Cy Twombly. Presentazione progetti editoriali
Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio hosts, Saturday, July 1st, 2023, at 6.00 pm the presentation of two publishing projects dedicated to the work and to the extraordinary artistic experience of Cy Twombly (1928-2011): Cy Twombly. INSCRIPTIONS, in six volumes, published by Brill | Fink 2022, by the author Thierry Greub, and Cy Twombly et la critique américaine 1951-1955. Histoire d’une réception, Editions du Regard, 2022 / English version edited by Gagosian Gallery NY, 2023, by the author Richard Leeman.
The discussions will be moderated respectively by Prof. Dr. Klaus-Peter Busse and by Eric De Chassey. The talk is introduced by the curator Peter Benson Miller.
Poetry has been a fundamental part of the work for Cy Twombly and has been a source of inspiration throughout his entire artistic research. In fact, the artist used to inscribe verses and fragments taken from poems by ancient and modern authors in his works.
The editorial project of Thierry Greub, Cy Twombly. INSCRIPTIONS, collects for the first time 901 of Twombly’s written notations, presenting them in transcriptions and in the context of their 113 different literary sources, and so traces the artist’s lifelong intellectual engagement with poetry and the forms of the scriptural.
The introductory volume, drawing on the result of the work of transcription and ascription, analyzes how Cy Twombly’s inscriptional practice developed and how complex constellations of contextual references are created between the scriptural and the graphic in his work. Against the background of the conception of poetics of Charles Olson, Twombly’s teacher at Black Mountain College, it becomes evident that in Twombly the scriptural is the principal bearer of “remanence”, the phenomenon that enables a re-enactment, in each present moment of reception, of what is represented. Cy Twombly described this energy force and emotional intensity as “the phenomenon of finding the memory of something that has vanishes and left no trace of itself”.
Cy Twombly et la critique américaine. Histoire d’une reception (Editions du Regard) by Richard Leeman is a study of the reception of Cy Twombly’s work by American critics, from hisfirst exhibition to the retrospective dedicated by the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1994-1995. At first, the volume examines the status of the painter in the context of the triumph of Abstract Expressionism, in the early stages of his career (1951-1957), at the beginnings of Pop and Minimal art, a time when the artist settled in Europe (1957-1966), then analyzing the post-Minimal decade (1966-1976), which opened some breaches in the dominant formalist and modernist mainstream. At the end the focus is concentrated on the 80s and 90s, in which the postmodern discourse reevaluates these latter criteria, during years in which the artist was involved and in which he also became a notable prominent figure. The reception of Twombly in the United States is therefore symptomatic, throughout his career, of those assumptions that have governed art criticism and history according to the different historical contexts.
The book launch is part of a cycle of presentations that enriches the interdisciplinary research program of Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, in the field of visual arts, music, literature and the environmental protection.
The wide program of studies and research his conceived to lead the audience to discover the work and artistic experience of Cy Twombly.