This exhibition catalogue was published by Hirschl and Adler Modern in 1986. It includes Roberta Smith’s essay “Rewriting History,” black and white reproductions, a list of works exhibited, a brief chronology of the artist’s life to date of publication, a list of individual exhibitions, and a list of monographs. 

Smith’s essay opens with consideration of Twombly’s Untitled (1957), which she compares to Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) and Willem de Kooning’s art more generally. She characterizes his 1950s paintings as “action painting,” borrowing the term from his Abstract Expressionist antecedents, asserting that “Twombly has eliminated all pretense to pre-meditation here, concentrating on line, the thing he knows best.” She calls this his “last ditch assertion of authorship, against all odds,” identifying a major distinction between these paintings and his paintings from 1960 such as Untitled (Panorama), the latter of which “exhibit a literacy and a lassitude.” For Smith, landscape surfaces in Twombly’s paintings in this moment as well, invoked in part through his use of city names in artwork titles. She offers extended discussion of Bolsena and the artworks produced there; by 1972, in Bolsena,“references to architecture and landscape as well as poetry are mixed, but in a completely different manner…Twombly the poetry-inspired contemplator of landscape becomes Twombly, the flight-mad engineer.” She identifies Twombly as offering “facts,” drawing on concrete observations and metamorphosing them into abstract compositions. She suggests that his relocation to Italy was in fact crucial to the continued development of his practice because its “topography and architecture are not only saturated with the past but continuous with it.” Throughout, she returns to Twombly’s various citations of Ovid and his Metamorphoses. She concludes that Twombly ultimately acts as a “conduit” for the history he cites and invokes throughout his practice, with “many voices speak[ing] through his.” 

For more on Twombly’s early 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); Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, ed. Kirk Varnedoe (1994); and Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, eds. Christine Kondoleon and Kate Nesin (2020).

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly on view at Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York (April 12 – May 7, 1986).

Cy Twombly. Published by Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, 1986; 40 pages, fully illustrated. English.