Cy Twombly: Making Past Present was a major joint exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. The project was postponed due to the lockdowns necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic, but was revived in 2022 with a presentation at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In 2023, the exhibition arrived at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Curated by Christine Kondoleon, with Kate Nesin and co-curated by Richard Rand and Scott Allan in Los Angeles, the exhibition brought together paintings, drawings, sculptures, and objects from Twombly’s personal collection, placing them in dialogue with ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Near Eastern works drawn from each institution’s holdings. Across its presentations, the exhibition explored how the past functioned in Twombly’s work not as a static reference but as an active, generative presence.

Twombly rejected the idea that modern art was dislocated from the past. Instead, he understood tradition as mutable and ongoing, insisting that history was vitally contemporary. The exhibition took this position as its premise, emphasizing that ancient culture entered his work not through illustration but through gesture, inscription, color, and naming—translated rather than reproduced, and always shaped by distance and mediation. Antiquity appeared less as a set of images than as a mode of thinking, absorbed through reading, travel, and looking, and continually reactivated in the present.

The Museum of Fine Arts was a particularly resonant site within this framework. As a student at the Museum School in the late 1940s, Twombly regularly crossed the street to visit the museum, where antiquities were then displayed in open study collections. Forms encountered there—and later through sustained travel in the Mediterranean—were absorbed into what might be described as an internal archive. Later, living in Italy placed him in daily proximity to ancient sites and objects, reinforcing antiquity as a lived environment rather than a distant inheritance. 

Writing functioned as a central axis of the exhibition. Twombly’s characteristic inscriptions—looping, misspelled, partially erased—were placed in proximity to carved stone texts from antiquity. In both cases, writing registered as a physical act rather than a transparent vehicle of meaning. Ancient inscriptions, often intended to be read aloud, resonated with Twombly’s attention to sound, spacing, and breath—concerns shaped by his engagement with poetry and with the experimental pedagogies associated with Black Mountain College.

Sculpture and material presence formed another point of convergence. Ancient representations of Venus were shown alongside Twombly’s own evocations of Aphrodite and Venus. These juxtapositions underscored his attraction to modest forms and white-painted constructions, and to the ways ancient cultures invested everyday objects with ritual and symbolic weight. His later sculptures similarly balanced fragility and monumentality, daily life and the sacred.

Mythological figures such as Achilles, Mars, Dionysus, and Orpheus recurred throughout the exhibition as names and emotional coordinates rather than narrative subjects. To inscribe these figures was to keep them present—to acknowledge their persistence while allowing them to remain unstable, mediated, and personal.

By situating Twombly’s work within encyclopedic collections, Making Past Present articulated history as something continually reconfigured through encounter. The exhibition presented Twombly as an artist who treated antiquity as a vernacular—available, mutable, and intimate—and for whom making art was inseparable from remembering, translating, and carrying forward what had already been made.

The Museum of Fine Arts published a catalogue to accompany the exhibition. It features the essays by Christine Kondoleon with Kate Nesin, with contributions by Anne Carson, Jennifer R. Gross, Brooke Holmes, and Mary Jacobus.

The Summer 2020 Issue of Gagosian Quaterly features the interview between Christine Kondoleon, Kate Nesin, and Gagosian director, Mark Francis about the origin of the exhibition.

For further information:
Getty Center, Los Angeles
getty.edu

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
mfa.org