This catalogue, published on the occasion of the inaugural exhibition at Gagosian’s Paris gallery, includes an introduction by Larry Gagosian and Marie-Laure Bernadac’s “Camino Real: La voie royale de la peinture / The High Road to Painting,” both published in French and English. It also includes color plates and a list of works exhibited.

Bernadac frames Camino Real as a “logical extension of recent cycles of painting typical of Twombly’s late style, beginning with Bacchus, Psilax, Mainomenos in 2005” (7). She differentiates “abstract” paintings and “naturalist” ones, with Twombly’s “blackboard” paintings falling in the former category and Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves (2009) in the latter, among others. Camino Real, for Bernadac, offers a “fusion between draftsmanship and color, between drawing and painting” (8). She offers detailed formal analysis of each painting, considering the exhibition both as a unified set of works and as “autonomous” individual paintings (8). Considering calligraphy, graffiti, and children’s drawings each as commonly suggested referents for the large loops that dominate Camino Real, she draws on Barthes to argue that the loops offer “the sign of a renunciation of control, an abandonment of mastery, and the acceptance of a vital, raw power” (9). She cites a large number of antecedents for Twombly’s practice, including Pablo Picasso, Charles Olson, and Nicholas Poussin, posing questions about shared characteristics (or the lack thereof) amongst artists’ late styles. She then turns to Tennessee Williams’s play Camino Real, offering a synopsis and quoting Williams’s preface to the first edition in which he writes that “I feel as the painter did, that the message lies in those abstract beauties of form and color and line, to which I would add light and motion” (as quoted on 11). She concludes that Camino Real “represents a culmination and a synthesis of his overall artistic approach” (11).

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).

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly: Camino Real at Gagosian Gallery, Paris (October 20 – December 23, 2010).

Cy Twombly. Camino Real. With a text by Marie-Laure Bernadec. Published by Gagosian Gallery, 2010. 32 pages, fully illustrated. French/English.