This catalogue includes Jonathan Jones’s brief essay “The Rose,” an excerpt from Les Roses by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by A. Poulin Jr., and color reproductions of works included in the exhibition with many detail photographs.

Jones asserts first that “Twombly’s new paintings do not depict roses, or a rose, but The Rose.” For Jones, this establishes a distinction between the object itself—i.e., a rose as a class of things—and “The Rose[, which] is a symbol.” He compares the paintings to English Tudor heraldry, but finds that in the paintings “the masculine regal rose is unmanned. It becomes a romantic rose, and then a decadent rose—and finally, in the two darkest hued works (IV and V), a rose of blood and wine.” He then focuses on the sense of movement generated by the paintings, connecting them to Twombly’s Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor (1994) and Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair (1985). He offers extended formal analyses of the paintings, describing them “as if Jackson Pollock were fused with a Chinese painter of blooms.” Jones concludes that “The symbol is empty. What lives is this moment of its use: not the stony Tudor emblem, but the poet holding the image in a cupped hand. Twombly’s Rose is as primitive and real as his bloody seas and drunken seasons: an abstraction become real in time.”

For further discussion of Twombly’s later practice and 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); 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 Rose at Gagosian Gallery Britannia Street, London (February 12 – May 9, 2009).

The Rose. Text by Jonathan Jones; Selections from Les Roses by Rainer Maria Rilke. Published by Gagosian Gallery, 2009. Fully illustrated. English edition.