Kate Nesin’s major monograph includes the following chapters: “Introduction: ‘Trying to be a Sculptor,’” “The Trouble with Prose,” “Superficies,” “Names,” “Returns,” and “Postscript: Sculpture Details.” Throughout, Nesin challenges characterizations of Twombly’s sculptures as transcendental or “purely” aesthetic that are prevalent in the secondary literature; she insists instead upon the materiality of the sculptures as objects and upon the challenges that that materiality instantiates. She considers questions of scale, surface, experientiality, modernism, and objecthood throughout. She further asserts that “how and with what these sculptures were repeatedly made signal the concerns of enclosure, address, and instability principal to them” (10).

“The Trouble with Prose” advocates for poesis as the appropriate designation for the sculptures, rather than “poetic,” responding to Giorgio Agamben. “Superficies” turns to Twombly’s use of white paint in the sculptures, and the multiple valences of whiteness in his practice. She focuses on materiality as “both complicating and grounding a vocabulary of surfaces, enclosure, emptiness, and openness” (13). “Names” focuses on “artificiality and unfixedness” (14), drawing on Roland Barthes and Rosalind Krauss’s foundational theoretical formulations. It also addresses the memorial valences and role of sculpture generally and sculpture for Twombly; as part of this discussion, Nesin considers connections to Nicholas Poussin. “Returns” addresses the gap in Twombly’s sculptural production between 1959 and 1976, focusing in particular on his return as “rais[ing] a patently equivocal dualism, that between the artist’s potential avant-garde status and his regular recourse to sculptural tradition” (14). “Postscript: Sculpture Details” reflects on the extent to which the sculptures can be said to be “knowable” or possible to explain and argues that the sculptures are in fact “operative through this resistance” to easy acquisition, classification, and description. The volume includes extended readings of sculptures such as Twombly’s Untitled (1953) sculpture of reed pipes overpainted in white, Thicket (1981), Epitaph (1992).

For further discussion of Twombly’s sculptures, see especially Achim Höchdorfer’s Cy Twombly: Das Skulptural Werke (2001) and Katharina Schmidt’s Cy Twombly: Die Skulptur / The Sculpture (2000). Additional exhibition catalogues concerning Twombly’s sculptural practice include Cy Twombly: Eight Sculptures, published by Gagosian Gallery (2009), 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).

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Cy Twombly's Things. By Kate Nesin. Published by Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2014. 248 pages; fully illustrated. English edition.