This exhibition catalogue was published on the occasion of Twombly’s 1994 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, for which he completed his monumental cycle Quattro Stagioni (1993–1994). The catalogue includes a foreword from Richard E. Oldenburg, Kirk Varnedoe’s text “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” and “Notes to the Text,” which offers an unusually rich set of primary source materials. It also includes color plates, a selected bibliography to date of publication, a selected list of exhibitions to date of publication, and an index of illustrations. 

Varnedoe’s authoritative essay opens with his now well-known assertion: “Illustrious and unknown: this is what Degas aspired to be, and what Cy Twombly has become” (9). His essay methodically traverses Twombly’s practice until 1994, focusing on what he terms “the basic circumstances of time, place, and biography in which it has been made” (10). His essay proceeds through the following sections and topics (as titled in text): early life and education, 1928-52; Europe and North Africa, 1952-53; army service and teaching in Virginia, 1953-56; Italy, 1957-58;  1959, a pivotal year; new themes and color, 1960-1961; portraits from history, 1962-64; grey paintings and related works, 1966-72; from epic to pastoral: the later 1970s and 1980s; and flowers and light: Gaeta, 1990-. Throughout, he attends to major influences such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Edmund Spenser, Leonardo da Vinci, and Pablo Picasso. Framing Twombly as “pulling together the fresh and the ancient” (51), Varnedoe concludes that “the panoramic range of subjects and areas mapped out by Twombly’s reduced means…reconfirm the possibility that art can pull the fullness of the world back in through portals of the most stringent simplicity” (52).

For more on the works included in this exhibition catalogue and on Twombly’s earlier practice, see also major retrospective catalogues and monographs, such as: Richard Leeman’s Cy Twombly: A Monograph (2005); Mary Jacobus’s Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (2016); Thierry Greub’s Inscriptions (2022); and Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, eds. Christine Kondoleon and Kate Nesin (2020). Recent exhibition catalogues such as Cy Twombly: Œuvres sur papier 1973–1977, Musée de Grenoble (2023), though more narrow in scope than the present volume, may also be of interest.

Though now out of print, a complete digitized copy of the exhibition catalogue is available on MoMA’s website here.

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly: a Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (September 25, 1994 – January 10, 1995). 

Cy Twombly: A Retrospective. By Kirk Varnedoe. Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994; 180 pages; 94 color and 93 black-and-white illustrations. English edition.