This catalogue includes Achim Hochdörfer’s essay “How to Hold the Tension,” an entry by Julie Sylvester, photographs by Sally Mann of Twombly’s Lexington home and studio, color plates, and a list of works exhibited. The catalogue includes the last paintings Twombly produced and was published after the artist’s passing. 

Hochdörfer’s essay begins with recollections of a lunch with Twombly at which the artist described memories with Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. He recounts the artist naming James Joyce as his favorite author and 1962 silkscreens as amongst his favorite of Rauschenberg’s artworks. Before situating Twombly’s practice relative to contemporaneous movements across his six-decade practice, Hochdörfer notes that “it has also become particularly clear to me how intensely Twombly was struggling to position his own late work at the time” (6). He identifies Quattro Stagioni (1993–94) as the first of Twombly’s “late works,” writing that “[t]he melancholy that pervades the Quattro Stagioni is due in part to his interweaving of individual history and the cycle of nature” (7). He offers extended reading of each canvas in the cycle before returning to the artist’s final works. He notes that, though not titled by the artist, Twombly clearly connected them to his Camino Real (2010) and muses that “in fact one has to wonder whether in these last pictures Twombly was trying to picture the physical strain of age itself” (10). He concludes that “his last work, consisting of an alternation of sound and silence that doesn't want to end, is titled Hay que caminar—there is only the moving on” (12). 

Sylvester’s entry notes that an inscription from Anne Sexton was found on a worktable near his final paintings: “Think of that first flawless moment over the lawn. Think of the difference it made” (41). She draws connections to his earlier series of paintings The Rose (2008) and concludes that “Twombly knew that these were his last paintings…They have his enormous strength” (43).

For further discussion of Twombly’s later practice and of related paintings, see also: Cy Twombly, published by the Centre Pompidou (2016); Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, ed. Nicholas Serota (2008); Mary Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (2016); Thierry Greub, Inscriptions (2022); Cy Twombly, published by Gagosian Gallery (2016); Dominique Baqué’s Cy Twombly: Sous le signe d’Apollon et de Dionysos (2016); Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, eds. Christine Kondoleon and Kate Nesin (2020); Nela Pavlouskova’s Cy Twombly: The Late Paintings 2003–2011 (2015); Camino Real, published by Gagosian (2010); and Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works, 2000–2007, published by Yale University Press for the Art Institute of Chicago (2009).

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

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

Cy Twombly. The Last Paintings. Essays by Achim Hochdörfer and Julie Sylvester; Photo essay by Sally Mann. Published by Gagosian Gallery, 2012. Fully illustrated.