This catalogue includes a short text by Vincent Katz entitled “Cy Twombly’s Photographs,” color reproductions of photographs, and a list of plates. 

Katz opens with the “dissociation between experience and photograph” (7), emphasizing the malleability and manipulability of a photograph. As a result, he writes that “one can achieve effects with a minimum of technique” (7). He connects Twombly’s practice to that of the Pictorialists and contrasts it with that of Eugène Atget. He describes the processes of autochrome, photogravure, and dry print. Regarding Twombly’s use of the dry print, he writes that “from the commonest means, like the monk’s habit, comes vision” (8). He then relates Twombly’s photographs to Edward Steichen’s The Pond — Moonlight (1904). On Twombly’s photography of artworks in his personal collection, Katz argues that “they show the expert, caressing eye looking, over and over, at the beloved object” (9). This mode of looking is likewise assigned to Twombly’s photographs of flowers, and in this case Katz finds that “it is as though, through casual observation, one were allowed to become infinitely demanding” (9). He reflects on points of connection and disjuncture in the practices of Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg, focusing especially on an early photograph in Rauschenberg’s Fulton Street studio in which Twombly’s Panorama (1955) is prominently featured. Katz concludes that “this work is about how proximity changes one’s view, just as when one is up close to someone, one’s vision changes” (10). A brief coda touches on Twombly’s “portraits of friends” (11), also included in the reproductions in the volume. 

For more on Twombly’s photographs, see also From State of Mind to the Tangible: The Photographic Cosmos of Cy Twombly by Carlos Peris (2022); Cy Twombly: Photographs III 1951–2010, published by the Museum Brandhorst and Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen (2011); Cy Twombly: Photographs 1951–2007, ed. Laszlo Glozer (2008); Twombly: Photographs, published by Brazos Projects (2000); Cy Twombly Photographs: Lyrical Variations, published by the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art (2016); Cy Twombly: Photographs, published by Matthew Marks Gallery (1993); Cy Twombly: A Survey of Photographs 1954–2011, published by Gagosian Gallery (2012); and Cy Twombly: Photographs, published by Gagosian Gallery (2015) and containing a text by Mary Jacobus.

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Cy Twombly. Photographs: 1951–1999. Edited by Nicola del Roscio. Essay by Vincent Katz. Published by Schirmer/Mosel, in association with Planco, München, 2002. 128 pages, 70 color illustrations. English edition.