THE FOCUS OF CY TWOMBLY

BY: Ramona Duoba

The late American painter and sculptor Cy Twombly had taken photographs since his days as a student at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He used photography to capture studies of his daily life. His images display an affinity with the Pictorialism of such figures as Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz in their emphasis on soft focus, fine detail, and deliberate composition.

In 2011, at MOMA’s retrospective of the artist’s work, his good friend photographer Sally Mann said Twombly, “brought to his work a certain vulnerability, an ambivalence about the fleeting nature and mutability of beauty itself, a vexed awareness of mortality.”

Now, ten years after Twombly’s death, the contemporary art gallery, Gagosian, has announced two exhibitions of the artist’s photographs on view in Paris and Rome. The exhibits will feature images made over a sixty-year period across locations in the United States, Italy, and the Caribbean locations that were central to the artist’s life and work.

Souvenirs of Time, at Gagosian Rome, showcases the photographs Twombly took throughout his career of his studios and interiors, and of his classical sculptures. “I love my sculptures, and I was lucky I had them for 50 years because no one would look at them, and I really liked having them around,” he once said. The photographs show his paintings and sculpture in varying phases of completion, offering insight into his working process.

In Paris, Gagosian’s exhibit highlights another aspect of Twombly’s photographic work— an ensemble of fruit and flower still lifes and landscapes. These shots are permeated with images of organic growth, depicting heirloom lemons cultivated in Gaeta, the petals of tulips and roses, and landscapes captured near his Lexington birthplace. His vision and memory and his joyful embrace of life embodied by these photographs extend to the pictures that Twombly took in 2011 of crosses and flowers in a cemetery on the Caribbean Island of Saint Barthélemy—his final series of photographs.

“The past is a springboard for me….Ancient things are new things. Everything lives in the moment; that’s the only time it can live, but its influence can go on forever.”—Cy Twombley

CY TWOMBLY: Souvenirs of Time on view October 30–November 13, 2021 

Via Francesco Crispi 16, Rome

Paris Photo 2021 on view November 11–14, 2021 

Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris