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Gagosian Quarterly

Fall 2022 Issue

Cy Twombly: Imperfect paradise

Eleonora Di Erasmo, cocurator of Un/veiled: Cy Twombly, Music, Inspirations, a program of concerts, video screenings, and works by Cy Twombly at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome, reflects on the resonances and networks of inspiration between the artist and music. The program was the result of an extensive three-year study, done at the behest of Nicola Del Roscio in the Rome and Gaeta offices of the Cy Twombly Foundation, intended to collect, document, and preserve compositions by musicians around the world who have been inspired by Twombly’s work, or to establish an artistic dialogue with them.

Cy Twombly, Treatise on the Veil (Second Version), 1970 [Rome], oil-based house paint and wax crayon on canvas, 118 ⅛ × 393 ⅝ inches (300 × 999.8 cm), The Menil Collection, Houston. Artwork © Cy Twombly Foundation

Cy Twombly, Treatise on the Veil (Second Version), 1970 [Rome], oil-based house paint and wax crayon on canvas, 118 ⅛ × 393 ⅝ inches (300 × 999.8 cm), The Menil Collection, Houston. Artwork © Cy Twombly Foundation

Eleonora Di Erasmo

Eleonora Di Erasmo is an art historian and curator. Since 2008 she has been working for the Cy Twombly Foundation, focusing in particular on the catalogues raisonnés of Twombly’s drawings (vols. 1–8) and sculpture (vol. 2). She runs the Foundation’s office in Rome and together with Nicola Del Roscio she recently curated the project Un/veiled: Cy Twombly, Music, Inspirations.

It must be visible or invisible,

Invisible or visible or both:

A seeing and unseeing in the eye.

—Wallace Stevens, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, 1942


In Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, the poet Wallace Stevens asks us to look at the sun with eyes that don’t know it, that are unfamiliar with its form, as if they were seeing it for the first time, perceiving its primordial idea, the sun as it was before we existed:

How clean the sun when seen in its idea.

Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven

That has expelled us and our images . . .

. . . There was a project for the sun and is.

There is a project for the sun. The sun

Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be

In the difficulty of what it is to be.1

The difficulty of being, the awareness of one’s own imperfection in the face of the perfection of nature, sparks in the poet the need to return the sun to its “first idea,” the desire to complete reality in order to reunite it with the reason of the world, to grasp a meaning in it that irremediably escapes the gaze of imperfect beings and is only ever revealed in brief moments, in the form of fleeting epiphanies.2

In a series of drawings made in 1990, Twombly noted the words “Delight lies in flawed words and stubborn sound,” a slightly modified quotation of the ending of Stevens’s “The Poems of Our Climate” (1938).3 The full passage runs,

Note that, in this bitterness, delight,

Since the imperfect is so hot in us,

Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.4

The creative process stems from the incessant state of need. The artist feeds on reality, investigating and probing it in all its details, conveying it naked.

Cy Twombly: Imperfect Paradise

Cy Twombly playing the piano, Munich, 2005. Photo: courtesy Biggi Schuler

Overexposure becomes a filter, a veil that is needed in order to be able to focus the gaze better and perceive what is closest to us, but that we normally struggle to recognize in its original essence. The truth that would otherwise remain invisible to the eyes.

The lens becomes an extension of the eye, “a subsidiary organ of sight, of memory.’5 Thus the use of mythology, the references to classical culture and modern literature, become a means of decoding the world and understanding human emotions, beauty and its contradiction, the universal relationship between things that governs the incessant forward movement of our existence. The coat of white paint with which Twombly covered his sculptures, assemblages of objects found by chance, transfigures them, and in this process of abstraction the artist strips them of their names, of their human trappings, bringing them back to their essence, to what preceded us:

There was a muddy center before we breathed.

There was a myth before the myth began,

Venerable and articulate and complete.6

In their turn, the eyes of the artists invited to take part in Un/veiled, and their music inspired by and dedicated to Twombly’s work, become further filters, new points of view from which to observe the artist’s creations. On the one hand Eraldo Bernocchi, composer of Like a Fire that Consumes All before It, soundtrack of the documentary film Cy Dear (2018), uses the reverberating sounds of his electric guitar to take us on a journey through the flow of memory.7 Time is deprived of its chronological progress, at times dilating, at others turning back on itself, in a continual alternation of instants, of memories of life lived, of meetings, of emotions. On the other hand, with To Neptune, Ruler of the Seas Profound (2019), Isabella Summers writes a personal story about some of Twombly’s most celebrated works, composing in fragmentary recordings and quotations of poems, just as Twombly used to notate and cite fragments from favorite poems in his paintings.

Cy Twombly: Imperfect Paradise

Cy Twombly, Study for Treatise on the Veil, 1970, [Rome], collage: (drawing paper, transparent adhesive tape), pencil, wax crayon, and ink, 27 ⅝ × 39 ⅜ inches (70 × 100 cm), Private collection. Artwork © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo: Mimmo Capone

In the same way in which Twombly assembled the most disparate objects to create his sculptures, Pierre Henry, a pioneer of musique concrète and electronic music, manipulated and remodeled audio material—“sound objects”—to produce his compositions. In 1953, as Nicola Del Roscio has written, Twombly was struck by a concert of Henry’s Le Voile d’Orphée (1953) that he heard on the radio, and years later he drew inspiration from it for the paintings Treatise on the Veil (1968) and Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) (1970).8

Le Voile d’Orphée opens with the manipulated sound of a piece of cloth being ripped, a sound that serves to symbolize the dramatic death of Orpheus, whose body is torn to pieces by bacchants. The sound expands as if suspended in a time without end, which Twombly conveys in his Treatise on the Veil paintings through a series of continuous lines, parts of broken lines, and numerical inscriptions. Traced in wax crayon on a dark ground, the lines run along the lower part of the two paintings, as if to measure the space of the canvas and beat out the rhythm of an inner tempo, calling to mind the scores of postwar avant-garde music.

