This volume includes Hubertus V. Amelunxen’s “Schenkst der Rose Scweigen Ein,” published in German as well as English and French (“Do Not Interrupt This Rose,” “Cette Rose Ne l’Interromps…”), color plates, and a list of works exhibited. In his essay, Amelunxen asserts that the photographs are “grounded in the art of light… With photography, Cy Twombly is seeing in another time. Seeing and Not-Seeing search for each other in the photographs in a manner distinct from his paintings and drawings” (170). Drawing on Roland Barthes, he considers the extent to which the composition of the photographs is deliberately mediated and manipulated by the artist. Amelunxen discusses a 1944 photograph of Twombly in Ogunquit, Maine at length. Returning to photographs taken by Twombly, he argues that “[n]othing could be more anaethema to Cy Twombly than using an image to illustrate, to refer to other things; (almost) none of the references are in the paintings or drawing that deviated from the picture of his own signs or what was written” (171). He extends this reading to the photographs, finding them essentially immediate transmissions. Addressing Twombly’s earliest photographs in the 1950s, Amelunxen draws connections to the “intellectual climate” (172) produced by figures such as Charles Olson and D.T. Suzuki. Traversing the breadth of Twombly’s photographic practice, Amelunxen maintains that “[c]onsistently, the relation between visibility and invisibility manifests itself, approaching, in dialogue with Merleau-Ponty, the Not-Visible within the Visible” (173). He concludes with a repeated assertion of the photographs as conveying “immediacy [and] vulnerability” (175).
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, 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)
Cy Twombly. Photographs III. 1951–2010. With an essay by Hubertus von Amelunxen. Schirmer/Mosel, 2011. 180 pages, 107 colour plates. English/French/German edition.