Tag: cy twombly

Cy Twombly Not Writing

a brushy mottled dark green background of an 8 by 12 foot painting has several washed white loops like cursive ls or calligraphy, each marked by long thin vertical drips of the watery paint. note 1 by cy twombly at sfmoma
Cy Twombly, Note I, 2005-07, acrylic on three wood panels in artist frame, 98 x 146 in., photo by Ian Reeves, collection SFMOMA

Thierry Greub’s research on the inscriptions in Cy Twombly’s work fills multiple volumes. Dean Rader wrote an entire book of poems from experiencing Twombly’s work. Reading Greub’s essay on Rader’s book and being caught in the flow of Twombly’s writing, I found myself suddenly stuck on the marks on this painting, Note I from III Notes from Salalah (2005-07).

They look like letters—Greub calls them, “lasso-shaped ‘ls’ and ‘es’ of Twombly’s writing-evoking traces of painting.” When the Art Institute showed the series in 2009, James Rondeau made reference to the “pseudo-writing” of the blackboard paintings, and to how the loops and apostrophe-like strokes interpreted “the calligraphic nature of printed Arabic.”

Honestly, I’m fine either/or/and/also, but I am just stymied by how they were made. The strokes on the right seem to start from the right, but each loop/stroke seems to start from the left. And the strokes on the left seem to start from the left. The point is, I think the strokes and drips tell this entire story of their making, yet they are not written. They look like letters or calligraphy, but they’re not made by writing.

cy twombly's loopy dgaf handwritten poster for his show, 3 notes from salalah at larry gagosian galley [heh] via crispi 16 dec 15, feb 16, all in fat blue india ink brush, and then roma written in like ballpoint pen in the bottom right corner, in case you didn't know where via crispi was, loser. this poster from 2008 is now for sale at the gagosian shop for 1250 us dollars
vs. Cy Twombly writing: Three Notes from Salalah exhibition poster from Gagosian Rome, 2008, via Gagosian Shop

The Art Institute goes on, “Although ostensibly based on writing, the paintings are also specifically indebted to place,” and then heads straight to the lush, green, tropical landscape of Salalah in Oman. Meanwhile, the only place I can picture is Twombly’s tiny storefront studio in downtown Lexington, Virginia where the series was painted. Because each Note is three wood panels, each 8×4 feet, like sheets of plywood, joined together, into a massive wall. Did he join them first? Or join two and add one later? Could the studio even fit all three Notes at once? Twombly made these when he was 80. The mind may reel, but it’s nothing compared to Twombly’s arm.

“What burns through existence to endlessness?” Dean Rader’s Meditations on Cy Twombly [ronslate]

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.]

Twombly’s Warhol Electric Chair

a warhol painting of an electric chair is black silkscreen ink on ultramarine blue ground, with a lot of black. sold by the twombly foundation in 2014
Andy Warhol, Little Electric Chair, 1964-65, oil and silkscreen on linen, 22 x 28 in., acquired by Cy Twombly and sold by his Foundation in 2014

The electric chair paintings are some of Warhol’s absolute best, but the little blue electric chair owned by Cy Twombly is a standout. The Christie’s lot description for the Twombly Foundation’s unloading of the painting extols this specific painting’s heavily inked contrast:

Housed for many years in the private collection of the artist Cy Twombly, it was this divergence between shadow and light that attracted the artist to this particular painting—an admiration bolstered by his understanding of chiaroscuro gained from his detailed study of Italian Renaissance painting undertaken during his time in his adopted homeland.

According to Christie’s Lisa Paulson’s youtube feature, Twombly & Warhol traded works “in the mid-60s,” through Leo Castelli, who also was Italian, with an admiration for settling his artists’ accounts in kind.

[a week later update]

A black and white Ugo Mulas photo from 1969/70 of the biggest Chamberlain foam sculpture ever, on a pedestal in between two marble framed doorways, in the Franchetti-Twombly’s palazzo in Rome, with a tiny picasso drawing of a woman's head on the floor to the left, and through the other door, a warhol tunafish disaster painting of a grid of poisoned tunafish cans, and a breuer wassily armchair as published in Cy Twombly Homes & Studios

I totally forgot that there was a huge Warhol Tunafish Disaster painting in the background of Ugo Mulas’s photo of a massive John Chamberlain foam sculpture at the Franchetti-Twombly palazzo. I feel like a more systematic look is called for.

Away From A Slant Step Theory of Postwar Sculpture

a child-sized plywood chair with a slanted seat, and a back, seat, and front lined in dark speckled linoleum, that was originally created for lifting your feet up while sitting on a toilet to improve your shitting, became an object of fetishized mystery among several generations of male post-minimalist and conceptual artists after it was acquired at a thrift store, is here depicted in black and white on the cover of a catalogue for the third exhibition it inspired, in 1983.

