Three Photographs Presented In Chronological Order
Tag: cy twombly
What Are These Statues In Cy Twombly’s Library
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.]
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…]
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.
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.
Continue reading “Gagosian’s First Show At 980 Madison Was Not Cy Twombly”Twombly Manifesto Esuarito
Well, the poster for the last Twombly show in Gagosian’s 980 Madison space sold out by lunchtime of the first day, if you’re wondering how the $20 Twombly fandom’s doing.
Cy Twombly, 23 January – 22 March 2025 [gagosian]
Previously, related: 35 Days Wait at 980 Madison
Good In Bed, Better Against A Wall
What to do with this story from Sally Mann’s memoir?
Continue reading “Good In Bed, Better Against A Wall”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:
Cy Twombly Homes & Picassos
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.]
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?
Continue reading “Cy Twombly Homes & Picassos”Cy Twombly Relive The Moment
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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]
Jenny Saville On Twombly Looking And Working
Via Wayne Bremser comes a shoutout to Cy Twombly’s Duchamp references, but not the ones I’d thought, and not where I’d expected it to come from.
In February 2024 Jenny Saville spoke on Twombly’s work and her connection to him at The Menil Collection. After acclimating to her regularly not mentioning the gallery she shared with Twombly, it turned out to be a fascinating talk, full of insights on painterly technique and reference and inspiration. Which, hold that thought.
At the moment cued above, though, Saville describes Twombly’s “banging together” of avant-garde modernism and the ancient world through “the Duchampian act of writing ‘APOLLO’ on a piece of paper or a canvas.” I’ll need to sit with it a minute, but I guess if anything can be a readymade, then so can the 4,000 years [sic] of human association with that word.
Saville’s illustrated discussion of Twombly is full of painterly details found in artists from Leonardo to Cézanne, and it feels rare to hear and see these references. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve felt Twombly’s painting and mark-making has been considered alone, if not sui generis, or in the context of his poetic sources, and not so much in relation to art of the world/past. Not for Saville, though.
One artist she comes back to more than any other is Turner, and the juxtapositions of Turner’s and Twombly’s atmospheric and spatial and abstract pursuits are fascinating.
Most of the talk is a close look/walkalong of the Menil’s Twombly centerpiece, Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor). But she ends with an expansive read of a blackboard painting [Untitled, 1971] filled with figure eights descending from left to right, and she didn’t mention Duchamp. And it still made sense.
Marion Barthelme Lecture: Jenny Saville on Cy Twombly [youtube, s/o @waynebremser]
Previously: Send More Twombly Duchamp Nudes
Send Twombly Duchamp Nudes
When it was published in the 1999 catalogue of his own collection, Cy Twombly’s publisher Lothar Schirmer listed the title of this amazing 1968 drawing, which he’d acquired directly from the artist in 1968, as Study after Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase.
When Schirmer (RIP) sold it yesterday at Sotheby’s, however, it was listed only as Untitled. And whoever wrote the lot essay for the Twombly wanted to connect it to Duchamp’s painting so bad, they began the essay with a picture of it.
And they said, “Untitled also pays homage to art historical forerunners and their attempt to capture movement in space and time,” without naming Duchamp. And then they quoted Suzanne Delehanty,
Like shadows of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, figure eights, frequent personages in Twombly’s cosmos of signs, borrowed perhaps from the mathematical symbol for infinity, multiply, recede and climb through the surface of a 1968 oil and crayon on paper to express, as does the 1912 nude, an abstraction of motion in space-time.
trying to call Twombly’s symbols and signs personages without surrendering their status as abstract marks. [Delehanty’s text is cited as coming from the collected writings on Twombly edited by Nicola Del Roscio in 2002, which elides its origin as a catalogue text for Twombly’s 1975 show at the ICA in Philadelphia, the city of Duchampian love.]
Discussing this and a couple of other related works on paper in his catalogue for Twombly’s 1994 MoMA retrospective catalogue, Kirk Varnedoe mentioned Duchamp exactly once, before going on at length about the Futurists:
That language of flow and fracture draws directly on the early modern fascination with the “cinematic” decomposition of forms in motion, in Duchamp (Nude Descending a Staircase,1912) and most notably among Italian Futurist artists, particularly Giacomo Balla.
It feels like a confluence of aversions: to figuration, to referencing other artists’ work, or to referencing Duchamp’s works specifically, but it feels acute in the detitling of this particular drawing. Looking at Duchamp’s painting had an impact on Twombly’s most significant body of work, which he apparently referenced many times. And Twombly went to great lengths to make sure his work was permanently installed down the hall from Duchamp’s. I, for one, would love to see something more on this connection than a passing namecheck.
