This catalogue includes Mary Jacobus’s essay “Aura di limoni (Aura of Lemons),” color reproductions, and a list of plates. Jacobus opens by characterizing Twombly’s photographs as “like emanations.” She asserts that “Twombly’s photographs seem to probe the intimate places of auratic objects—paintings, tapestries, a sculptured earlobe or a curling tress of hair…” She notes the appearance of Twombly’s painterly and sculptural practices in the photographs, describing the photographs in turn as “miniature paintings in light.” She connects this to Rainer Maria Rilke’s description of happiness as “falling” in the Tenth Elegy of the Duino Elegies, before turning to Twombly’s photographs of lemons. She notes the different varieties of lemons and related citrus fruits documented by the photographs: cedri (citrons), scompiglio di Venere (which Jacobus translates as “Venus in disarray?”), and mani di Buddha (Buddha’s Hand). She frames the photographs as invoking visual and olfactory senses simultaneously, adding that “they exhale something of the aura of Twombly himself.” She then turns to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” offering “the aura as medium” in Twombly’s photographs. She considers the photographs as an index of Twombly’s gaze as well as of his perception, connecting this to Benjamin’s theorization of the optical unconscious. She incorporates Roland Barthes’s famous theory of the punctum. She closes with quoting Pablo Neruda’s “Oda al limón” (“Ode to the Lemon”), arguing that “[i]n Twombly’s photographs, the freshness of things is savored as pastness—their untouched essence at the moment of capture.” 

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, published by Gagosian (2012), Edmund de Waal 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 Gallery Davies Street, London (October 10 – December 12, 2015).

Cy Twombly. Photographs. Volume II. Text by Mary Jacobus. Published by Gagosian Gallery, 2015. 48 pages, fully illustrated. English edition.