rome in 2021, but which is here used to confirm the identification of the statue, as one the artist later moved to gaeta, and to confirm that if people in twombly world have known of my public plea to identify the various plaster statues in his homes, they dgaf enough to reach out and say oh yeah, that's the pan from bassano or whatever, but that's fine. at this point i'm appreciating the inquiry as much as the answer. keeps me looking.
Cy Twombly, Interior, 1998, Bassano in Teverina, drypoint, ed. 6, shown by the esteemed copyrightholder of the entire oeuvre, Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, at Gagosian Roma in 2021

Previously, directly related: What Is This Statue in Cy Twombly’s Library?
Manfredi Gioacchini | Cy Twombly Gaeta [manfredigioacchini]
Gioacchini’s new book Grand Tour, published Oct. 2024 by Quodlibet, includes the Gaeta photos [manfredigioacchini]

Gagosian’s First Show At 980 Madison Was Not Cy Twombly

Now that Gagosian is closing their 980 Madison Avenue space with a Twombly show, the line has gone around that it makes sense, because Gagosian always opened a new space with a Twombly show. But 980 Madison did not open with a Twombly show. It opened with a Jasper Johns show.

Jasper Johns: The Maps was Gagosian’s first show at 980 Madison Avenue. It opened 36 years ago today: February 3rd, 1989. Before that, Gagosian, sometimes called “a Los Angeles dealer” in reviews, had a space in Chelsea, at 521 West 23rd St. The first Cy Twombly exhibition at 980, Bolsena Paintings, opened in December 1989. Twombly’s exhibition history includes a show at Gagosian NY in 1986, which is not in Gagosian’s exhibition archive [indeed, none of the W 23rd St shows are.] In the three-year interim, Twombly showed new and old work with five other New York galleries.

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Good In Bed, Better Against A Wall

the reid white house, a 19th century red brick house in downtown lexington virgnia, is photographed from this oblique angle because just to the left, behind that hedge, is the post office, which is built on the house's front yard, and so there's no clear view of the house. it has two chimneys on each end, and a white columned porch. the double porch in the background was added later. via vlr
the house formerly known as the Reid-White House, photographed for the Virginia Landmark Register in 2016 by Sarah Traum, in such a way that the post office in the front yard can’t be seen.

What to do with this story from Sally Mann’s memoir?

Every time [Cy Twombly and I] would leave his house and catch a glimpse of the neighboring Reid White house behind the trees, one or the other of us would repeat our favorite line from a story my mother used to tell about the occupant of that house, Mrs. Breasted White. That’s what I swear I remember her saying: “Mrs. Breasted White.” But now, writing that name, it somehow seems highly improbable.

Anyway, we’d say the punch line, sometimes in unison, and then we would both howl with laughter, as if we had just heard it for the first time. Here’s how the story goes:

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Cy Twombly Homes & Picassos

the cover of cy twombly homes and studios features a photo of the artist in a white suit standing with his hand at his moth, flanked by roman and renaissance busts in front of the marble doorway of his palazzo on via di monserrato, a painting by him barely legible in the room behind, from horst p. horst's iconic 1966 photoshoot for vogue
The cover of Cy Twombly: Homes & Studios, 2019/2020, available for retail at Gagosian and Karma

While the arrival of Carlos Peris’s lovely book did not give me much to add on the subject of Cy Twombly’s photography, the arrival of Cy Twombly Homes & Studios has filled the content pipeline to overflowing.

First, don’t sleep on such a book when it first comes out; I missed the hardcover edition by my own negligence.

Second, Nicola Del Roscio is an international treasure, and he should not be forced to write to share his insights and experiences alongside Twombly; sit him down and record him talking, Hans Ulrich Obrist-style, for as long as it takes. For every buck wild story about how much Twombly loathed studio visits, and when a Qatari royal made an unexpected visit to Gaeta via helicopter, he scrambled to set up a decadent luncheon in the courtyard is included, how many treasures and priceless memories are left out?

