Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1972, Oil paint, wax crayon, and lead pencil on canvas, 79-5/8 x 102-1/2", The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection, Los Angeles.

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1967, oil and crayon on canvas, 58 x 70", collection of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Barry Lowen Collection.

Cy Twombly, Nini's Painting, 1971, Oil-based house paint, wax crayon, and lead pencil on canvas, 102-3/4 x 118-1/4", The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection, Los Angeles.

Cy Twombly, Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves (III), 2009, Acrylic on canvas, 105-5/16 x 83-5/8", The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection, Los Angeles.

Cy Twombly, Untitled (from Blooming, A Scattering of Blossoms & Other Things), 2007, acrylic on panels, 99 1/4 x 217 3/8", The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection, Los Angeles.

Cy Twombly, Yard Sale, 2009.

Cy Twombly, Foundry, Naples, o.J.

Cy Twombly, Landscape, Lexington, VA, 2007.

Cy Twombly, Painting Detail (Roses), 2009.

Cy Twombly, Tulips, 1985.

Museum Brandhorst
Theresienstrasse 35a
+49 (0) 89 23805-2286
Münich
Cy Twombly Photographs 1951-2010
April 6-July 10, 2011

Cy Twombly ist vor allem durch seine Gemälde und Zeichnungen international bekannt und berühmt geworden. Erst in den 80er Jahren trat er mit seinem bis dahin unbekannten plastischen Werk an die Öffentlichkeit. Zu Beginn der 90er Jahre folgte das photographische Oeuvre, zunächst durch Galerie-Ausstellungen und Buchpublikationen. Im Sommer 2009 führte dann die Retrospektive des Museums moderner Kunst in Wien alle Gattungen zusammen. Erkennbar wurden Parallelen in der medialen Entwicklung: Twombly zeichnet auf seine Leinwände, er verwendet Ölfarbe auf Papier, er bemalt die weißen Gipsskulpturen, und mit seinen Photos bezieht er sich auf sein bildnerisches Werk und auf seine Lebens- und Erfahrungswelt. Nach Twombly verkörpern sich in diesem Spektrum die verschiedenen Bewusstseinszustände (states of mind) seines Schaffens.

Im Museum Brandhorst werden nun erstmals in Deutschland über 100 seiner photographischen Bilder ausgestellt. Neben Blumenstillleben und Landschaften sind es vor allem Atelieraufnahmen, die zeigen, welches Licht und welche Atmosphäre der Künstler in diesem Medium bevorzugt. Auffällig ist die Unschärfe aller Aufnahmen, die nicht zufällig an die Piktorialisten des späten 19. Jahrhunderts erinnert. Der Verlust an motivischer Deutlichkeit wird allerdings aufgewogen durch den Gewinn an bildhafter Präsenz. Etliche Darstellungen sind darüber hinaus bewusst überbelichtet, so dass sich die stoffliche Integrität der Sujets auflöst. Gelegentlich verwendetes Blitzlicht überstrahlt die Objekte und bleicht sie aus. Die Vervielfältigung im Drypoint-Verfahren verleiht den Werken zusätzlich eine samtene, geradezu unfassliche Qualität.

