Presented by the Sursock Museum in association with the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio and in partnership with Lebanon's Ministry of Culture, Cy Twombly: Photographs brought together thirty works spanning more than two decades of Twombly's engagement with the photographic medium. The first exhibition of Twombly's photographs in Lebanon, it drew on loans from the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio and Gagosian Gallery to present a concentrated view of a practice that Twombly sustained—largely outside the public eye—from his years as a student at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s through the rest of his life.

The photographs, made between 1985 and 2008, record the habitual landscapes of Twombly's world: the verdant countryside of Virginia and the coastlines of Italy; intimate studio interiors; details of ancient buildings and sculptures; and still lifes of flowers and domestic objects. Beginning in the early 1990s, Twombly developed a signature process, using specialized copiers to enlarge Polaroid images onto matte paper. The resulting prints—their surfaces softened, their details dissolved into something approximate and auratic—brought the photographs into dialogue with the historical and literary allusions sustaining his paintings and sculptures.

Two essays in the exhibition guide located the photographs within the literary and philosophical registers that Twombly's work consistently invites. Mary Jacobus, in "Aura di Limoni," brings Walter Benjamin's concept of the aura—"a strange tissue of space and time"—to bear on the photographs' quality of suspended emanation, arguing that Twombly's camera mediates rather than captures, surrounding its subjects with a luminous envelope that withholds as much as it reveals. Drawing on Rilke's Duino Elegies and Pablo Neruda's "Oda al limón," Jacobus proposes that works such as Light Flowers (2008) and Strawberries, Gaeta (2008) function as "little lyrics in themselves"—images of transient happiness already consigned to reminiscence at the moment of capture. Edmund de Waal, in "Cy Twombly: A Kind of Aura," approaches the photographs through memory, describing them as acts of anathemata—objects set aside, inscriptions in space, like palimpsests in which time accumulates beneath the surface. Spanning the arc from early pictures of Robert Rauschenberg's studio materials to photographs of flowers left on a grave taken shortly before Twombly's death in 2011, the works de Waal engages reveal an attentiveness he likens to Rilke's Dinggedichte: thing-poems in which looking becomes a form of devotion.

Taken together, the exhibition articulated a dimension of Twombly's practice that his paintings and sculptures imply but rarely make so directly visible: the daily, haptic quality of his seeing—his attentiveness to surfaces, light, and the aura of ordinary things—as the ground from which all his work grew.

The Sursock Museum published a catalogue to accompany the exhibition. It features the essay by Carlos Peris.

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