Fresson Twombly Tulips
Remember how some of Cy Twombly’s photos were made by hand by a secretive French family who’s perfected some ludicrously complicated and luxurious wet-printing process, and the others were made by enlarging Polaroids on a color copier?
Yeah, these tulips are some of the former. Fresson Prints. Ask for them by name.
22 Nov 2024, Lot 690: Cy Twombly, Tulips (iii), 1993, est. $50-70k [christies]
Previously, related: Makin’ Copies: Cy Twombly Photos
Achaeans In Battle In Palazzo
Claudio Santambrogio just pointed me to some great, moody photos Annabelle d’Huart made of Cy Twombly and his Roman studio in 1978. If only she had Horst’s agent, we would have all been swooning over these for decades, too.
Anyway among the images posted by @paintedout in 2017, is a pair of paintings from Twombly’s 10-panel epic cycle, Fifty Days at Iliam, which is in the Philadelphia Museum. Heroes of the Achaeans [left] and Achaeans in Battle, are at the Nos. 2 and 4 the cycle, and they both look pretty done.
In 2018, the Museum and Yale University Press published a monograph on Fifty Days, in which curator Carlos Basualdo interviewed d’Huart about her visit to Twombly’s studio. The Museum acquired five of d’Huart’s prints, including the image above.
This is the same book that classics scholar Richard Fletcher talked to Tyler Green about on an episode of MAN Podcast, which prompted the Twombly Foundation to send a cease & desist demanding Green delete images of the Fifty Days paintings they discussed from his website, which prompted me to make an artist book out of a print of the screencap of the podcast site. And which actually soured me on buying the book, so not being more familiar with d’Huart’s photos sooner is the result. I have now ordered it; let the healing begin, I guess.
[the healing update: I got the book; it is gorgeous. d’Huart was literally like, I decided to photograph Minimalists so I flew to New York I called the director of MoMA from JFK he said I can’t meet you today but come tomorrow for lunch then Leo Castelli gave me a desk in his office and introduced me to everyone and Cy and then I was staying with Balthus and his kids in Italy and said let’s have a dinner for Cy and that’s how I made these photos he loved them. I am not exaggerating if anything I’m understating.]
Annabelle d’Huart Twombly studio photos in the PMA [philamuseum.org]
Makin’ Copies: Cy Twombly Photos
Cy Dear was a saddening revelation. The 2018 documentary by Andrea Bettinetti tells a story of Cy Twombly’s life, but its subject is actually Nicola Del Roscio, Twombly’s longtime partner who has spent his life enabling the artist’s work, and managing his legacy. In the process Del Roscio’s own sadness and grief seem to have gone untended, and now loom over the landscape he’s so fastidiously cultivated. I’ll need more time to process Cy Dear and the implications of Twombly’s life on his work and the people around him.
But one thing that finally makes some sense is Twombly’s photographs. Not how their copyrights have all been assigned to the Nicola Del Roscio Foundation. That always struck me as a natural gesture: the Polaroids Twombly made throughout his decades of days were left to the person he spent all those days with. What I could never figure out is what they were, and how he made them.
Continue reading “Makin’ Copies: Cy Twombly Photos”Fit To Print
I got to Josh Pazda Hiram Butler’s sales archive through an odd John Cage search, and I stayed for an unusual Cy Twombly find: a painting on newsprint—the Washington Post from April 5th, 2001, to be precise.
How did this? What is this? There are clear edges, plust some bleed; the acrylic shows no brushmarks, but does show the folds of the paper. It says framed by artist, but there’s also a bit of scorching right around the painted part, and the signature in the lower margin, like it was matted differently for a while?
Anyway, it turns out to be very similar to a work on, of all places, the Twombly Foundation’s own website, in the Prints section.
Described as a monotype, this work contains the same lozenge-shaped, leaf-like motif. It’s also on newsprint, and has borders very much like those kissed in place by the sun up top.
I think these are cardboard prints, where the image is carved into a sheet of cardboard with something rough, like a nail, and which are painted and pressed against a surface—in this case, straight up newspaper from the porch—to transfer the image.
Twombly made raw, scratchy monotypes right after getting back to New York in 1953, and in 1996, he revisited the cardboard engraving technique for an edition Twombly and Nicola Del Roscio printed for the Whitney Museum. Whether it was a pump-priming exercise, a diversion, a warm-up, or something else, this rough, disposable, DIY printing medium seems to have struck a chord with Twombly. At least it worked well enough to let these things out of the studio, conservators bedamned.
“Printed by Cy Twombly; printed by Nicola del Roscia”? [whitney.org]