Alle diese Momente, die der professionelle Blick als misslungen oder fehlerhaft einstufen würde, weichen die Konturen des Abgebildeten auf, verflüssigen Stoffe und Formen, lassen Licht und Schatten ineinander verschwimmen oder nehmen den Farben ihren Glanz und / oder steigern ihre Kraft. Eine sentimentale Stimmung oder gar der Eindruck von Kitsch stellen sich indessen nicht ein. Auffällig ist nämlich, dass den Arbeiten ein strenges Konzept zugrunde liegt. Es erscheint beinahe konstruktivistisch in den Stillleben und Atelieraufnahmen mit ihren vielen kunst- und kulturgeschichtlichen Referenzen oder lässt sich bei den Blumen und Bäumen als spielerische Adaption von Informel und Monochromie verstehen. Alles in allem gewinnt man den Eindruck, dass der Künstler im Medium der Photographie über das reflektiert, was sich auch in seinem malerischen Oeuvre manifestiert. Die so genannte Realität löst sich jeweils in eine Fülle von Aggregatzuständen auf: von den Zeichen bleibt das Gestische ihrer Gestaltung, von den Botschaften nur die vage Erinnerung, das Zeitgemäße ist von mythischen Momenten durchsetzt, alles Faktische ist einer permanenten Transformation unterworfen. In allen Medien — ob Malerei, Zeichnung, Skulptur oder Photographie — bietet Twombly dem Betrachter keine in sich kohärenten Botschaften, die sich formal, stilgeschichtlich oder ikonographisch bündig bestimmen und analytisch definieren ließen. Sein Oeuvre ist vielmehr durchgängig als Aufforderung zu begreifen, sich als Betrachter aus den flottierenden Phänomenen selbst ein Sinnliches und Sinnhaftes zu bilden. Dies läuft auf einen Prozess hinaus, der vieles umgreift, vieles tangiert, vieles offeriert aber kaum endgültigen Klassifizierungen und Festlegungen führt.

Wie sonst nirgendwo in Europa sind im Obergeschoss des Museums Brandhorst viele Gemälde, Skulpturen und Arbeiten auf Papier von Cy Twombly zu sehen. Aus konservatorischen Gründen lassen sich seine Photographien allerdings nicht in diesen Kontext integrieren, sondern werden in jenen Räumen des Untergeschosses präsentiert, die kein Tageslicht haben. Der Betrachter wird sich vielleicht mehrfach von oben nach untern und umgekehrt bewegen, um sich die motivischen Zusammenhänge und medialen Differenzen zu vergegenwärtigen. Und dabei wird sich ihm ein Oeuvre erschließen, das singulär ist und doch etliche verblüffende Bezüge zum Geschehen der zeitgenössischen Photographie aufweist. Hiroshi Sugimoto, Gerhard Richter, Elger Esser und andere wären in einem solchen Zusammenhang zu berücksichtigen.

Cy Twombly, Interior, Rome, 2003.

Cy Twombly, Painting Detail and 'By the Ionian Sea' Sculpture, 1992.

Cy Twombly, Lemon, o.J.

Cy Twombly Sensations of the Moment, MUMOK exhibition view, Foto: MUMOK, Lisa Rastl, © MUMOK.

Cy Twombly, By the Ionian Sea, Naples, 1988, Bronze, Collection Cy Twombly, Foto: Claudio Abate, Rom, © Cy Twombly.

Cy Twombly, Hero and Leandro, (To Christopher Marlowe), Rom, 1985, / 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, 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, Ferragosto III, Rom, 1961, Oil, wax crayon, lead pencil on canvas, 165 x 200,5 cm, Daros Collection, Schweiz, Foto: Daros Collection, Schweiz, © Cy Twombly.

Cy Twombly, Lemons, Gaeta, 2005, Color dry-print, Blatt / Sheet: 43,1 x 27,9 cm, Edition: 3/6, Collection Cy Twombly, Foto: Archiv Nicola del Roscio, Rom, © Cy Twombly.

Cy Twombly, Wilder Shores of Love, Bassano in Teverina, 1985, Oil based house paint, oil crayon, coloured pencil, lead pencil on wooden panel, 140 x 120 cm, Private Collection, © Cy Twombly, Walther Dräyer, Zürich.