We just need to get it all while we can, and while he can. [And while recounting this history, may someone will ask Nicola how, while making this book in the midst of the first public disclosures of sexual predation against him, it was decided to use Bruce Weber’s 1994 photo of Twombly’s studio for the frontispiece.]

a page from homes & studios with a large blurry 1991 photo by deborah turbeville, printed beyond its resolution capacity for aesthetic effect. it depicts what is called in the caption a picasso drawing on a chair. the drawing of the head of a woman in profile is in an extremely ornate carved frame, and the chair is also ornately carved with a dark upholstered velvet seat. it sits between two stone doorframes on a marble floor, in the palazzo cy twombly bought in bassano, italy. except it turns out that twombly made this copy of a picasso drawing, nicola del roscio probably knew that when he put this caption in the book in 2019, but it's not clear whether turbeville knew it when she made the photo.
“Picasso drawing on chair,” reads the 2019 caption of 56 Bassano, a 1991 photo by Deborah Turbeville listed as 56 Bassano in Homes & Studios, which, well,

Homes & Studios, 2019, contains fleeting mentions of the following (non-exhaustive): the palazzo purchased in Tonnicoda, which Twombly felt guilty for abandoning, so he named some works after it ; the castle Twombly almost impulse-bought in the name of either Nicola or his studio assistant Viorel. And at least the third cringe mention (all, I think, posthumous), of Twombly’s closeness with his former nanny, a Black woman named Lula. There is a dissertation or ten to be written about Twombly’s relationship to the South (and Rauschenberg and Johns, for that matter; Twombly told Sally Mann their joint biography should be called, Dickheads from Dixie. Mann also noted that Lula was barely a decade older than Cy; she began working for the Twomblys when she was just thirteen.)

Anyway, point is, my most urgent takeaway from Homes & Studios is that we need more information on Twombly’s Picassos: How many are there? And are they actually Picassos? Because the one above, in Deborah Turbeville’s 1991 photo from Bassano, captioned in 2020 as “Picasso drawing on Chair,” was revealed in 2023, at least, to be a 1985 drawing by Twombly, either of a Picasso or in Picasso’s mode. If this can be mislabeled as a Picasso, what about the others?

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Cy Twombly Relive The Moment

a 2010 photo by nicola del roscio over cy twombly's left shoulder as the artist sits in khakis and a red and white pinstripe shirt at a black tabletop. his aged hands move toward stacks and rows of polaroid photos arranged on the table. closest to the edge are three closeup details of a classical sculpture of a male head. two rows of polaroids depict variations of light and dark shadows and lines, perhaps details from some painting or other. via cy twombly dot org
“Twombly reviewing his photographs at Schirmer/Mosel’s office”, Munich, 2010
Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, photo by Nicola Del Roscio via cytwombly.org

Spanish artist/art historian Carlos Peris wrote a dissertation, and a book, on Cy Twombly’s use of photographs as a core part of his creative process. Here is a quote from a conversation he had with poet Dean Rader at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio in the summer of 2024:

[…] there are some photographs from the archive that show Twombly with all the Polaroids arranged on a table. So he used to play games like memory games with them and stacking them and reorganizing them, like for more focused to less focused on, from more specific content to a more abstract one. And all this kind of games played with this kind of card game or tarot card or something like that, so this kind of trying to recall or to go back, it’s a kind of souvenir. Of course. Yeah. These photographs, what they did was to take these specific moments, so he could come back to them and think again about them and feel them again. And I think that happens all the time with his paintings. As you said before, you feel when Twombly is making that scribble, making that gesture of that paint or over the materials having there. So that motion, I think with photographs he was trying to reconnect with that moment, with that state of mind, with that specific moment.

Photos of such a moment, when Twombly went to his publisher Lothar Schirmer’s office to make color photocopy enlargements of his Polaroids in 2010, are now on the Cy Twombly Foundation website. This was also recounted by Schirmer in the 2018 documentary, Cy Dear.

The Foundation has been adding such content to their website, explained Foundation managing director Eleonora Di Erasmo in an interview last September.

That includes two additional documentary shorts by Andrea Bettinetti, the director of Cy Dear. One is about a 2023 exhibition, Cy Twombly, A Journey to Morocco, 1952-53, and the other is a making of video of Un/Veiled, an exhibition and events program staged at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio in Rome in 2022 and 2024. The whole thing is under the umbrella of In Perspective, which focuses on other artists, poets, musicians, etc., who have been influenced or inspired by Twombly’s work.

The conversation between Peris and Rader, whose focus is on the relationship between seeing and reading, image and text, went up a couple of weeks ago. Peris’s book, meanwhile, From State of Mind to the Tangible: The Photograpic Cosmos of Cy Twombly, has been around since 2022. I will probably write more about it when it arrives.

