Cy Twombly. Paintings and Sculptures 1951 and 1953
This exhibition catalogue, published by Sperone Westwater in 1989, includes reproductions of two sets of Twombly’s artworks: one “executed in Lexington (Virginia) and Black Mountain (North Carolina) and…shown in Chicago in the fall of 1951,” the other “painted in New York City after spending a year in Europe and North Africa and…exhibited at the Stable Gallery, New York” in 1953. It includes a reproduction of Robert Motherwell’s 1951 statement about the artist, originally published by the Seven Stairs Gallery. Motherwell’s laudatory statement, referring to Twombly as “the most accomplished young painter whose work I happen to have encountered,” praises the artist for “his native temperamental affinity with the abandon, the brutality, the irrational in avant-garde painting of the moment.”
Other than the reproduction of Motherwell’s earlier text, the catalogue contains no discursive essays. There is a reproduction of a poem written by Charles Olson for Twombly, intended to accompany “his first Chicago and New York shows,” and a series of plates followed by an exhibition checklist. Paintings and sculptures reproduced include Min-Oe (1951), Solon I and Solon II (1951), Volubilis (1953), and Tiznit (1953). The catalogue also reproduces photographs of Twombly taken by Robert Rauschenberg. The catalogue was published in an edition of 1500.
Scholars researching Twombly’s early practice may also consult Richard Leeman’s Cy Twombly: A Monograph (2005); Kate Nesin’s Cy Twombly’s Things (2014); Thierry Greub’s Inscriptions (2022); and Gagosian Gallery’s Cy Twombly: In Beauty it is finished: Drawings 1951–2008 (2018). Writings on Cy Twombly, ed. Nicola Del Roscio (2002) also includes primary source material from this period. Motherwell’s text can also be accessed in Cy Twombly, the 1951 exhibition catalogue from Seven Stairs Gallery.
(Publication description by Jamie Danis)
Cy Twombly. Paintings and Sculptures 1951 and 1953. Texts by Charles Olson; Robert Motherwell. Published by Sperone Westwater, New York, 1989. 76 pages. Illustrated. English.
