This catalogue includes an essay by Katharina Schmidt, color reproductions, and a list of works exhibited. Schmidt’s essay, “A look at recent paintings by Cy Twombly,” opens with an epigraph from T.J. Clark’s The Sight of Death. She connects the Untitled 2006 paintings in the exhibition to his earlier “blackboard” paintings and notes the connection the artist drew between the first series and Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings. She writes of the later paintings that they “too, address energy and dynamism, order and chaos, time and space, albeit with fundamental shifts of emphasis resulting from the use of different artistic means.” She offers extended formal analyses of the paintings, evoking the value in repeated looking discussed by Clark in the quoted passage. She asserts that “[t]he individual character of each motif embodies a different type of movement: they are free, as it were, to expand in diverse directions.” She connects these wholly abstract and gestural paintings to his affinity for “plants and flowers…combined…with his love of literature, especially poetry.” She also draws connections between the large looping lines of the 2006 paintings and his emphasis of the letter O in inscriptions relating to Orpheus and Plato and forms relating to Apollo and figs. She writes that these “associations point to a narrative core concealed at the heart of the paintings.” Turning to his practice more generally, she reflects on the interplay between diametrically opposed pairings, with particular attention to tension between public and private dimensions. Schmidt concludes that the ever-elusive and ever-compelling challenge to decode the paintings ensures their ongoing vitality.

For further discussion of Twombly’s later practice and his related Bacchus paintings, see also: Cy Twombly, published by the Centre Pompidou (2016), Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, ed. Nicholas Serota (2008); Mary Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (2016); Thierry Greub, Inscriptions (2022); Cy Twombly, published by Gagosian Gallery (2016); Dominique Baqué’s Cy Twombly: Sous le signe d’Apollon et de Dionysos (2016); Nela Pavlouskova’s Cy Twombly: The Late Paintings 2003–2011 (2015); and Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, eds. Christine Kondoleon and Kate Nesin (2020). Many of the referents discussed by Schmidt are also addressed in 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 at Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG in Zurich (June 1 – September 28, 2007).

Cy Twombly. Edited by Georg Frei. Text by Katharina Schmidt. Published by Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich, 2007. 54 pages, 19 color plates. German/English edition.