Cy Twombly. Vol. IV: Unpublished Photographs 195–2011
Text by Michael Krüger
Text by Michael Krüger
This catalogue includes color reproductions and an essay by Michael Krüger printed in German, English, and French as “Die Zitronen des Cy Twombly / Cy Twombly’s Lemons / Les Citrons de Cy Twombly.” Krüger begins with his own experience with ornamental lemons at the Villa Massimo in the 1980s and his contemporaneous encounter with Twombly’s artworks. He asserts that “Now, more than thirty years later, I am having a look at the lemons he photographed. They are without a doubt my lemons. He preserved them for me, these misshapen yellow clumps, which must have fascinated him so much that he wanted to portray them again and again, from all sides” (173). (Krüger does later note that he never met the artist in person.) After noting the relative paucity of attention to Twombly’s photographs, Krüger asserts that Twombly’s passing fundamentally shifted perception of his artworks: “with the shock of the news of Twombly's death, his pictures, which one had seen here and there—and sometimes missed—began to light up in the imagination like an electronic route map, started sending signals to each other that in turn produced a physiognomy, an overarching whole” (174). He reflects on Twombly’s broader legacy and his assessments of the various strengths he identifies in the artist’s practice. He describes the types of subjects portrayed in the photographs and the relationship between any of Twombly’s photographs and reality itself. Krüger concludes that “of all the desperate and failed, serious or ironic attempts to force some elusive meaning into the rectangle of a picture, to escape the void, in the end all that is left is a few lemons” (176).
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, Volume II, published by Gagosian (2015); 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, 1951–1999, ed. Nicola Del Roscio (2002). For more on Twombly’s photographs of lemons specifically, see Mary Jacobus’s essay “Aura di limoni (Aura of Lemons)” in Cy Twombly: Photographs, Volume II.
(Publication description by Jamie Danis)
Cy Twombly. Vol. IV: Unpublished Photographs 1951–2011. With an introduction by Michael Krüger. Schirmer/Mosel., 2012. 184 pages, 111 colour plates. English/French/German edition.