This catalogue includes a foreword and acknowledgements by H. B. Summer, an essay by Heiner Bastian, and reproductions of artworks included in the exhibition. 

Bastian’s essay is broken down into a number of smaller sections, including: “Writing—In What Form?,” “A Grey Unrecognisable Place,” “A Rough Album,” “Instant and Transformation,” “An Order of Subjective Feeling: Mallarmé as Beginning,” “An Historically Necessary Context,” “From Gesture to a Personal Tableau of Signs,” “A Form and Its Reflection,” “Sign and Analogy: Color as ‘Materia Nuda,’” “Birth of Venus as Image of the Centre,” and “Notes on Paintings.” Bastian writes of his distrust in the process of writing a monographic essay on Twombly’s oeuvre, speculating, “Doesn’t it show that writing about art is an impersonal form that is in the end superfluous? What do paintings mean when experienced through our verbal equivalents…?” (31) He maintains a focus on the relationship between language, both written and verbal, and visual form throughout the essay. He foregrounds his own attempt at “remembering and attempting to reconstruct his personal experience” (32) throughout the essay, describing both early experiences of viewing Twombly’s work (as in “A Rough Album”) and experiences contemporaneous to the writing of the essay. He discusses the effects of time on the paintings and the rewards of longer durations of viewing, as light and other conditions shift visual perception. Bastian also brings in major theoretical sources such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Stéphane Mallarmé. He offers Marcel Duchamp, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Abstract Expressionism as his “historically necessary context” for understanding Twombly’s practice. He discourses on qualities of light in Twombly’s practice and in “the ancient and Mediterranean world” as “a dimension unto itself…Light is the genesis of the Mediterranean” (37). Moving chronologically through Twombly’s practice until the date of publication, Bastian at last asserts that Twombly “speaks through” his historical imaginary populated by heroes and gods, with “veil, time line and changing context in everything that can be captured as poetry in painting” (48).

For more on Twombly’s early practice, see also major retrospective catalogues and monographs, such as: Richard Leeman’s Cy Twombly: A Monograph (2005); Mary Jacobus’s Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (2016); Thierry Greub’s Inscriptions (2022); Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, ed. Kirk Varnedoe (1994); and Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, eds. Christine Kondoleon and Kate Nesin (2020).

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Cy Twombly. Bilder Paintings 1952 – 1976. Text by Heiner Bastian. Propyläen Verlag, Berlin, 1978. 240 pages. English/German