Cy Twombly
Ferragosto III, Rom, 1961
Öl, Wachskreide, Bleistift auf Leinwand / Oil, wax crayon, lead pencil on canvas
165 x 200,5 cm
Daros Collection, Schweiz
Foto: Daros Collection, Schweiz
© Cy Twombly
Cy Twombly
Hero and Leandro, (To Christopher Marlowe), Rom, 1985
Wandfarbe auf Ölbasis, Öl auf Leinwand / Oil based wall paint, oil on canvas
202 x 254 cm
Privatsammlung
Foto: Archiv Nicola del Roscio, Rom / Jochen Littkemann
© Cy Twombly
Cy Twombly
Untitled, Rom, 1970
Wandfarbe auf Ölbasis, Wachskreide auf Leinwand / Oil based wall paint, wax crayon on canvas
155,5 x 190 cm
Sammlung Nicola del Roscio
Foto: Archiv Nicola del Roscio, Rom/ Jochen Littkemann
© Cy Twombly
Cy Twombly – Sensations of the Moment
4.6. – 11.10.2009
MUMOK Ausstellungsansicht / exhibition view
Foto: MUMOK, Lisa Rastl
© MUMOK
Cy Twombly – Sensations of the Moment – Museum Moderner Kunst, Austria
For the first time in Austria, MUMOK will present a retrospective of Cy Twombly’s work.
June 4 — October 11, 2009
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Twombly, one of the most important artists of hisgeneration (b.1928), has been based in Italy since the late 1950s. Hiswork diverged from the abstract expressionist tradition dominated bysuch figures as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.Twombly first gained recognition with large format, monumentalpaintings with gestural and often textual inscriptions. His works havebeen influenced by poetry and classical mythology but also byMediterranean landscapes and lighting. The exhibition “weavestogether” approximately 200 works from every period, bringing hismuch lesser known photographic work together for the first timewith his paintings, sculpture and drawings.
Since his studies in the 1950s — Twombly studied at the same time asRobert Rauschenberg at the legendary Black Mountain College — his workhas developed concurrently in many different media: Painting, Sculpture,Photography and drawing have corresponded with each other in aprocess of continual transference. Twombly uses drawing in his paintings,oils in his drawings, paint on his sculptures and makes references to hispictures and objects in his photographic work. The retrospective at theMUMOK shows a collection of all of the different media heightening anawareness of their simultaneity and subtle interconnectedness. Theexhibition has been organized into relatively loosely defined categoriessuch as the establishment of white, the use of writing, the significance ofthe principles of collage and aesthetic means of expression, as well as themovement on the canvas of impasto paint.
Hardly any other artist in the 20th century went as far to approach the“zero point” of modern art as Cy Twombly did. Children’s handwritingexercises, thoughtless scribbling and graffiti constituted contemporarypoints of departure for actualizing the experience of mythical stories,drawing a connection to the major themes of Mediterranean culture,with works that alternate between sensibility and rawness, fine filigreeprecision and expressivity. The color white, that has remainedconstitutive both for Twombly’s paintings and his sculptures, representsthe matrix of this process of transformation. It registers the multipletraces of the work process, opening up a poetic space of possibilty thatTwombly suggestively fills with inscriptions, names and lines from poemsby poets such as Rainer Maria Rilke or Sappho.
Up to now, few people have been aware of the fact that Cy Twombly hasworked with photography since the early 1950s. His rich photographicwork will be shown together with his other works for the first time at theexhibition in Vienna. Stylistic devices such as the intentional use of theeffects of over exposure or blurry focusing can in many ways be seen inconnection with his use of white or the way he lets colors and forms flowdown the surface of the painting. But the photographs also offer insightinto the environment surrounding his creative process — evoking theimages of Constantin Brancusi’s studio — whether in his adopted countryof Italy, in Rome, in Bassano di Teverina, or the coastal village Gaeta, or,more recently, in the city of his birth Lexington, Virginia.
A catalogue with numerous illustrations will accompany the exhibitionwith essays by Edelbert Köb, Achim Hochdörfer, Johanna Burton, PeterGeimer and Gregor Stemmrich, and with artistic interventions by JeffWall, Franz West and a photographic homage by Tacita Dean.
Biography
Cy Twombly was born April 25, 1928 in Lexington, Virginia. He began hisstudies in 1947 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston andthen in 1945/50 at Washington and Lee University in Lexington. In 1950,he went to New York and continued his studies at the Art StudentsLeague. It was here that he got to know Robert Rauschenberg and JasperJohns. One year later, he transferred to Black Mountain College in NorthCarolina where he studied with Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline.Together with Rauschenberg, he traveled through South America, NorthAfrica, Spain and Italy in 1952.
Twombly taught at the Southern Seminary and Junior College in BuenaVista, Virginia in 1955/56, and then returned again to Rome in 1957. Twoyears later, he finally moved to Italy. In 1968, the Milwaukee Art Centerpresented his first retrospective in the United States, followed by largeinternational exhibitions: The retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zürich(1987) traveled to Madrid, London and Paris. While the exhibition at theMuseum of Modern Art (1994) continued on to Houston, Los Angeles andBerlin, followed by a large retrospective at the Pinakothek der Moderne inMunich (2006). In 1995, the Cy Twombly Gallery run by the Menil Familywas opened in Houston. The most recent retrospective began at the TateModern in London (2008) and went from there to Bilbao and Rome.
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