سي تومبلي
塞•托姆布雷
싸이 툼 블리
סיי טוומבלי
サイ・トゥオンブリー
Сай Твомбли

source: kunstmuseumbasel
L’artiste américain Cy Twombly compte avec Robert Rauschenberg et Jasper Johns, auxquels il était très lié, parmi les plus importants protagonistes d’une génération d’artistes qui s’est distancée dans les années 1950 de l’expressionisme abstrait pour développer son très personnel et très influent language pictural.

Twombly est né en 1928 à Lexington, en Virginie, et mort à Rome en 2011. À une époque où la capitale mondiale de l’art s’est déplacée de Paris à New York, Twomply a choisi de faire le chemin inverse pour s’installer à Rome. Là-bas, il découvre la lumière méditerranéenne, mais aussi l’histoire, la mythologie et la poésie antiques, qui vont imprégner son oeuvre par associations. Des champs picturaux généralement blancs sont activés par une force gestuelle griffonante proche de l’écriture, au moyen de lignes, de signes, de fragments de mots. Ce sont des traces de souvenirs personnels autant que de la mémoire collective où se voient associés écrit et image.

Au coeur de l’exposition se trouvent des peintures des années 1950 à 1970 de la collection du Kunstmuseum complétées par des prêts de la Fondation Emanuel Hoffmann et la Daros Collection qui possède un important ensemble d’oeuvres de Twombly. Elles illustrent l’évolution de l’artiste à ses débuts. Le tableau Untitled, de petit format, créé en 1954 à New York constitue le point de départ. La matière compacte et le coup de pinceau révèlent l’origine de Twombly, l’expressionisme abstrait. Les tableaux suivants ont été peints pour la majeure partie à Rome à partir de 1957. Dorénavant, le fond sombre cède le pas à des toiles lumineuses librement rythmées par des lignes au crayon, à la craie ou à l’huile où les grands formats et les formats horizontaux dominent. Les tableaux semblent être les témoins de l’état d’âme vécu pendant le processus de création, même des gestes correcteurs tels des ratures et retouches ainsi que des formes inachevées restent présents. Ainsi naît une ambivalence entre dévoiler et cacher.

Le public pourra admirer pour la première fois le tableau au format portrait Untitled (1969) réalisé en 1969 au Lago di Bolsena au nord de Rome. Il montre une ouverture délicate, semblable à une fenêtre composée de hachures à la mine de plomb au milieu d’un champ coloré blanc. La donation de cette oeuvre au Kunstmuseum par Katharina et Wilfrid Steib en 2013 est à l’origine de cette exposition. Ce cadeau complète la présence imposante de Cy Twombly à Bâle. Dans la préface de la brochure d’exposition est retracé l’historique de la collection.
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source: whoswhode
Cy Twombly wurde am 25. April 1928 in Lexington im US-Bundesstaat Virginia geboren.

Twombly studierte in den Jahren von 1948 bis 1951 an der Washington and Lee University in Lexington sowie an der Kunsthochschule in Boston (Boston Museum School) und bis 1951 an der Art Students League in New York. Bereits 1945 fertigte Twombly vollplastische Werke an. Er unterlag den Einflüssen des deutschen Malers, Plastikers und Dichters Kurt Schwitters und des Schweizer Bildhauers, Zeichners und Malers Alberto Giacometti sowie den Objektkunstwerken der Surrealisten, die sich in den ersten Assemblagen der Fünfziger aus alltäglichen Gegenständen wiederfanden.

Nach seinem Studium besuchte er auf Initiative des amerikanischen Malers und Objektkünstlers Robert Rauschenberg von 1951 bis 1952 das Black Mountain College in Beria in North Carolina. Dabei war er ein Schüler des amerikanischen Expressionisten Franz Kline und des Malers und Schriftstellers Robert Motherwell. 1955 präsentierte er der Öffentlichkeit in seiner ersten Einzelausstellung in New York erstmalig plastische Werke, die zuvor keine Beachtung fanden. Mit Robert Rauschenberg ging Twombly auf Reisen nach Spanien, Italien und Nordafrika. 1957 verließ er die Vereinigten Staaten und siedelte nach Rom über. Die Werke des Künstlers erinnerten nun an Schriftzüge und Linien der Graffiti-Kunst, die in krakeliger Form ausgeführt wurden. Seine Bilder wirkten dadurch chaotisch. Die Gestaltung schien nur dem Zufall überlassen.

