This volume includes a preface by Madison Cox and Nicola Del Roscio, Tina Barouti’s “Culture vernaculaire et abstraction,” Anne-Grit Becker’s “Voyager, dessiner,” and Natalie Dupêcher’s “Volubilis, bis: les peintures marocaines de Cy Twombly.” There are also reproductions of works included in the exhibition. An Italian-language edition of the text is also available, as is a French and Arabic edition. 

Barouti narrates the history of Twombly’s travels in North Africa with Robert Rauschenberg in 1953, focusing largely on the photographs taken by the artists. She includes details such as the type of camera used by the artists (a second-hand Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera), anecdotes of Twombly and Rauschenberg’s encounters with Paul Bowles in Tangier, and excerpts from letters Twombly wrote to the director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Leslie Cheek, Jr., regarding the trip. (Scholars may wish to note that the letters quoted here are available in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts archives in their entirety.) Becker likewise emphasizes Twombly’s letters from North Africa, though she draws on these to understand Twombly’s works on paper rather than his photographs. She identifies the artist’s experiences in Morocco as decisive in introducing chance procedures, offers extended formal analysis of a single sketch that survives from the artist’s time in Tangier, and discusses the artist’s subsequent production of his North African Sketchbooks (1953) at the Pigorini Museum in Rome. Dupêcher focuses on Italy and North Africa as intertwined for the artist rather than as wholly distinct influences, writing that they share “classical and ancient sediments, and a history that is both more broadly understood and more specifically rooted than is often understood” (“sédiments classiques et antiques, et une histoire tout à la fois entendue de manière plus large et enracinée de manière plus spécifique qu'on le conçoit souvent”) (79).

For more on the works included in this exhibition catalogue and on Twombly’s earlier practice, see also major retrospective catalogues and monographs, such as: Richard Leeman’s Cy Twombly: A Monograph (2005); Mary Jacobus’s Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (2016); Thierry Greub’s Inscriptions (2022); and Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, eds. Christine Kondoleon and Kate Nesin (2020). As this volume includes reproductions and discussion of Twombly’s photographs, the following volumes on photography may also be of interest: Cy Twombly: Photographs, Volume II, published by Gagosian (2015); Cy Twombly: Photographs 1951–2007, ed. Laszlo Glozer (2008); Twombly: Photographs, published by Brazos Projects (2000); Cy Twombly Photographs: Lyrical Variations , published by the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art (2016); Cy Twombly: Photographs, published by Matthew Marks Gallery (1993); Cy Twombly: A Survey of Photographs 1954–2011, published by Gagosian Gallery (2012); and Cy Twombly: Photographs, 1951–1999, ed. Nicola Del Roscio (2002).

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Published in 2023 on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly, Morocco, 1952/1953 at the Musée Yves Saint Laurent, Marrakech (March 4 – July 2, 2023).

Cy Twombly. Marocco 1952/1953. With texts by Tina Barouti, Anne-Grit Becker, Natalie Dupêcher. Published by Humboldt Books, 2023, 80 pages, b/w. Italian/English and French/Arabic editions.