MUMOK
Museum Moderner Kunst
Stiftung Ludwig Vienna
MuseumsQuartier
Museumsplatz 1
+ 43-1-525 00
Vienna
Cy Twombly
Sensations of the Moment
June 4-October 11, 2009

Cy Twombly, one of the most important artists of his generation (b.1928), has been based in Italy since the late 1950s. His work diverged from the abstract expressionist tradition dominated by such figures as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. Twombly first gained recognition with large format, monumental paintings with gestural and often textual inscriptions. His works have been influenced by poetry and classical mythology but also by Mediterranean landscapes and lighting. The exhibition “weaves together” approximately 200 works from every period, bringing his much lesser known photographic work together for the first time with his paintings, sculpture and drawings.

Since his studies in the 1950s — Twombly studied at the same time as Robert Rauschenberg at the legendary Black Mountain College — his work has developed concurrently in many different media: Painting, Sculpture, Photography and drawing have corresponded with each other in a process of continual transference. Twombly uses drawing in his paintings, oils in his drawings, paint on his sculptures and references his pictures and objects in his photographic work. The retrospective at MUMOK shows a collection of all the different media heightening awareness of their simultaneity and interconnectedness. The exhibition has been organized into relatively loosely defined categories such as the establishment of white, the use of writing, the significance of the principles of collage and aesthetic means of expression, as well as the movement 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 handwriting exercises, thoughtless scribbling and graffiti constituted contemporary points 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 filigree precision and expressivity. The color white, that has remained constitutive both for Twombly’s paintings and his sculptures, represents the matrix of this process of transformation. It registers the multiple traces of the work process, opening up a poetic space of possibilty that Twombly suggestively fills with inscriptions, names and lines from poems by poets such as Rainer Maria Rilke or Sappho.

Up to now, few people have been aware of the fact that Cy Twombly has worked with photography since the early 1950s. His rich photographic work will be shown together with his other works for the first time at the exhibition in Vienna. Stylistic devices such as the intentional use of the effects of over exposure or blurry focusing can in many ways be seen in connection with his use of white or the way he lets colors and forms flow down the surface of the painting. But the photographs also offer insight into the environment surrounding his creative process — evoking the images of Constantin Brancusi’s studio — whether in his adopted country of 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 exhibition with essays by Edelbert Köb, Achim Hochdörfer, Johanna Burton, Peter Geimer and Gregor Stemmrich, and with artistic interventions by Jeff Wall, Franz West and a photographic homage by Tacita Dean.

Cy Twombly was born April 25, 1928 in Lexington, Virginia. He began his studies in 1947 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and then in 1945/50 at Washington and Lee University in Lexington. In 1950, he went to New York and continued his studies at the Art Students League. It was here that he got to know Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. One year later, he transferred to Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he studied with Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline. Together with Rauschenberg, he traveled through South America, North Africa, Spain and Italy in 1952.

Twombly taught at the Southern Seminary and Junior College in Buena Vista, Virginia in 1955/56, and then returned again to Rome in 1957. Two years later, he finally moved to Italy. In 1968, the Milwaukee Art Center presented his first retrospective in the United States, followed by large international exhibitions: The retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zürich (1987) traveled to Madrid, London and Paris. While the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (1994) continued on to Houston, Los Angeles and Berlin, followed by a large retrospective at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2006). In 1995, the Cy Twombly Gallery run by the Menil Family was opened in Houston. The most recent retrospective began at the Tate Modern in London (2008) and went from there to Bilbao and Rome.

Cy Twombly, Alessandro Twombly, Via Monserrato, Rom, 1965, Color dry-print, Sheet: 43,1 x 27,9 cm, Edition: 3/5, Collection Cy Twombly, Foto: courtesy Schirmer / Mosel, © Cy Twombly.

Cy Twombly, Untitled, Rome, 1983, Bronze, painted with white oil-base paint, Edition: 2/5, 179 x 23 x 41 cm, Collection Cy Twombly, Foto: Kunsthaus Zürich, © Cy Twombly.

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 2008, 3-teilig, Acryl auf Leinwand, 275,8 x 144,3 cm, Privatsammlung, Schweiz, Foto: Privatsammlung, Schweiz, © Cy Twombly.