Die bloß ansatzweisen Zeichnungen und Schmierspuren verstärken den Eindruck. Für Bilder dieser Art trifft der Begriff “Streukomposition” zu. In dieser gemeinsamen Präsenz von Malerei, Geschriebenem und Zeichnung forderte er einen Assoziationsprozess des Betrachters heraus. In seiner Gemäldekunst realisierte der Maler oftmals Bilderzyklen, die in ihrer monochromen Gestaltung besonders durch eine gestenähnliche Zeichensprache wie traditionelles Graffiti wirkt. Er griff die Zeichen der Straße und Häuserwände auf, indem er sie seinen Bildern hinzusetzte. Dagegen weist eine Bildergruppe aus den siebziger Jahren eine kontinuierliche Anordnung aus Farbe, Bögen und geraden Linien auf, wie zum Beispiel in dem Werk mit dem Titel “Nini`s Painting” (1971).

In seinen Werken verarbeitet Cy Twombly oftmals kulturhistorische oder mythologische Elemente, wie in den Werken “School of Fontainebleau” (1971) oder “Apoll und der Künstler” (1975). 1961 entstand der Titel “Leda und der Schwan” (1961), für den und auch für andere Werke einfache Strukturen sowie Kreide- und Bleistiftstriche auf großformatigen Malgründen kennzeichnend sind. In der ersten Hälfte der Achtziger Jahre entstanden Landschaftsbilder mit atmosphärischem Ausdruck, in denen die Farbe vorherrscht. Neben der Gemäldekunst war Twombly auch als Bildhauer tätig und schuf ein umfangreiches Werk mit beachtlicher Bedeutung für die Skulpturkunst. Die Objekte aus bemaltem Holz weisen oftmals einen geometrischen Stil auf, wie der Titel “Rotella” (1986) gut dokumentiert.

Die oftmals mit weißer Farbe übermalten Skulpturen wie zum Beispiel die Arbeit “Thicket, Jupiter Island” verdecken ihre ursprüngliche Bedeutung. Auch in der plastischen Kunst von Twombly spielt somit die Assoziation des Betrachters eine Rolle, beziehungsweise die Möglichkeit einer anderen Betrachtungsweise und Beilegung von anderer Bedeutung. Twomblys variationsreiche Skulpturen wirken oftmals fragil und in sich schauend. 1953 wurde Cy Twomblys erste Einzelausstellung in der Kootz Gallery in New York organisiert. Zwei Jahre später unterrichtete Twombly am Art Department des Southern Seminary Junior College in Buena Vista in Virginia. Die rege Ausstellungstätigkeit von Cy Ttwombly geht zurück bis auf das Jahr 1951. Seine Gemälde und Skulpturen wurden in europäischen und US-amerikanischen Galerien und Museen gezeigt.

Im Jahr 1994 fand zu Ehren des Künstlers eine Retrospektive im New Yorker Museum of Modern Art statt. 2002 wurden Bilder von Cy Twombly zur Gruppenausstellung “Art Chicago” in der CAIS Gallery präsentiert. 2008 wurde er mit dem Gerhard-Altenbourg-Preis geehrt. Das Museum Brandhorst in München, unter der Leitung der Bayerischen Staatsgemäldesammlung, hatte ab 2009 das gesamte Obergeschoss im Haus dem Künstler Cy Twombly gewidmet.
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source: the189
In 1962 Cy Twombly (born 1928 in Lexington, Virginia) painted a work that illustrates many of the abiding engagements of his practice. Untitled is divided into two zones by a horizontal line about two thirds of the way up. Across the bottom edge of the canvas, Twombly has scribbled a textual fragment gleaned from the poet Sappho: “But their heart turned cold + they dropped their wings.” The phrase, suggesting a hovering between higher and lower realms, conjures up a distant classical realm, even as the grappling, awkward hand renders the words materially present.

In the upper third of the canvas, the artist provides a code for viewing: a white circle swirled with pink is labelled “blood”; an aggressive red “x” reads “flesh”; a glutinous dollop of brown paint, “earth” or possibly “youth”; a delicate disc of wispy white paint, “clouds”; and a shiny coin-shaped form in graphite pencil, “mirror”. Beneath this code, Twombly has rendered, within a drawn frame, an array of possibilities for mark-making per se, as though to set them apart from the more direct references of words.

