This volume includes a foreword from James Cuno, an untitled essay by James Rondeau, color plates, and a selected bibliography. 

Cuno’s foreword notes that the exhibition was the artist’s first in Chicago since his first solo show at the Seven Stairs Gallery in 1951. Rondeau begins with an overview of the artist’s practice and Roland Barthes’s writing about Twombly. He characterizes the artist as “an actively irreducible figure whose output—ever impossible to categorize or systematically decipher—remains potently aggressive and strange, experimental and willfully unresolved” (16). Rondeau points to 1972 as a decisive break between the artist’s “early” and “late” practice and describes the selection criteria for the artworks included in the exhibition. In each subsequent section, Rondeau then describes: in section II, the artist’s response to landscape, with reference to Quattro Stagioni (1993–94) and Nicholas Poussin; in section III, Twombly’s Untitled (2001), with reference to related artworks such as Mars and the Artist (1975); in section IV, Twombly’s A Gathering of Time (2003) and Untitled (Winter Pictures) (2004), with reference to earlier artworks such as Twombly’s Poems to the Sea (1959) and Jasper Johns’s Field Painting (1963–1964); his Peony Blossom Paintings (2007), with reference to Edo screen painting and Japanese haikus quoted by the artist; and in section VI, Twombly’s III Notes from Salalah (2005–2007), with reference to the city for which the paintings are named and Rainer Maria Rilke. Rondeau concludes that Twombly’s “achievement is truly liberating in its intention to express and to annihilate the self, to adore and to abhor the vulgarities of human sexuality, to celebrate and to corrupt the allure of classicism and myth, to embrace and to dismantle the past, to replicate and to disfigure language and landscape” (38). 

For more on the artworks discussed in this catalogue, see also Cy Twombly: Blooming, a Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things, published by the Collection Lambert in Avignon (2007); Cy Twombly: Blooming, a Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things, published by Gagosian (2007); Mary Jacobus’s Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (2016), especially chapter 8, “Twombly’s Lapse”; III Notes from Salalah, published by Gagosian Gallery (2008); Cy Twombly: A Gathering of Time, published by Gagosian Gallery (2003); and Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, ed. Nicholas Serota (2008).

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works, 2000–2007 was published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title organized by and presented at the Art Institute of Chicago from May 16 to September 12, 2009.

Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works, 2000–2007. With an essay by James Rondeau. Catalogue of The Art Institute of Chicago. 96 pages, 31 colour plates, 29 illustrations. German edition, Schirmer/Mosel, 2009. English edition distributed by Yale University Press for the Art Institute of Chicago, 2009.