This exhibition catalogue was published by Gagosian Gallery in 2007; exhibitions of this cycle of paintings were held in 2007 at both Gagosian and at the Collection Lambert en Avignon. The catalogue includes Robert Pincus Witten’s essay “Peonies / Kusunoki: Thoughts on Cy Twombly’s ‘A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things” along with color reproductions of the ten artworks in the exhibition.

Pincus-Witten asserts that the cycle of paintings “was conceived with a particular range of architectural referents in mind—panneuax, trumeaux, cartouches, portal panels, and such like—pictorial formats conventional to the décor of the hôtel particulier.” He terms Twombly “the artist of the genius loci,” reflecting on his connection in this cycle to the papal history of the city of Avignon. He offers two major referents for the cycle: “Enlightenment classicism, that French revival of the humane scale” and Japonisme. He frames the series as a marked departure from the artist’s earlier work, instead reflecting a “preoccupation with a lunar, valedictory grief” through his use of Japanese haiku in English translation. He considers the particular haiku Twombly quotes and the associations the peonies Twombly paints bring to bear on the work. He notes that Roland Barthes identified Twombly’s affinity for “Japanese aesthetics” earlier than most in his 1979 essay, “The Wisdom of Art,” and discusses the role of Japanisme more broadly in the history of American art. Pincus-Witten reflects on other floral motifs in Twombly’s practice, which together are taken to reveal “a challenging beauty against all odds [and] on the other [hand] the vanity of the enterprise itself.” He notes that the peony’s brief bloom and spectacular decay may well invoke “how quickly time passes, how it all passed like a dream…” He asserts that the paintings are fundamentally ambiguous, a characteristic he attributes broadly to “old-age style” for artists across many media. He finally returns to specifically Japanese referents including Kusunoki and Hokusai, and Twombly’s attachment to poetry generally. 

For more on these works, see also the 2007 exhibition catalogue from the Collection Lambert in Avignon, Cy Twombly: Blooming, a Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things, which includes Éric Mézil’s “Cy Twombly: maître-artificier des fleurs de feu” (“Cy Twombly: Master-pyrotechnician of Fire Flowers”) in French and English.

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Blooming: A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things at Gagosian Gallery New York (November 8 – December 22, 2007).

Blooming: A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things. Essay by Robert Pincus-Witten. Published by Gagosian Gallery, 2007. 60 pages; fully illustrated. English edition.