This catalogue was published on the occasion of Thomas Ammann Fine Art’s 2001 exhibition Cy Twombly: 6 Paintings 3 Sculptures. It includes a brief discursive text in English by Georg Frei, as well as full-page color reproductions of each of the paintings and sculptures included in the exhibition. It also includes installation views of the exhibition and a list of plates. Each of the works in the exhibition is untitled; the paintings were produced between July and August of 2000 in Gaeta, and the sculptures were produced in Rome in 1959, 1983, and 1983 respectively. 

Frei’s essay opens with the assertion that “Cy Twombly’s fragile art bears witness to his sensitivity to the elegiac, the epic, the dramatic.” He frames Twombly’s ideograms as “condens[ing] into pictorial gestures” and his inscriptions as “vibrant with emotion.” He differentiates Twombly’s practice from the antecedent of Abstract Expressionism, insisting that Twombly has “dispensed with the drama of the brushstroke,” and instead “conjure[s] up the historic sites and poetic arts of classical antiquity and the more recent past.” Turning to the paintings included in the exhibition, he refers to them as “an ode to white,” foregrounding the artist’s use of and restraint around color. He focuses closely on the interactions of color and language in the paintings and draws connections to earlier collages such as Natural History Part II, Some Trees of Italy (1975–76), in which the leaflike motif repeated in these later paintings first emerges. He discusses the inscriptions placed into dialogue with these forms, arguing that it transforms the latter into “tears of remembrance, of longing, of grief.” He closes with consideration of the sculptures included in the exhibition, describing their material qualities and their transformation into “a complex idol-like figure.”

For more on paintings from in this period and included in this exhibition, see Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, eds. Christine Kondoleon and Kate Nesin (2020); Richard Leeman’s Cy Twombly: A Monograph (2005); Mary Jacobus’s Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (2016); and Thierry Greub’s Inscriptions (2022). See also Kate Nesin’s Cy Twombly’s Things (2014) and Achim Hochdörfer’s Cy Twombly: Das Skulpturale Werk (2001) for further discussion of the sculptures. On the earlier collages referenced in Frei’s text, see Cy Twombly: Œuvres sur papier 1973–1977, Musée de Grenoble (2023).

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly: 6 Paintings 3 Sculptures at Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG in Zurich (June 11–September 28, 2001).

Cy Twombly. Text by Georg Frei. Published by Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich, 2001; 38 pages, 13 color plates and 3 installation shots. English edition.