Published on the occasion of Twombly’s retrospective at the Tate Modern of the same name, Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons includes a foreword from Nicholas Serota, Richard Schiff’s “Charm,” Tacita Dean’s “A Panegyric,” Cy Twombly’s interview with Nicholas Serota, “A History Behind the Thought,” catalogue entries with discursive text for each exhibition section, a chronology, a bibliography, and a list of exhibited works. The exhibition sections are: “American-Type Painting?”; “Et in Arcadia Ego”; “Insinuating Elegance: The Anxiety of Influence”; “Abject Expressionism: The Ferragosto Paintings”; “Longitude and Latitude: The Bolsena Paintings”; “Fade to Grey: Treatise on the Veil”; “Mourning and Melancholia: Nini’s Paintings”; “The Art of Assemblage: Columns, Collage and Bricolage”; “Memory and the Mediterranean”; “Writing on Water: The Green Paintings”; “Seasons and Cycles: Quattro Stagioni”; “Fire and Rapture: Bacchus, Psilax, Mainomenos”; and “Between Roses and Shadows.”

Schiff’s essay centers on a “pea-pod” shape in Twombly’s Untitled (1959), with considerations of the role of fetish objects, “absent-minded animation” (19), and Twombly’s uneven scrawl. Dean’s essay focuses on Pan (1975), with discussions of James Joyce’s annotation practice, the significance of deletion and signatures, and the power carried by a name. She closes with a quotation from Marguerite Yourcenar’s poem Phaedo. In “History Behind the Thought,” Twombly and Serota discuss early influences such as Arshile Gorky and Franz Kline, experiences at Black Mountain College, the artist’s relationships to Virginia and Italy, the importance of landscape, the role of sculpture in Twombly’s overall oeuvre, the creation of his Lepanto (2001) and Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) (1994), and his later emphasis on cycles or multi-part artworks. In a statement typical of his attitude towards interviews, Twombly concludes by commenting “[y]ou’ve got enough. And if there’s something I didn’t say, you could make it up” (53). 

Scholars interested in this volume may also consult other major catalogues and monographs, such as: Mary Jacobus’s Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (2016); Thierry Greub’s Inscriptions (2022); Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, ed. Kirk Varnedoe (1994); Cy Twombly: Œuvres sur papier 1973–1977, Musée de Grenoble (2023); Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters, ed. Nicholas Cullinan (2011); 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. Cycles and Seasons at the Tate Modern, London (June 19 – September 14, 2008).

Cy Twombly. Cycles and Seasons. Edited by Nicholas Serota. With essays by Nicholas Cullinan; Tacita Dean; Richard Shiff. Published by D.A.P / Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. 2008. English edition. First published in 2008 by Tate Publishing on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons.