This catalogue includes an introduction by Emily Wei Rales, Kate Nesin’s essay “Five Sculptures In and Out of Place,” and an afterword by Emily Wei Rales and Mitchell P. Rales. It also includes photographs of sculptures in Glenstone Museum’s collection, a set of “selections from the Nicola Del Roscio Archives,” which include photographs of the sculptures taken in Twombly’s studios, a list of contributors, and a list of works. 

In her introduction, Wei Rales reflects on Twombly’s practice and its critical reception, with particular attention to the broad critical neglect of his sculptural practice. The catalogue features “six sculptures in the Glenstone collection that represent nearly every decade of Twombly’s sculptural activity…five were selected in consultation with the artist” (8). She offers a brief biography of the artist and offers reflection on her 2010 visit to Twombly’s Lexington studio. She notes that “I had the feeling that he regarded his private domain as indistinguishable from the fabric of his work life” (9). She recounts the process of selecting and installing the sculptures in collaboration with Twombly.

In her essay, Nesin takes up a comment made by Twombly to Wei Rales that the sculptures selected for the museum were “rough” (25). She links this with the “adjectival polarities [that] abound in the critical writing on Twombly’s work” (25), and notes the materiality of place invoked in the consistent notation of sculptures with their location of production. She writes that “as this group accentuates, concerns of proximity and approximation, of singularity and assembly, of consistency and indeterminacy, are vital to the entirety of Twombly’s sculptural output” (25). She discusses Twombly’s sculptural practice across the duration of his oeuvre, offers “an account of white paint as sculptural signature” (26), and foregrounds multiplicity and contradiction as key features of Twombly’s sculptures. Offering an individual account of each sculpture in the group, she argues that “Twombly’s sculptures, individually considered, are interpretatively open, fundamentally unfixed…any selection of his sculptures is ‘rough’” (26). 

For further discussion of Twombly’s sculptures, see especially Kate Nesin’s Cy Twombly’s Things (2014), Achim Hochdörfer’s Cy Twombly: Das Skulpturale Werk (2001), and Katharina Schmidt’s Cy Twombly: Die Skulptur / The Sculpture (2000). Additional exhibition catalogues concerning Twombly’s sculptural practice include Cy Twombly: Sculpture, published by Gagosian Gallery (2019), Cy Twombly: Sculptures 1992–2005, published by the Alte Pinakothek München and Schirmer/Mosel (2006), and Cy Twombly: Ten Sculptures, published by Gagosian Gallery (1997). Nesin’s essay for Eight Sculptures, published by Gagosian Gallery (2009) pursues a similar framing around dichotomies in Twombly’s practice. 

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Cy Twombly. Wei Rales, Emily, and Ali Nemerov, eds. Text by Kate Nesin. Published by Glenstone Museum, Potomac, 2018. 64 pages, fully illustrated. English.