[after the book arrived update: I will not. It’s nice, but Peris’s text is more poetic than revelatory. The important idea that Twombly used photos as tools for revisiting details or atmospheres remains to be expanded upon. Also, they reproduce Twombly’s Polaroids at like 80% scale, when it would have been just as easy and more impactful to print them full-scale.]

There are apparently more than 5,000 Polaroids in the Archive. Did Twombly take all of them? Did he point and Del Roscio shoot? Is one question that occurs to me about Twombly’s process. But more interesting rn is the trajectory of a moment: the making of a mark, the making of an instant photo print of it, the sorting and accumulation of photos, and the revisiting and re-experiencing of moments.

It makes me think of three inapposite things at once: Andy Warhol making Polaroids and turning some of them into paintings. Willem de Kooning painting atop projections of details and gestures from earlier paintings. And Cady Noland making Polaroids of “non-existent” works. In the painters’ cases, the artist uses a record of a moment, whether an image or a mark, to fix it in paint. Instantaneity is not just a tool, but a subject. But Warhol only did that with a tiny fraction of the Polaroids he took. The rest of those moments, Like Noland’s sculptures, are long gone.

“Save money at Gagosian!” said no one ever, until now [gagosianshop]
Previously, related: Makin’ Copies: Cy Twombly’s Photos
[Polaroids of] Non-Existent Cady Nolands
Warhol’s ‘Homage to Marcel Duchamp’?
Willem de Kooning meant to not do that

Qu’est ce que c’est Cy Twombly Sketches?

a sketch by cy twombly on a sheet of perforated notebook paper has three landscape oriented boxes filled with marks, notes, preparatory sketches for working out a composition that involves mount olympus. not sure how he used these, but they were at his friend willie's paris apartment and sold by artcurial in 2022
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1961, pen on note paper, 9 x 6 1/4 in., sold and then deleted from Artcurial

Maybe you’re different, but I confess, I never imagined Cy Twombly making sketches. Like his marks, or his line, which Barthes described as “without goal, without model, without telos,” his compositions always feel like they just happened, products of the moment of their execution.

this framed 1960 work by cy twombly called study for school of athens  has some cloud like forms above, and a cluster of bar charts vertical elements, and some roughly drawn texts or mountains or something on the bottom. in various later works, those volcano like mountains stood in for penises, but that'd be a lot of penises, even for twombly. via hauser & wirth
Cy Twombly, Study for School of Athens (R0me), 1960, photo John Etter via Hauser & Wirth

He called some works studies, of course, but those always seemed like iterations, or versions, which were things he made a lot of. Hauser & Wirth brought one to Basel a few years back, and it very much feels like a version.

He also worked in series, groups, and it’s impossible not to imagine he mapped those out ahead of time, or at least planned them in some way.

a notebook sheet drawn by cy twombly shows one landscape composition in a rectangle, with indecipherable marks and text in it, and then a full-scale drawing of mount olympus surrounded by clouds and such, more representational than you'd expect for twombly. sold by artcurial
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1961, pen on note paper, 9 x 6 1/4 in., sold and then deleted from Artcurial

But here are five what look like preparatory sketches on two sheets of little notebook paper. They are from 1961 and belonged to Robert William Burke, a dealer in Paris whose books from Twombly were inscribed to “Willie.” On the back of these sheets, though, Twombly dedicated them to “My K… 2” and “My K… 3,” and honestly, “Who is K?” is a less urgent question right now than, “So that means there’s also a 1?”

Actually, the real question is what these actually are. I don’t have Twombly’s complete oeuvre handy to see if these relate to some specific c. 1960-63 works, but I can’t find any that map to the narrative. And to the map. There is geography and place—landscape—in these sketches, with Mount Olympus towering over all. The last one looks like Mordor. It’s the one Burke apparently kept in the foyer.

a snapshot of a chic cluttered interior of paris art dealer robert william burke's apartment. art books stacked on antique tables and chairs are pedestals for little artworks. shopping bags by lichtenstein and warhol are framed on the wall between or below two black charlotte perriand sconces, and one of burke's twombly sketches sits on top of a stack of books in a gilt frame. via artcurial, though i think it actually came from barnaby's or someplace, because artcurial started deleting its burke and/or twombly-related content.
Robert William Burke installation view, via Artcurial

There is also time, sequence: that top one literally goes left to right, start to end, with battles and places in between.

