This catalogue, published by Gagosian Gallery in 2012, contains Edmund de Waal’s essay “Cy Twombly: A Kind of Aura,” color plates, and a list of works exhibited. De Waal writes that Twombly “inhabits” the photographs included in the exhibition and notes that the photographs were taken across a fifty-five-year period. He asserts that Twombly’s “paintings and sculptures keep alive very particular moments in their making, the inscribing, scribbling, daubing, and scratching onto paper, canvas, and plaster, the sticking and tearing and collaging. His work is a glorious list of transitive verbs, an iterative inhabitation of the present moment.” He offers historical background and thematic summation of the photographs, noting that subjects represented range from Robert Rauschenberg’s Fulton Street studio in the 1950s to flowers to a Lexington, Virginia yard sale. Though not mentioned here, note also that many of the photographs in this catalogue were taken in Italy, often Gaeta. These include Cabbages, Gaeta (1998/2009), Lemons, Gaeta (2005/2009), and Light Flowers III, Gaeta (2008/2008). De Waal suggests that the works merit the designation of anathemata, which he defines as “an act of apprehension and accord.” The effect for de Waal is that of “an inscription in space…a memorializing of time itself.” He draws connections to Rainer Maria Rilke and Man Ray, specifically his retelling of his experience meeting Constantin Brancusi. De Waal concludes that “Twombly's photographs share Brancusi's intensity of vision. They have an aura.”

For more on Twombly’s photographs, see also From State of Mind to the Tangible: The Photographic Cosmos of Cy Twombly by Carlos Peris (2022); Cy Twombly: Photographs III 1951–2010, published by the Museum Brandhorst and Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen (2011); 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). In Cy Twombly: Photographs, Volume II, published by Gagosian (2015) following the present volume, Mary Jacobus’s essay “Aura di limoni (Aura of Lemons)” also focuses on the role of aura in Twombly’s photography.

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly. Photographs at Gagosian Beverly Hills (April 27 – June 9, 2012).

Cy Twombly. Photographs. Essay by Edmund de Waal. Published by Gagosian Gallery, 2012. Fully illustrated. English edition.