This volume includes a foreword from Yutaka Hashimoto, Yumiko Saito’s “Message,” Kiyoko Maeda’s “The Photographs of Cy Twombly,” reproductions of photographs, an illustrated list of works, and quotes from the artist. 

Saito’s entry focuses on the effect of Twombly’s photographs, describing it “as possessed of an aesthetic that is detached from the visual reality of the objects we see before us and goes beyond being depictions of physical objects.” Maeda narrates the history of Twombly’s photographic practice, including his time at the Art Students League and travels with Robert Rauschenberg in 1953. Of his 1954 photographs in Rauschenberg’s Fulton Street studio, Maeda writes that they “did not draw our attention to the overall unity of the composition but rather to the individual elements scattered across the picture plane.” Turning to Twombly’s photographs from the 1980s, Maeda asserts that their soft focus and close framing produces “vagueness and ambiguity [which in turn] induces a sense of similarity that makes it possible for the objects to interchange with each other, producing a variety of possibilities for expansion of the images' implications.” The essay also includes discussion of Twombly’s use of dry printing and photocopying. Maeda concludes by turning to blindness, drawing here on Roland Barthes and returning to discussion of Twombly drawing in the dark during his military service as a means of unlearning his acculturated hand. Maeda extends this framework to photography, adding that “Twombly used photography to take the ‘bind’ aspect of his art one dimension further with methods that couldn't be achieved in painting or drawing.” 

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: States of Mind, published by Schirmer / Mosel (2009); 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 on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly Photographs: Lyrical Variations, held at The Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art (April 23 – August 28, 2016).

Cy Twombly Photographs: Lyrical Variations. Texts by Yutaka Hashimoto; Yumiko Saito; Kiyoko Macda. Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, 2016. 192 pages, illustrated. Japanese/English edition.