This exhibition catalogue, published by Gagosian Gallery in 2003 alongside an exhibition in New York, includes an introductory essay from Linda Norden entitled “What Painting Can Contain.” Norden describes the paintings included in the exhibition—all Untitled (2003), except one listed as 2001–2003—as “on first encounter…perilously close to pretty.” Comparing these to his earlier Triumph of Galatea (1961) and School of Athens (1960), Norden notes the consistency of Twombly’s “awkward elegance” and of the “erotic sensation we read as beautiful until we register its signification.” These later paintings, Norden argues, are distinct in having “no conspicuous dissonance,” a departure from the formal juxtapositions routinely featured in the earlier canvases. Nevertheless, Norden finds a continuity with the artist’s earlier practice in the paintings’ “refusal to resolve, refusal to relax, refusal to banish the violence or bypass entirely the irreverence of Twombly’s unruly gestures.” She draws connections in the shared ground color to Twombly’s Lepanto (2001) and identifies an “intimated insurrection of an interior pushing up from underneath.” Norden notes still further connections to earlier works, as in the accumulations of white paint shared with his 1963 Nine Discouses on Commodus, and considers “the degree to which they were misunderstood in New York in 1964.” Turning to the “blackboard” paintings, Norden argues for a shift from references to writing in these earlier works to producing “paintings about painting.” She considers the physical presence of Twombly’s hand on the canvas in relationship to artworks by Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns, concluding that it serves as “Twombly’s emphatic declaration of his own painterly practice.” For Norden, these paintings “reconfirm his preoccupation with the fugitive nature of thought and desire, the things that make us all too human.”

This essay is followed by reproductions of each of the artworks included in the exhibition and two installation photographs, as well as a list of plates. The exhibition was conceived as a celebration of the artist’s 75th birthday. For more on related paintings, see also Cy Twombly: Blooming, a Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things (2007), published by the Collection Lambert en Avignon, which includes detailed discussion of the artist’s subsequent large-scale floral paintings.

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly: A Gathering of Time at Gagosian Gallery Madison Avenue, New York (May 12 – July 21, 2003).

A Gathering of Time: Cy Twombly, Six Paintings and a Sculpture. Essay by Linda Norden. Published by Gagosian Gallery, 2003. 36 pages; 9 color illustrations. English.