Cy Twombly Sensations of the Moment, MUMOK exhibition view, Foto: MUMOK, Lisa Rastl, © MUMOK.

Cy Twombly. Untitled, 2002. Dry print, 11 x 13-1/2", Collection of the artist, © Cy Twombly. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Cy Twombly. Untitled, 2007. Acrylic on wood, 99-3/16 x 217-5/16". Private Collection, © Cy Twombly. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Cy Twombly. Note II, 2005-2007. Acrylic on wood panel, 96 x 144". The Steven and Alexandra Cohen Collection, © Cy Twombly. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Cy Twombly. Note III, 2005-2007. Acrylic on wood panel, 96 x 144". Private Collection, © Cy Twombly. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Cy Twombly. Untitled no.3, 2004. Household paint on wooden panel in artistÕs frame, 99-1/4 x 72-7/8". The Collection of Barbara Bluhm-Kaul & Don Kaul, Chicago, Illinois USA, © Cy Twombly. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Cy Twombly. Untitled, 2001. Acrylic, wax crayon, pencil and collage, 48-3/4 x 35". Cy Twombly. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
312-443-3600
Chicago
Abbot Galleries
Modern Wing
Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works 2000-2007
May 16-September 13, 2009

Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works 2000–2007 celebrates the artist’s abiding concern with the natural world, specifically landscape, seascape, and flora. The exhibition is devoted to a full range of media, including bold and monumental multipanel paintings, wood and plaster sculptures, dry print photographs, and works on paper. Many of the more than 30 works in this exhibition have never before been seen in an American museum.

“There could not be a more fitting artist to showcase for the opening of the Modern Wing,” says James Rondeau, curator of the exhibition and Frances and Thomas Dittmer Chair of the Department of Contemporary Art. “Cy Twombly’s decades of pushing the limits of gesture — through inscriptions and marks, the inclusion of language, and bold, immediate color — bring us from the expressionism of mid-century to its present-day manifestation. The evolution of his style mirrors the evolution of painting itself over the past fifty years. And the Modern Wing is the perfect setting for his works based in and about nature. Visibility, light, and the consciousness of one’s surroundings are both the lessons of Twombly’s mature work and the experience we hope to create in the Modern Wing galleries.”

Cy Twombly: The Natural Worldinvestigates the 82-year-old artist’s current production, the result of a period of remarkable resurgence. The 31 works in the exhibition include works on paper, sculptures, photographs, and monumental paintings, all rooted in evocations and expressions of landscape, flora, and materiality. While Twombly’s work over the course of his career has always been rooted in place — his move to Rome, for example, in the late 1950s mirrored his immersion with classical referents and a profound sense of history—rarely has landscape and its components been expressed with such viscerality. In Cy Twombly: The Natural World the artist offers bold, energetic images of peonies, the turquoise sea of the Caribbean, the sensations of dirt and earth, the romantic (and unseen by the artist) lushness of Yemen, all rendered with an immediacy and palpable pleasure in materiality.

The exhibition begins with Twombly’s works on paper, sculptures, and photographs. While Twombly’s sculptures refer, in their white-washed and distressed surfaces, to the classical past, their materials — boxes, fabric, plaster, and cloth — are transformed from the quotidian and inorganic (paint-soaked rags) to the decayed and organic (wilted flowers). The paintings that surround them, from 2001, are rich and gestural, filled with explosions of color and based in sensation rather than inscription. Included here are also seven rarely exhibited photographs by Twombly himself of his sculpture Untitled (Lexington), featured in the opening gallery.

The second section of the exhibition juxtaposes the cool seascapes from A Gathering of Time (2003) with the rough, nearly excremental Winter Pictures. The seascapes are gentle, ethereal fields of light green punctuated by bursts of white, suggesting the reflective shimmering of the sun. In counterpoint to the seascapes, the exhibition offers the dripping, running browns and grays of the Winter Pictures, resonant of mud, dirt, and earth as well as the glorious mess of life, waste, and decay.

