Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings Vol. 3 includes works on paper produced between 1961 and 1963. Brief introductory remarks from Nicola Del Roscio include reflections on Twombly’s musical occupations. There are several notable inclusions for scholars interested in Twombly’s replication of sustained thematic interests in multiple media; First and Second Part of the Return from Parnassus (1961), a series of Triumph of Galatea works (1961), and many others appear in paintings as well as the drawings catalogued here. There is a large series of Delian Odes (1961) as well as of Notes from a Tower (1961), the latter of which was completed in Val Gardena. There are also many works relating to Homeric themes and to later painting cycles such as Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), including Vengeance of Achilles (1962), Study for Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus (1962), and a series of Dionysian works. The latter offers an unusually early instance of the large swirling forms that come to dominate his later Bacchic paintings. Other themes that recur in later works in multiple media include Hero and Leander, studies for Twombly’s School of Athens, the birth of Venus, a study for Blue Ridge Mountains Transfixed by a Roman Piazza (1962), and a study for Leda and the Swan (1962). The volume will also be of interest to those working on Platonic material in Twombly’s oeuvre and connections to Plato’s program for moral education, which is recorded in various works relating to Plato and his Symposium.

Cy Twombly: Œuvres sur papier 1973–1977, Musée de Grenoble (2023), though it addresses works from the decade following this volume, will likely nevertheless be of interest to scholars researching works from this period, as it includes many works produced in Val Gardena as Notes from a Tower were. Several untitled drawings from this period are reproduced and discussed in Dominique Baqué’s Cy Twombly: Sous le signe d’Apollon et de Dionysos (2016). For more on Study for Blue Ridge Mountains Transfixed by a Roman Piazza, see Kate Nesin’s essay “Mountains Transfixed, Memory Unfixed” in Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, ed. Christine Kondeleon and Kate Nesin (2020). Brooke Holmes’s “The Time of Achilles” in the same volume offers helpful reflections on the Homeric content also present here.

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings Volume 3 1961–1963. Edited by Nicola Del Roscio. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2013. Fully illustrated. English edition.