The elements of the code come from three distinct experiential fields: the elemental (earth and clouds), the somatic (flesh and blood) and the subjective (mirror). And they can be mapped on to three corresponding traditional genres of oil painting, respectively: landscape, figure and self-portraiture. In Untitled we see Twombly’s invocation of myth and poetry, his wavering between high and low and his sustained dwelling on the threshold where writing becomes drawing or painting. Perhaps most importantly, we see in this painting how marks and words – in collaboration and counter-distinction – construct meaning differently. As John Berger has written, Twombly “visualises with living colours the silent space that exists between and around words”.

Although his work resonates strongly with generations of younger artists, ranging from Brice Marden to Richard Prince to Tacita Dean to Patti Smith, it has a general propensity to polarise its audience between perplexity and unbridled admiration. (Remember the incident in summer 2007 of a woman planting a lipstick kiss on a Twombly canvas on show in Lyon?) Additionally, the critical and historical reception has seemed to describe two Twomblys – one about form, the other about content.

Some writers have concentrated on the materiality of the artist’s mark as aggressive, often illegible graffiti; others have followed the classical allusions to ferret out the references. Two elements might serve as metaphors for the predominant interpretations: the floating disc of white paint labelled “clouds” standing for the poetic and mythological aspects, and the scatological heap of brown paint designating “earth”. However, Twombly’s painterly palimpsests trace the progressions through which form and content, text and image are inextricably linked.

Earth / Youth

Cy Twombly arrived in Manhattan in 1950 while the New York School painting of Pollock and de Kooning was in full swing. Upon Robert Rauschenberg’s encouragement, Twombly joined him for the 1951–1952 sessions at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina – a liberal refuge, a site of free
experimentation and exchange in a nation growing increasingly conservative during the Cold War. Among the influential teachers present at this time were Charles Olson, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and John Cage. Building on the freedom afforded by the previous generation, the younger artists emphasised libidinal energy integrated through experience.

They focused attention on calligraphic gesture and word/image relationships resulting in work that was more syncretic, less spontaneously automatist. Works such as Twombly’s Min-Oe (1951) bear evidence of the poet Olson’s interests in the roots of writing in ancient cultures and condensed glyphic forms.

For eight months spanning 1952–1953 Twombly and Rauschenberg travelled through Europe and north Africa, joined for a while by the writer Paul Bowles. Upon returning to New York, Rauschenberg set up the Fulton Street studio that Twombly sometimes shared. Eleanor Ward invited the two artists to exhibit at her Stable Gallery.

A series of Twombly’s works on light grounds dating to 1955 were given curious titles from a list collaboratively compiled by Twombly, Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns – Criticism, The Geeks, Academy. Here, pencil and crayon lines are inscribed into viscous light greyish brown paint. Among the anxious, discontinuous thickets, basic signs and letters begin to appear.

In 1957, having built a bridge of connections with Italian artists showing frequently at the Stable Gallery, Twombly left again for Italy, where he would remain for the most part, though making frequent trips, including many to the States. He established a studio in Rome overlooking the Colosseum and wrote a short statement for the Italian art journal L’Esperienza moderna, which was to remain the sole published reflection on his own work until 2000, when he was interviewed by David Sylvester. In the statement, Twombly describes his process: “Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate – it is the sensation of its own realisation.”

Works from this era bear out the description. In Arcadia, for example, it is as though he taps into the nervous system, harnessing an alert state of tension, letting it come through in abrupt bursts at a level where it is generally inhibited by the body’s higher functions, registering its insistent throb in stuttering, jittery, whiplash lines. His move to Italy also afforded him ready access to the Mediterranean repository of classical ruin and reference. In works such as Olympia, words and names – “Roma”, “Amor” – emerge out of a network of marks.

In 1959 Twombly executed some of the most spare works of his career, among them the 24 drawings that comprise Poems to the Sea, done on the coast of Italy at Sperlonga. What order of poems, punctuated with numerals and question marks, are these? The sea is reduced to horizon line and word, scribblings and veils of paint against the stark white of paper. A persistent compulsion is invoked in the viewer, the desire to read what is there, but not fully manifest in the artist’s scrawled script. Two words in these drawings emerge into legibility, “time” and “Sappho”, as if washed up on the beach alongside sudden, subtle gem-flashes of colour – blue, orange-yellow, pink – gleaming all the more because of their discretion.