It’s been told and retold enough that even if you’ve somehow never heard it or seen its inspiration, it’s clear that several generations of artists ascribe to the Slant Step Theory of post-minimalist and conceptual sculpture: In 1965 William T. Wiley bought a plywood & linoleum stool with a steeply slanted seat at a Bay Area thrift shop. Installed in the studio of his student at UC Davis, Bruce Nauman, the Slant Step’s nonfunctional mystery and alluring form made it an aesthetic fetish object. It inspired at least two shows in the 1960s and several more since. It got passed around, stolen and rescued, surviving as an intentionally absurd teaching prompt until it entered the collection of UC Davis’s museum.

As far as I can tell, the first time it was publicly recognized as a stool for helping you squat on the toilet and take a better shit was only in 2014, well into the Squatty Potty era. Even so, it’s not clear that later shows have addressed this fundamental reinterpretation of an enigmatic totem as a highly specific, utilitarian, biological tool.

It reminds me of the novel-for-some-mundane-for-others theory of paleolithic tally sticks as lunar or menstrual calendars. And of Ursula K. Leguin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, where human experience can be understood through narratives other than violence and conflict, and motives other than competition, killing, or subjugation. The Slant Step Theory may be similarly narrow and incomplete. It’s not a mystery; it’s just you.

a bruce nauman sculpture in dark grey green resin and fiberglass cast from a plywood chair-shaped box with an angled seat and back, it belonged to cy twombly, then his foundation sold it off in 2014
Bruce Nauman, Device to Hold a Box at a Slight Angle, 1966, fiberglass and polyester resin, 29 5/8 x 23 1/2 x 30 in., acquired by Cy Twombly in 1969, and sold by the Foundation in 2014

Nauman made Device to hold a box at a slight angle in 1966, with the Slant Step in his studio. It had already been shown twice before Philip Johnson’s partner David Whitney curated it into Nauman’s first show at Castelli in 1968. It went from there to documenta 4, and when it came back, Cy Twombly bought it, in 1969.

The Cy Twombly Foundation sold it in 2014. What happened to it in those 45 years? I don’t know of any photo of Twombly interiors in which Nauman’s Device appears. Did Twombly study it? Contemplate it? Respond to it? Store it away? If a revision of the Slant Step History of contemporary sculpture is in order, who knows what might be learned by tracing Twombly’s connections to and from this Nauman he kept for so long?

Cy Twombly Watermark

At one point in my life I decided instead of just normal engraved stationery, I wanted a watermark. So I went to Mrs John L. Strong, and sat down with Mrs Lewis. Mrs John L. Strong has its own watermark, so surely they would know a paper mill that could accommodate my plan, I suggested. Mrs Lewis explained very tactfully, in as positive and genteel a way as possible, that no. Mrs Strong would certainly be able to help design a beautiful paper that evoked the subtlety of a watermark. I was glad to hear it, that we would be able to produce a paper with a watermark.

She said, “What part of ‘no’ did you not understand?” only it was the Vanderbilts’ stationer on Madison, so it came out like, “It’s interesting when two people have a conversation about the same thing, how they understand it differently.”

a black cloth covered clamshell box lies open on a featureless table. on the left side are loose sheets of handmade paper, face down. on the right, are more loose sheets of handmade paper, face up, revealing one sheet of on kawara's code drawing, except it's a print, a text rewritten in cipher where two differently colored hashmarks replace each letter of the alphabet. published by yvon lambert in 1996
Zooming in, zooming in, where is the Twombly watermark on these CODES prints at Yvon Lambert

The point is, yesterday I read that in 1996, not so far from the time I was pursuing my watermark, Yvon Lambert published On Kawara’s CODES in an edition of 150 “on 180gr/m2 pure rag paper made especially for the book by the Moulin de Fleurac* and watermarked by Cy Twombly.” And I realized I’d been doing it wrong. But to know how wrong, I needed to figure out wtf is going on with why Cy Twombly is making and watermark paper for On Kawara.

He did not, and it was not. The listing for CODES in the Bibliothèques de Paris clarifies: “Chaque feuille porte la signature d’Yvon Lambert en filigrane (réalisé par Cy Twombly)” So the watermark is Lambert’s, as written by Twombly.

And Twombly also made his bookplate. So far I can find images of neither. But we do have two versions, four years apart, of Twombly’s ex libris for Dr. Reiner Speck, courtesy of Dr. Speck’s show of Twomblyphemera at Maison d’Art.

a detail of a page in the maison d'art catalogue for the 2025 show, cy twombly reiner speck: fragments of an adoration, where two versions of the bookplate twombly designed for speck are displayed side by side. a draft from 1974, and the real deal, from 1978, which, we read, was published as an edition of 1000. both bookplates say ex libris dr speck, etc., in twombly's messiest handwriting
Cy Twombly Ex Libris draft, 1974, and Ex Libris, 1978, ed. 1000? via Maison d’Art’s catalogue for Fragments of an Adoration

Do I need to check the prints CR to get a full bookplate inventory? Is a watermark a print, a drawing, or a sculpture?

*Lambert’s choice of mill for his small batch watermark paper is instructive. He did not ask Arches. Though Moulin de Fleurac sounds prized, specific, and ancient, it only started in the 1970s.

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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