That same tempo dilates in the echoing sounds produced by the piano of Harold Budd. He in turn took inspiration from the Treatise on the Veil works to compose his Veil of Orpheus (Cy Twombly’s) (2012), whose cadenced progress, made up of poetic pauses and suspensions, almost seems to be reminding us of the phrase Twombly used to describe his Treatise on the Veil: “a time line without time.”9




Republished from the introduction for the Un/veiled catalogue (translated by Christopher Huw Evans).

1Wallace Stevens, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, 1942. Available online at https://genius.com/Wallace-stevens-notes-toward-a-supreme-fiction-annotated (accessed July 12, 2022).

2Ibid.

3See Nicola Del Roscio, ed., Cy Twombly: Drawings. Cat. Rais. Vol. 8 1990–2011 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2017), pp. 68–73.

4Stevens, “The Poems of Our Climate,” 1938. Available online at http://thepoemoftheweek.blogspot.com/2006/06/poem-of-week-6192006-poems-of-our.html (accessed July 12, 2022).

5Paolo Maurensig, L’ombra e la meridiana (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1998), p. 9.

6Stevens, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.

7Andrea Bettinetti, Cy Dear, produced by Good Day Films, Milan, 2018.

8See Del Roscio, ed., Cy Twombly: Drawings. Cat. Rais. Vol. 5 1970–1971 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2015), p. 9.

9Twombly, quoted in Isabelle Dervaux, “Interstices of Time: Cy Twombly’s Treatise on the Veil,” in Michelle White, Dervaux, and Sarah Rothenberg, Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil 1970 (Houston: The Menil Collection, 2019), p. 14.

Black and white image of the interior of Cy Twombly’s apartment in Rome

Cy Twombly: Making Past Present

In 2020, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, announced their plan for a survey of Cy Twombly’s artwork alongside selections from their permanent ancient Greek and Roman collection. The survey was postponed due to the lockdowns necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic, but was revived in 2022 with a presentation at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from August 2 through October 30. In 2023, the exhibition will arrive at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The curator for the exhibition, Christine Kondoleon, and Kate Nesin, author of Cy Twombly’s Things (2014) and advisor for the show, speak with Gagosian director Mark Francis about the origin of the exhibition and the aesthetic and poetic resonances that give the show its title: Making Past Present.

Cy Twombly, Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catallus, to the Shores of Asia Minor), 1994, oil, acrylic, oil stick, crayon, and graphite on three canvases,

Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor

Thierry Greub tracks the literary references in Cy Twomblys epic painting of 1994.

Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006), on the cover of Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2021

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Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2021

The Summer 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006) on its cover.

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1990, acrylic, wax crayon, and pencil on handmade paper, 30 ⅝ × 21 ⅝ inches (77.8 × 54.8 cm)

Twombly and the Poets

Anne Boyer, the inaugural winner of the Cy Twombly Award in Poetry, composes a poem in response to TwomblyAristaeus Mourning the Loss of His Bees (1973) and introduces a portfolio of the painters works accompanied by the poems that inspired them.

Gerhard Richter’s Helen (1963) on the cover of Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2021

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Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2021

The Spring 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Gerhard Richter’s Helen (1963) on its cover.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1928. Photo: Lou Andreas-Salomé

Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies

Bobbie Sheng explores the symbiotic relationship between the poet and visual artists of his time and tracks the enduring influence of his poetry on artists working today.

Featuring Joan Jonas’s Mirror Piece 1 (1969) on its cover.

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2020

The Summer 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Joan Jonas’s Mirror Piece 1 (1969) on its cover.

River Café menu with illustration by Ed Ruscha.

The River Café Cookbook

London’s River Café, a culinary mecca perched on a bend in the River Thames, celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2018. To celebrate this milestone and the publication of her cookbook River Café London, cofounder Ruth Rogers sat down with Derek Blasberg to discuss the famed restaurant’s allure.

Left: Sally Mann, Self-Portrait, 1974; right: Jenny Saville in her studio, c. 1990s.

In Conversation
Sally Mann and Jenny Saville

The two artists discuss being drawn to difficult subjects, the effects of motherhood on their practice, embracing chance, and their shared adoration of Cy Twombly.

The cover of the Fall 2019 Gagosian Quarterly magazine. Artwork by Nathaniel Mary Quinn

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Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2019

The Fall 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Sinking (2019) by Nathaniel Mary Quinn on its cover.

Glenstone Museum.

Intimate Grandeur: Glenstone Museum

Paul Goldberger tracks the evolution of Mitchell and Emily Rales’s Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland. Set amid 230 acres of pristine landscape and housing a world-class collection of modern and contemporary art, this graceful complex of pavilions, designed by architects Thomas Phifer and Partners, opened to the public in the fall of 2018.

Cy Twombly: In Beauty it is finished

Cy Twombly: In Beauty it is finished

Mark Francis, director of the exhibition Cy Twombly: In Beauty it is finished, Drawings 1951–2008, describes the impetus for this expansive presentation, the source for its title, and details the stories of some of the works on view.