In these pages, meaning is endlessly frustrated and pursued. It settles only in the distance, figured perhaps by the horizon lines that move across the top of each of the drawings – in fact, simply grey or blue lines made with a straight edge, but suggesting seascapes at the vanishing point. The flat planes of sea and page have been collapsed. Writing comes in waves, rolling funnels of cursive script, crossed out, erased, enfoamed in satiny greyish-white paint. The signs are given as nascent forms, as gestural indications of “the hand’s becoming”, as Roland Barthes so aptly phrased it.

Flesh and Blood

In the autumn of 1960 Twombly had his first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Moving into the 1960s, thick and florid colour comes into his work, along with multiple classical references. During the prolific summer of 1961, he reached a fever pitch, a colouristic crescendo in the Ferragosto paintings. A thickly encrusted palette of brown, pink and red takes on a viscerality paired in the work with a body parcelled into pictograms: pendulous breasts, erupting penises, scatological posteriors. From 1961 to 1963 mythological motifs appear with increasing insistence: Leda and the Swan, Venus, Apollo, Achilles. This line of investigation culminated in 1963 with a series of works called Nine Discourses on Commodus, an obscure portrait of the megalomaniacal Roman emperor conceived while Twombly was reading the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet and looking at the paintings of Francis Bacon. These works were shown at Castelli in 1964, to a New York art world which had by then turned to Pop and Minimalism.

Following this exhibition, Twombly’s American enthusiasm ebbed for a number of years. The situation was quite different in Europe, where his work remained a critical success. Nevertheless, the Commodus exhibition represents a crucial moment of rupture in the artist’s career, for, as he commented, it made him “the happiest painter around for a couple of years: no one gave a damn what I did”. Approaching the end of the 1960s, Twombly employed a monochrome grey ground.

In 1966 white writing in looped repetitive script appears on blackboard-like surfaces. The works, which continue into the early 1970s, resemble rudimentary handwriting tests, registering the muscular rhythms of the arm relaxing and tensing, and seem to eschew outside reference; but Leonardo da Vinci’s Deluge drawings and the Italian Futurists’ spatio-temporal explorations echo through them.

Clouds

Beginning in 1975, Twombly had been working towards increasingly integrated combinations of text and image; of lines – both written and drawn – and colour. The repeated returns to the rich resources of classical mythology have remained the complications of his work. He employs myth as yet another form in conjunction with painting, drawing and writing. He sometimes suggests myth’s first seminal stirring, letting only hermetic fragments come to the surface as names from the past: Hero and Leander, Orpheus, Bacchus. At other times he offers a full-blown line or verse burdened with all of its cultural and poetic associations like a tree overripe with fruit. Roberto Calasso has written of the Greek myths: “All the powers of the cult of gods have migrated into a single, immobile and solitary act: that of reading.” Twombly’s caveat, however, would be that the gods’ powers lie not in a single act, but in the mobilisation of the space between reading and seeing.

We see this in works such as Venus and Apollo (both 1975). In Venus the name of the goddess is written out in a palimpsest of red lines with a blossom drawn in crimson oil stick beneath. She is attended by a pencil-drawn list of her various names (Nadyomene, Aphrodite, Nymphaea…) and of her associations (myrtle, poppy, apple, sparrow…). “Venus” is written out so as to emphasise the openness of the “V”, “N” and “U”. In the pendant drawing, “Apollo” is delineated in dark blue with a triangle, the Greek delta, serving as the first initial and doubling as a directional pointer upward. Like the delta, the two letters “o” of the name are closed forms, as against the five open letters of Venus. Apollo, too, is accompanied by a list of his many names and attributes (laurel, palm, tree, hawk, grasshopper…). In these drawings, no direct definition is provided (no goddess of love or god of measure), but rather a network of allusions given both word and form.

The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a retrospective exhibition in 1979 intended to rectify Twombly’s relative absence on the American scene. Roland Barthes, upon the artist’s suggestion, wrote the catalogue essay, “The Wisdom of Art”. In his tendency to promote a proliferating, reference-laden and intricate web of text, Barthes met his match with Twombly, whose work he described as “inimitable”: “It is in a smear that we find the truth of redness; it is in a wobbly line that we find the truth of a pencil.” The exhibition made only a small splash, critiqued by some for being “too European”. Twombly was still in Rome and very much outside the dominant narratives of contemporary American art of the time.