That Twombly planned, or worked out, or imagined, such traditional compositional structures for his paintings feels almost as anachronistic and radical as his antique, classical, and poetic references. Even if they get buried by his marks and signs, or even if they just remain in his head, or his eye.

35 Days Wait at 980 Madison

a portfolio with a reproduction of a cy twombly work on paper mounted on a board, the work is the phrase, V day wait at Jiayuguan written with a loaded ink brush, via reed sims
Cy Twombly, V Day(s) Wait at Jianyuguan, 1980, one of only two images of one of only two copies of this artist book documented online, one at the Menil, and the one from whence I ganked this image, a 2023
catalogue by the London rare book dealer Reed Sims

In the fall of 1979 Cy Twombly traveled through the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, which seems unexpected, though probably not as unexpected as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December. The suite of works on paper inspired, we’re told, by this trip, Five Days Wait at Jianyuguan, was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1980. Twombly also published a little artist book of the same name, a portfolio of sixteen mounted reproductions, in an edition of 50.

Jianyuguan, or Jianyu Pass, is a fortress at the western end of the Great Wall, , and the Silk Road’s historic gateway to China. For Chinese people, meanwhile, Jianyuguan evokes exile, where the desert awaits those expelled through the “gate to hell.”

Nothing in Twombly’s chronology or the texts for the Biennale works make mention of the artist going into China, and I cannot imagine a less plausible route into China for an American artist in 1979 than traveling overland from Khazakhstan, across the Gobi Desert, to Jianyuguan. The westbound route is even less plausible, and not just because what lay on the other side, Xinjiang province, was now a part of China.

It’s safe to assume, then, that Twombly was not the one doing the waiting. So this title, and perhaps all the works, reference a literary source, perhaps an adventurer’s travelogue from a bygone era. The titles of the various works in the portfolio do sound like captions: “Uygur taking tea on arrival”; “Harem”; “Leaving the land of men”; “Preparing for departure.” So maybe Twombly was referencing a set of images or illustrations.

And speaking of preparing for departure: the Jianyuguan works will be reunited for the first time since Venice, and the artist’s book will be reissued in facsimile (of a facsimile), for an exhibition next month at Gagosian’s 980 Madison gallery. It seems likely that this will be the last exhibition in this soon-to-be-bygone space, as the building will become the headquarters of the Bloomberg Foundation.

[day after update: Claudio traced the Reed Sims example to the Paris estate auction of dealer and friend of Cy Robert William “Willie” Burke, where it sold for EUR1529. Nice return on a four-month investment.]

January 24, 2025 Update: .the exhibition is open. The facsimile is released—in an edition of 500—as is a catalogue/folio. And an account by Nicola Del Roscio of the Russia/Afghanistan leg of the trip with the artist and ten unnamed Sicilians, presented at a 2012 Twombly symposium at the University of Cologne, and published in 2014 in the proceedings, Cy Twombly: Image, Text, Paratext, is online. It sounds precarious in the extreme. Del Roscio mentions several sculptures Twombly made in response to the Afghan trip, after the Russian invasion. But there is no mention of Jianguyuan.

poster for a january 2025 cy twombly exhibition at gagosian gallery, 980 madison avenue, nyc, with text about the show at the bottom, is dominated by a 1986 painting, paesaggio, vertically oriented, and green, in which a dark greenish zone, ominous, or sumptuous or both, stretches from the upper left in a curve toward the lower right, suggesting a dark mound or the top of a large tree. the upper and right section of the painting is lighter greens and whites, some brushmarks, some thinner poured sections, part of twombly's exploration of various levels of liquidity in paint. barely legible in the darkness are a couple of lines of hand drawn text in thin orange. via gagosian shop

More interesting, perhaps, actually extraordinary, is Thierry Greub’s project to index and map out all of Twombly’s inscribed poetic and literary references throughout his career, tracking his volume, sources, and shifts therein. One work cited as evidence of Twombly’s engagement in the 1980s with Arab poets is the flagship work for this Gagosian show, a 1986 acrylic on wood titled Paesaggio, which contains a quote from the 10th century poet al Ma’arri.

[February 2025 UPDATE: Five Day Wait has arrived, it is beautiful, bound and cased, but very slight, a slim volume of visual verse, with a tipped in plate per page, and the works list, and the colophon, and that’s it.]

Cy Twombly opens 23 January 2025 at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue [gagosian]