The final galleries of The Natural World are filled with Twombly’s most recent works in the exhibition — six monumental paintings. The Peony Blossom Paintings (2007) are three 18-foot-long, multipanel, horizontal paintings — two of explosive blood red blossoms on bright yellow grounds and one of white blossoms dripping through a nearly celadon ground. All of these works are inscribed with translations of Japanese haiku on peonies, a rare turn in Twombly’s career from the classical past of the West to the evocative meditations of the East that is also echoed in the paintings’ format, which follows the six-panel format of traditional Japanese folding screens. The exhibition concludes with a series called III Notes From Salalah, (2005-07) which is a port city in Yemen of great fantasy and romance in ancient Arabic literature. Twombly here returns to the suggestion of written language in these paintings — the central elements being almost cursive loops and whirls — but the deep, lush greens connect the paintings to the investigation of place and nature that has so occupied him late in his career.

Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works 2000-2007 shows an artist of astonishing creativity and productivity flowering, once again, in his later years. Drawing on the exploration of visual idiom that has characterized his work throughout his career, Twombly here can be seen as rooting that idiom now very distinctly in sensations of place and the sheer pleasure of materials — paint, plaster, surface, color. The results are works that are hopeful, assertive, bold, powerful, and contemporary in the truest sense.

Cy Twombly. Untitled, Lexington, 2002. Wood, string and fabric strip, plaster, synthetic resin paint in white, light gray, light ocher tones and black, traces of yellow, green and red tones, 77-1/2 x 27-3/4 x 19-1/4" Collection of the artist © Cy Twombly. Courtesy Pinakothek, Munich and Schirmer/Mosel, Munich. Photographed by Jochen Littkemann.

Cy Twombly. Untitled, 2003. Oil on canvas, 84-3/4 x 104-1/2". Glenstone, © Cy Twombly. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Tate Modern
Bankside
London
+44 20 7887 8888
Tate Modern Level 4 East
Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons
June 19-September 24, 2008

This exhibition brings together two of Cy Twombly's great painting series from the 1990s — The Four Seasons, 1994-5 from the Tate Collection and The Four Seasons, 1993-4 from The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

The Four Seasons (also known as Quattro Stagioni), are among the most popular exhibits at Tate Modern. Their subject is the annual cycle of spring, summer, autumn and winter with titles in the Italian translation: Primavera, Estate, Autunno and Inverno. Twombly first began work on them in July 1991 and painted both sets over an overlapping period in his studios in the Italian towns of Bassano and Gaeta. Evoking the natural rhythms of death and rebirth often found in classical culture, the artist used a palette of colours largely inspired by the brilliant Mediterranean light.

Cy Twombly was born in Lexington Virginia in 1928 and studied in Boston, and New York. He met Robert Rauschenberg at the Art Students League in New York in 1950 and later attended the influential Black Mountain College in North Carolina which fuelled his interest in the calligraphic and automatic drawing technique of the Surrealists. Twombly combined this with the expressive gestures of Jackson Pollock to create his recognizable graphic style.

During the mid 1950s he shared a studio and worked closely alongside Rauschenberg in Manhattan. Twombly’s move to Italy in 1957 coincided with a shift away from Abstract Expressionism to a mature style inspired by poetry, mythology, the classics and European history and literature.

Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons is the first major exhibition of the work of Cy Twombly in 15 years and is an opportunity to examine his paintings, drawings and sculpture across a long and influential career. The exhibition travels to The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, October 28, 2008-February 8, 2009 and Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, March 4-May 24, 2009. The Four Seasons from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art will only be exhibited at Tate Modern.

Cy Twombly, Ferragosto V, 1961, Private Collection, Courtesy Thomas Ammann Fine Art, Zurich, Oil paint, wax crayon, lead pencil on canvas, 164.5 x 200 cm.