The Green series, Untitled [A Painting in Nine Parts], is a sustained investigation of colour set in relation to Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry and Monet’s art. Clearly gesturing toward landscape painting, this work seems to be the most mimetic of Twombly’s oeuvre, yet it is also the most rawly material – suggesting the two primary paths taken in the decades to follow.

The green Untitled was executed in the spring of 1988 in Rome, the wood panels covered in quick-drying acrylic (for speed was of the essence in these shots of propulsive vernal energy). Part 1 functions like a title page: two lines from Rilke’s Moving Forward pencilled in Twombly’s cursive hand (“… and in the ponds broken off from the sky, my feeling sinks as if standing on fishes”) flutter down the plane of white. “Fishes”, written in shimmery silver-grey oil stick near the bottom of the panel, spans from edge to edge, even moving on to the white frame. Words read as though seen through rippling water. Rhythmic spurts of graphic attention create a visual analogue to the assonance of the words. The hesitations around the letter “s” swish like fish. In the other panels, words seem to be losing the battle with a superabundance of verdure. Groping finger streaks of deep emerald green have the look of sea grasses shimmying in shallow water.

Monet’s Water Lilies enter the frame of reference. The effect of spatial disorientation and the congested surfaces of these pond-panels suggest something of metaphorical drowning. The myth of Narcissus, in which identity is swallowed up by mirror reflection, lurks somewhere beneath these works.

Mirror

In 1994 the Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston, Texas – designed by Renzo Piano from Twombly’s original conception – opened as a joint project between the Dia and Menil Foundations to house an extensive permanent collection of the painter’s work. That same year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a Twombly retrospective curated by Kirk Varnedoe. It met with success and marked a dramatic shift in his American reception. This was due largely to the curator’s mission of reinstating the artist’s grand themes into an individual poetics. Varnedoe essentially reads Twombly’s work as sublimation: “[Twombly] used the new art he created precisely to reforge, in a wholly different poetics of light and sexuality that was specific to his experience, the link between the heritage of the human past and the life of a personal psyche.”

Concurrent with the MoMA retrospective, Twombly exhibited his Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) (1994) at the Gagosian Gallery in New York.The monumental piece measuring four by sixteen metres, a meditation on ageing and homecoming, offers an extraordinary array of types of mark, range of chromatic dynamics from the faintest stain of pale grey to outbursts of overripe wines and vibrant yellow-oranges, and a large body of associative references (to name only a few: Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Keats, Catullus, Archilochus, Turner).

The painting is intended to be read from right to left, like a Chinese scroll, marking the direction of Twombly’s return over the Atlantic as it does the movement of soul boats crossing the Nile, the primary pictorial theme. The varied marks also weave a complex web of connections to myth, poetry, history, memory, conventions of painting and earlier moments in Twombly’s career.

Untitled was undertaken over a period of nearly 22 years, from 1972 to 1994. Just before it was about to be installed in the Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston, Twombly called Paul Winkler, then director of the Menil Collection; he had found a disused factory with enough wall space to hang the work in Lexington. The painting was rolled up and two Menil couriers were dispatched in an ice storm to deliver the work so that Twombly could rework it, yet again, before it was permanently hung. The anxiety around finishing this painting belies the artist’s thought expressed to Winkler, that it would be his last. It was not. He had been extremely prolific since 1994.

The Bacchus series from 2005, for example, with its rush of roseate pigment and whorls of gestural energy, shows an extra-ordinary exuberance.
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source: momaorg
the art world lost one of its key figures when Cy Twombly passed away. A remarkably innovative and deeply influential artist, Twombly left an important legacy that resonates in a broad range of contemporary work. MoMA recently had the great fortune of acquiring seven sculptures and two paintings directly from the artist. These works join a core group of paintings already in the Museum’s collection. To acknowledge this landmark acquisition, the Department of Painting and Sculpture mounted a focused installation of the sculptures outside the entrance to the recently reinstalled fourth-floor galleries (where the two newly acquired paintings by the artist, Tiznit [1953] and Academy [1955], are on view). Twombly’s sculptures have remained relatively unknown to the public, overshadowed by his more widely exhibited paintings. The works currently on view, made over the course of 50 years and in various studios, trace the history of Twombly’s sculptural production and present a unique point of entry into this important body of work.
Two of the sculptures included in this installation were made in the mid-1950s, soon after Twombly’s return to New York from a trip to Europe and North Africa that profoundly informed the direction his art would take. Like other works from this same period, these sculptures make reference to the ancient objects Twombly viewed in his travels. Intimate in scale and made of simple materials—sticks that have been covered, bundled, and bound—an untitled work from 1955 invokes an almost fetishlike object of personal and private devotion. Untitled (Funerary Box for a Lime Green Python), comprising two pairs of bound palm leaf fans on a rectangular base, suggests a kind of ancient monument or reliquary. Twombly applied white house paint to this work’s surface, initiating a technique that would become an integral part of his sculptural process.

