For the first time in nearly 30 years, new paintings by Cy Twombley were exhibited at a New York gallery. This book documents the recent show at Gagosian Gallery, and includes color plates of all paintings in a beautiful multipanel gatefold.
Matthew Marks is pleased to announce his next exhibition will be Cy Twombly Photographs. The exhibition will consist of twenty-nine color photographs. This is the first time Twombly has exhibited work in this medium.Cy Twombly began experimenting with color photography in the early 1980s. About four years ago he started working with the master printers Michel and Jean-Francois Fresson at the Atelier Fresson in Savigny sur Orge, France. The Fresson technique is a unique photographic printing process carried on exclusively by the Fresson family since 1990. The photographs which result have an unusually rich surface and extraordinary, saturated colors over which the artist is able to maintain exceptional control. Fresson prints are the most permanent photographic color images made today.The subject matter of Twombly's photographs are flowers, trees and ancient Roman sculptures. The majority of the works in the exhibition have been put together by the artist into groups of five or six images. Theirs is similar to the way Twombly has presented his paintings and drawings in the past. While not as abstract as his work in other media, the photographs Twombly will show are close in feeling to his larger scale work and are important to an understanding of his subject matter and working methods.The last exhibition in New York consisting of entirely new work by Cy Twombly was held in 1982. -- Press Release (see link).
The Centre Pompidou will present a major retrospective of the work of American artist Cy Twombly bringing together works from public and private collections around the world. The comprehensive showcase will be structured around three major cycles: Nine Discourses on Commodus, 1963, Fifty Days at Iliam, 1978, and Coronation of Sesostris, 2000, and will span the artist's entire career, from his first works in the early 1950s to his last paintings. Presented chronologically and featuring some 140 paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculptures, the exhibition will provide what the Centre Pompidou describes as a clear picture of an extraordinarily rich body of work which is both intellectual and sensual. In addition to emphasizing the importance of series and cycles in Twombly's practice, through which he reinvented history painting, the exhibition will also highlight the artist's close relationship with Paris.
**A New York Times Editors Choice** "The most substantive biography of the artist to date...propulsive, positive and persuasive."—Holland Cotter, New York Times Book Review **PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Finalist** **A Marfield Prize Finalist** Cy Twombly was a man obsessed with myth and history—including his own. Shuttling between stunning homes in Italy and the United States where he perfected his room-size canvases, he managed his public image carefully and rarely gave interviews. Upon first seeing Twombly’s remarkable paintings, writer Joshua Rivkin became obsessed himself with the mysterious artist, and began chasing every lead, big or small—anything that might illuminate those works, or who Twombly really was. Now, after unprecedented archival research and years of interviews, Rivkin has reconstructed Twombly’s life, from his time at the legendary Black Mountain College to his canonization in a 1994 MoMA retrospective; from his heady explorations of Rome in the 1950s with Robert Rauschenberg to the ongoing efforts to shape his legacy after his death. Including previously unpublished photographs, Chalk presents a more personal and searching type of biography than we’ve ever encountered, and brings to life a more complex Twombly than we’ve ever known.
"Lepanto," Cy Twombly's ravishing suite of 12 large canvases in acrylic, crayon, and graphite, may be the artist's most satisfactory work. First exhibited at the Venice Biennale in the summer of 2001, the series depicts the famous 16th century sea battle raged by the combined European forces under Venetian leadership against the Ottoman invasion. Twombly's glorious, luminously intense sequence of panels is meant to be absorbed as a single image, a panoramic portrayal of war on a heroic scale, with the viewer standing in the midst of a battle that ends in the destruction of the Turkish fleet.
Originally published in 1954, The Wilder Shores of Love is the classic biography of four nineteenth-century European women who leave behind the industrialized west for Arabia in search of romance and fulfillment. Hailed by The Daily Telegraph as "enthralling to read," Lesley Blanch’s first book tells the story of Isabel Burton, the wife and traveling companion of the explorer Richard Burton; Jane Digby, who exchanged European society for an adventure in loving; Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, a Frenchwoman captured by pirates who became a member of the Turkish sultan’s harem; and Isabelle Eberhardt, a Swiss woman who dressed as a man and lived among the Arabs of Algeria.