This publication includes three volumes: a hardcover book titled Cy Twombly New York, illustrated with the works included in the associated Gagosian Gallery Madison Avenue, New York exhibition; a hardcover book titled Cy Twombly London with the works included in the associated Gagosian Gallery Grosvenor Hill, London exhibition; and a softcover volume with Briony Fer’s essay “Twombly’s Time.”

Fer opens with the assertion that “[n]owhere is the pursuit of the past more urgently felt than in Cy Twombly's late sculptures.” She focuses particularly on his bronze casts, and takes up Frank O’Hara’s famous characterization of the sculptures as “witty and funereal.” She argues that the sculptures “certainly do not depict ancient myths directly but evoke more obliquely the kinds of props or objects that might attach to some obscure ritual, whose meaning is no longer accessible to us.” Drawing comparisons to Pablo Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe (1914), attending carefully to the relationship Twombly’s sculptures have to time and aging. Fer takes up Twombly’s 1969 paintings made in Bolsena at length, which she frames as “creating [Twombly’s] graphic encyclopedia,” taken together with 1968 drawings on Saint Martin using Leonardo da Vinci sketches. Returning to the sculptures, Fer concludes that “Twombly dramatizes what happens to art in the process of changing over time, and what it is to think about that process in larger aesthetic, cultural, and historical terms.”

For further discussion of Twombly’s sculptures, see especially Kate Nesin’s Cy Twombly’s Things (2014), Achim Hochdörfer’s Cy Twombly: Das Skulpturale Werk (2001), and Katharina Schmidt’s Cy Twombly: Die Skulptur / The Sculpture (2000). Additional exhibition catalogues concerning Twombly’s sculptural practice include Cy Twombly: Eight Sculptures, published by Gagosian Gallery (2009), Cy Twombly: Sculptures 1992–2005, published by the Alte Pinakothek München and Schirmer/Mosel (2006), and Cy Twombly: Ten Sculptures, published by Gagosian Gallery (1997).

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly at Gagosian Gallery Madison Avenue, New York (April 23 – July 2, 2015) and Cy Twombly at Gagosian Gallery Grosvenor Hill, London (October 10 – December 12, 2015).

Cy Twombly. Text by Briony Fer. Published by Gagosian Gallery, 2016. Box set of two hardcover books and one softcover book with text. Cy Twombly New York: 72 pages, fully illustrated; Cy Twombly London: 92 pages, fully illustrated; and Twombly's Time by Briony Fer: 14 pages, fully illustrated. English edition.