This volume includes the following entries: a preface by Edelbert Köb; Achim Hochdörfer’s “‘Blue goes out, B comes in’: Cy Twombly’s Narration of Indeterminacy”; Gregor Stemmrich’s “‘Talking about the Essence of Something’: History, Discourse and Myth in Cy Twombly’s Work”; Peter Geimer’s “Cy Twombly, Painter / Cy Twombly, Photographer”; Jeff Wall’s “Observations, Started off by a Conversation in Rome with Achim Höchdorfer”; Franz West’s “On Cy Twombly’s Semantic Loops”; Johanna Burton’s “Cy Twombly’s Transformations”; Tacita Dean’s “Gaeta: A Photo Essay”; and Astrid Kurz’s “Biography Cy Twombly.” It also includes a list of works exhibited.

Köb’s essay frames the exhibition as “bringing all the media together and offering a comprehensive overview that makes it possible to see and experience their simultaneity and subtle interconnections” (7). Within this, Köb foregrounds photography as the least known and most novel aspect of the exhibition. Höchdorfer argues that Twombly’s “narration of indeterminacy” “creates a ‘panorama’ that is always being reconfigured—to use the title of the picture photographed by Twombly a panorama of associations and connotations that engender structurally and semantically weak formations” (31). Stemmrich focuses on questions of epistemology, postmodernism, temporality, and use of poetry. Wall emphasizes subjectivity, rationality, and beauty as criteria for evaluating Twombly’s practice. West draws on Claude Lévi-Strauss and considers composition, order, and fragmentation as frameworks for Twombly’s practice. Burton engages at length with Kirk Varnedoe’s 1994 essay “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” originally published in the exhibition catalogue for Twombly’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and offers extended consideration of the significance of the artist’s misspelling of “Ilium” as “Iliam” in Fifty Days at Iliam (1978). Dean’s photo essay includes views of Twombly’s Gaeta home, and the studio spaces and library within it.

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). Scholars interested in this volume may also consult other major catalogues and monographs, such as: Mary Jacobus’s Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (2016); Thierry Greub’s Inscriptions (2022); Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, ed. Kirk Varnedoe (1994); Cy Twombly: Œuvres sur papier 1973–1977, Musée de Grenoble (2023); and Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, eds. Christine Kondoleon and Kate Nesin (2020). 

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly: Sensations of the Moment at Museum Moderner Kunsts Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, June 4–October 11, 2009, curated by Achim Hochdörfer.

Cy Twombly. States of Mind. Texts by: Johanna Burton, Peter Geimer, Achim Hochdörfer, Gregor Stemmrich. Essays: Tacita Dean, Jeff Wall, Franz West. Schirmer/Mosel, 2009. 324 pages, 278 color illustrations. German/English edition.