Cy Twombly: Portraits was a focused display organized at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in association with the Cy Twombly Foundation, centered on the role of figuration and portrait-making across Twombly's career.

Anchoring the display were two rare figurative paintings: a 1956 portrait of the set designer Henry Heymann, and an abstract work of 1967 representing the philanthropist Paul Getty Jr. The latter belongs to a series of paintings Twombly made in Rome depicting friends and associates, in which gesture and scrawl are directed at the sitter rather than any rendering of physical likeness; the name, incorporated as a compositional element, asserts the work's identity as a portrait.

Also included were pencil drawings from 1959, lent by the Foundation and shown for the first time, depicting nude figures and classical busts. These works revealed the depth of Twombly's engagement with Greek and Roman antiquity during his years in Rome and Gaeta — an engagement conducted not through illustration but through a gestural language that places them in dialogue with Abstract Expressionism. The display also gathered photographs spanning several decades: early portraits from the 1950s of associates including John Cage and Franz Kline, made while Twombly was a student at Black Mountain College; later portraits of close friends such as Nicola del Roscio and Betty di Robilant; and still-life and self-portrait photographs — among them Tree-Peony (1980) and Sky, St. Barthélemy (2011) — whose luminous, softly indistinct surfaces recall the early twentieth-century Pictorialist movement.

For further information:
National Portrait Gallery, London
npg.org.uk