Detail of color photomural of Cy Twombly in Rome, 1966, taken by Horst P. Horst, 1966. Shown along with Roman portrait busts from Twombly’s personal collection of antiquities, in The Getty Center’s installation of Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, August, 2022.
What’s old is new again. At least that’s an aesthetic mantra that American painter, sculptor, and photographer Cy Twombly (1928 -2011) seems to have lived by. Raised in Lexington, Virginia, Twombly lived in New York and studied at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina (among other places), before finding his way to Italy on a fellowship in 1952 with friend and fellow artist Robert Rauschenberg. Clearly, Twombly discovered something intangible but magic in the city of Rome that spoke to his soul. After a few more years of bouncing around from place to place, even serving as a cryptographer in the U.S. army, the artist would end up returning to Rome in 1957, marrying, and spending the rest of his life abroad with periodic trips back to the States. Twombly eventually grew his own collection of antiquities, displaying them among his own strikingly modern canvases and sculptures at his villa. The inclusion not only of the photo seen here , but of several of these actual classical sculptures from the artist’s personal collection within the Getty installation offers a wonderful gloss on this aspect of the artist’s life and oeuvre .
Throughout his career, Twombly was captivated by the intersection of the enduring legacy of the ancient and the contemporary in the Mediterranean world, seemingly wanting to explore and offer his own translation of this transhistorical experience. Time living in Gaeta in Southern Italy, in particular, seems to have given the artist closer contact with classical sources and fueled his engagement with cultural memory, especially through mythological subjects. He continually mined Greek and Roman texts (poetry, myths, even ancient graffiti) for themes, images, and 'words to deploy on his canvases. Venus became a major theme for him, as did the story of Leda and the Swan (iterated several times), along with the epic journeys and battles of Homer. Additionally, artifacts and ruins, sand, worn walls and ancient floors came to inspire the palimpsest-quality of his gestural, marked surfaces, as well as the creation of imaginative, often elegiac assemblage sculptures in abraded, muted whites. All of this sense of history and human experience comes together and truly “makes the past present” in a terrific show “Cy Twombly: Making Past Present,” co-curated by the MFA, Boston, that is now on through October 30, 2022 at The Getty in Los Angeles.