This volume, produced by the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio in collaboration with the Cy Twombly Foundation, includes Eleonora Di Erasmo’s essay “Cy Twombly: Imperfect Paradise.” The volume includes Italian and English text; the English version of Di Erasmo’s essay can also be accessed through Gagosian Quarterly here. As the article abstract notes, “The program [Un/Veiled] was the result of an extensive three-year study, done at the behest of Nicola Del Roscio in the Rome and Gaeta offices of the Cy Twombly Foundation, intended to collect, document, and preserve compositions by musicians around the world who have been inspired by Twombly’s work, or to establish an artistic dialogue with them.”

Di Erasmo begins with Wallace Stevens’s Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), noting that Twombly transcribed a modified passage from Stevens’s “The Poems of Our Climate” (1938) in a set of 1990 drawings. Specifically, Twombly wrote “Delight lies in flawed words and stubborn sound” (originally in Stevens: “Note that, in this bitterness, delight, / Since the imperfect is so hot in us, / Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds”). Di Erasmo uses this poem and Twombly’s iteration of it as a means of reflecting on the creative process itself, arguing that “[t]he artist feeds on reality, investigating and probing it in all its details, conveying it naked.” She turns to Twombly’s wide range of referents and quotations “as a means of decoding the world and understanding human emotions, beauty and its contradiction, the universal relationship between things that governs the incessant forward movement of our existence.” Di Erasmo offers reflections on artists inspired by Twombly included in the program, such as Eraldo Bernocchi and Isabella Summers, and closes with reflections on the relationship between music and painting within and after Twombly’s Treatise on the Veil (1968) and Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) (1970). She also discusses Pierre Henry’s Le Voile d’Orphée (1953) as an inspiration for Treatise on the Veil, and the subsequent performance of Henry’s composition as part of Un/Veiled.

For more on artistic responses to Twombly’s practice, see also the Cy Twombly Foundation’s In Perspective project as well as later iterations of Un/Veiled such as Un/Veiled: Inside the Creative Process (after Cy Twombly), also published by the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio with the Cy Twombly Foundation (2024). For more on the Treatise on the Veil works and their musical antecedents discussed in this catalogue, see also the dedicated catalogue for Treatise on the Veil published by the Menil Collection, Houston (2019).

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Published on the occasion of the project Un/veiled. Cy Twombly, Music, Inspirations at Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome (May 20–June 11, 2022).

Un/veiled. Cy Twombly, Music, Inspirations. With a text by Eleonora Di Erasmo. Published by Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, 2022. 54 pages. Italian/English.