Installation view of Cy Twombly: Sculpture at MoMA (May 20–October 3, 2011). Photo: Jonathan Muzikar. Shown, from left: Untitled (Funerary Box for a Lime Green Python). 1954. Wood, palm leaf fans, house paint, cloth, and wire. Promised gift of Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis. Untitled. 1984–85. Wood, plaster, nails, and paint. Purchase. Untitled. 1955. Wood, cloth, twine, and paint. Promised gift of Steven and Alexandra Cohen. All works in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art and © 2011 Estate of Cy Twombly
At the close of the 1950s, Twombly stopped making sculpture for nearly two decades. Upon returning to the medium in 1976, he made a series of works in Rome composed of cardboard tubes, one of which is on view at MoMA. Here the task of sculptural production was reduced to an almost unthinkably simple strategy: Twombly created an abstract form from two spare columnar elements whose textured surface, built up by layers of white house paint, lends an expressive quality to the structure’s reserved stateliness.
Twombly drew inspiration from classical literature, ancient epic poetry, and mythology, and evidence of these influences recur as themes throughout his oeuvre. He once said he was “very happy to have the boat motif” in his work, not only for its autobiographical relevance—as a child, he spent his summers with his parents by the sea in Gloucester, Massachusetts—but also because he liked the “references to crossing over” associated with it. One of the sculptures on view at MoMA, an untitled painted wooden construction made in Rome (1984–85), conjures nautical imagery through its ship-like form. The cast bronze By the Ionian Sea, made in Naples (1988), gets its title from the 1901 travelogue by the British author George Gissing (1857–1903), who traveled the Mediterranean by land and water.
Twombly’s sculptures are primarily made of found materials he gathered in the various places he has lived. While in Jupiter Island, Florida, in 1992, Twombly dug in the sand on the beach to form a mold for the plaster base of an untitled sculpture included in MoMA’s display. Atop the base is a pair of found objects—a long wooden stick and a set of plastic leaves—and embedded within it is actual sand that adhered to the plaster during the casting process. In a recent work from 2005, made in his studio in Lexington, Virginia, a painter’s mixing wand, its tip a blaze of electric pink paint, is perched atop an assemblage of found objects.
Embedded within the history of Twombly’s sculptural production is a history of Twombly himself, and so the artist becomes increasingly familiar through an understanding of his practice. It is truly an extraordinary opportunity to be able to present, in this particular moment, a broad selection of such an important body of his work, and an honor to become its new custodian.
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source: philamuseumorg
Taking cues from the Dada movement and from the work of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, Cy Twombly (American, 1928– 2011) created poetic objects whose serene white surfaces and allusive forms seem to recall remote worlds of myth and the ancient past. After reaching an indisputable maturity in his early sculpture, created from 1946 to 1959, Twombly returned to working in three dimensions in the mid-1970s and continued to cast new works up until his passing in 2011. When asked shortly before his death whether any of his sculptures might be considered companions to his masterful series of ten paintings Fifty Days at Iliam of 1978 (installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989), the artist responded by choosing these six extraordinary bronzes for this installation.
Like Fifty Days at Iliam (on view in galleries 184 and 185 in the main building), which takes as its subject the Trojan War of Homer’s Iliad, the sculptures that Twombly selected for this installation also refer to the circumstances of an ancient fight. They evoke chariots, sitting still or ferociously charging; the rising sun before the conflict; and the sunset, which falls equally on the victorious and the defeated. Their varied forms seem to combine the triangular shapes of the simplified chariots of the Trojan warriors and the phallic thrust of Achilles in Fifty Days at Iliam paintings. The violence of Twombly’s sculptures is countered by their pale, irregular surfaces, which seem weathered and washed, as if they have long confronted the elements. Yet the focus of these sculptures is not just one war in particular, but any war— as they seem to powerfully embody the impulse to overcome, obliterate, and cancel.