This edited volume was published following conference preceding of the same title. It is divided into the following sections with essays and authors included. Section I, “Twombly’s Artistic Concept,” includes Richard Hoppe-Sailer’s “Cy Twombly. Painterly Affinities,” Adriana Bontea’s “Cy Twombly: Painting as an Art of Thinking,” Gottfried Boehm’s “Cy Twombly. Sites of Transformation,” and Steffen Siegel’s “Distancing of Abstraction. Cy Twombly’s Photographic Gestus.” Section II, “Antiquity as Inspiration,” includes Petr Charvát’s “Cy Twombly, Sumer, and the Sumerians,” Dietrich Wildung’s “Wrong label? Egyptological Reflections on Coronation of Sesostris,” Joachim Latacz’s “Cy Twombly with Achilles at Troy,” Dietrich Boschung’s “Cnidian Venus,” Jürgen Hammerstaedt’s “Cy Twombly’s Thyrsis Triptych and the Hellenic Pastoral Poetry of Theocritus,” and Stefan Priwitzer’s “Nine Discourses on Commodus.” Section III, “Modernity as a Frame of Reference,” includes Artur Rosenauer’s “Distiny or Strategy? On the Question of Late Style in Twombly and Titian,” Lisa Hopkins’s “Twombly’s Hero and Leandro (To Christopher Marlowe),” Henry Keazor’s “‘…And Then Goes Off to Somewhere Else’: Cy Twombly and Nicolas Poussin,” Yoshinobu Hakutani’s “Cy Twombly’s Painting of the Peonies and Haiku Imagery,” Georg Braungart’s “‘Infinite Trace’: Cy Twombly’s ‘Poetics’ between Image and Song,” and Armin Zweite’s “Twombly’s Roses. On a Few of the Painter’s Pictures in the Museum Brandhorst.” Section IV, “Image and Text in Cy Twombly,” includes Thierry Greub’s “‘To Revalorize Poetry Now’: On Cy Twombly’s Literary Inscriptions,” Mary Jacobus’s “Twombly’s Narcissus: Ovid’s Art, Rilke’s Mirror,” Martina Dobbe’s “Mediality, Text, and Image. Aspects of Theoretical Discourse about the Works of Cy Twombly,” and Martin Roussel’s “‘ce passé du trait’: Roland Barthes’ Painter of Writing, TW.” Section V, “Traces of Life,” includes Reiner Speck’s “Twombly’s Laura” and Nicola Del Roscio’s “Trip to Russia and Afghanistan with Cy Twombly, 1979.” The volume is broadly concerned with sources for, references in, and influences on Twombly’s practice, with entries traversing the entire chronological span and all media of his oeuvre.

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); and Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, eds. Christine Kondoleon and Kate Nesin (2020). 

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Cy Twombly. Image, Text, Paratext. Edited by Thierry Greub. Published by Wilhelm Fink, Paderborn, 2017. 528 pages, illustrated. German and English editions.