This volume, which focuses on the pavilion dedicated to Twombly designed by Renzo Piano at the Menil Collection, Houston, includes a foreword from Josef Helfenstein, Paul Winkler’s “Just About Perfect: A Recollection,” Carol Mancusi-Ungaro’s “Cues from Cy Twombly,” installation photographs of the pavilion, plates of artworks, and a list of illustrated works.

Winkler’s essay includes insights into the Twombly’s involvement in the design and execution of the pavilion and is accompanied by reproductions of letters and sketches the artist sent to Winkler. He narrates the origins of the Cy Twombly Gallery and describes the level of specificity with which the artist offered input: e.g., “His original sketch…consisted of two rooms, each eight meters (twenty-six feet) square…It should be sky lit with no windows. The outside should be fairly abstract or neutral. He wanted wide-plank wooden floors, which were not to be too yellow” (18). He then turns to Piano and conveys the architect’s extensive dialogue with the artist to produce the desired effect. 

Mancusi-Ungaro centers her essay on her experience of conserving Twombly’s artworks as well as on her personal relationship with the artist. She focuses especially on The Age of Alexander (1959–1960), Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) (1994), and Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair (1985), all of which are now permanently installed in the Cy Twombly Gallery. Of Twombly, Mancusi-Ungaro notably observes that “[h]e would speak freely of Don Juan, his mother, and Apollo. It did not seem to matter that they had lived hundreds of years ago or ten years ago, or never lived at all. Each seemed equally available to him” (63).

Scholars interested in this volume may also consult other major catalogues and monographs, such as: Mary Jacobus’s Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (2016); Thierry Greub’s Inscriptions (2022); Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, ed. Kirk Varnedoe (1994); Cy Twombly: Œuvres sur papier 1973–1977, Musée de Grenoble (2023); Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters, ed. Nicholas Cullinan (2011); and Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, eds. Christine Kondoleon and Kate Nesin (2020). A recording of a conversation between Twombly and Mancusi-Ungaro is also available through the Menil’s Artists Documentation Program, available online here.

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Cy Twombly Gallery. Edited by Nicola Del Roscio and Julie Sylvester. With a foreword by Joseph Helfenstein and texts by Paul Winkler and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro. Published by Cy Twombly Foundation and Menil Foundation, 2013. 220 pages, fully illustrated. English edition.