Exhibition Explores Twombly’s Lifelong Fascination With The Ancient Mediterranean World
By Dolores Quintana
American Artist Cy Twombly’s work is being exhibited at The Getty Center Museum. The major exhibit started on August 2 and will continue until October 30. You can visit the museum and attend online tours to learn more about the artist and view his paintings. Tickets and information are available here.
The Getty Museum website describes the painter’s work by saying, “Cy Twombly (1928–2011) ranks among the most prominent US painters to emerge in the 1950s, a period of radical experimentation in American and European art. Combining gestural strokes of paint, broad areas of empty space, and words scribbled in a nearly illegible hand, Twombly’s work can be enigmatic, even perplexing. Making sense of it requires an appreciation of his attitudes toward history, place, and cultural memory.
This exhibition explores Twombly’s art through the lens of ancient Greek and Roman culture, a consistent source of inspiration throughout his career. Twombly avoided centers of modern art like New York, moving to Italy in 1959. There he engaged creatively with the enduring legacy of antiquity, infusing his work with provocative allusions to mythology, poetry, and archaeology. By exploring the classical past, Twombly followed a long tradition in American and European art. His great contribution lay in linking his understanding of ancient art and literature to late-twentieth-century modernist practice, translating historically remote references into a bracingly contemporary artistic idiom.”
The online exhibit is called Art Break: Musings on Cy Twombly with Ewa Monika Zebrowski Wednesday, August 31, 2022, 12:00 p.m. is an online talk series that takes a closer look at art with Getty experts and guest artists, writers, and thinkers. To complement the current exhibition Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, curator Scott Allan and Montreal-based artist Ewa Monika Zebrowski discuss Twombly’s role as a “muse” in her practice as a photographer and poet, with particular attention to one of her Twombly-inspired artist’s books, The White Sculptures (2019).
There will be a second program in our “Musings on Cy Twombly” series with poet and writer Dean Rader on October 12 at 12:00 p.m.
A hybrid program called Reading Cy Twombly Backwards will take place on Tuesday, September 13, 2022, at 4:00 p.m. online and at The Getty Center. To attend in person, go to the website, and to watch on Zoom, register here.
Like few of his peers at the vanguard of postwar American art, Cy Twombly (1928–2011) appreciated the richness of the world’s ancient Mediterranean cultures and mined it for inspiration. Throughout his career, he created thousands of paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and prints inspired by artifacts from the ancient past. As he stated, “Modern Art isn’t dislocated, but something with roots, tradition, and continuity. For myself, the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary).” In this lecture, curator Christine Kondoleon explores the artist’s lifelong fascination with antiquity—from mythology and poetry to war and memorials—and how it shaped his creative vision.
Dr. Christine Kondoleon is the George Behrakis Chair of the Art of Ancient Greece and Rome at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. As Chair she has led the renovations and reinterpretations of 12 new galleries of Greek, Roman and Byzantine art for the Behrakis Wing of Ancient Art at the MFA Boston that opened in December 2021. She is the curator of Cy Twombly: Making Past Present and the editor of the accompanying exhibition catalog. In addition to publications of MFA Boston’s world-renowned collection, she has also organized the exhibition Games for the Gods (2004), and her Aphrodite and the Gods of Love, the first exhibition on the goddess of love (2011). Her special field is later Roman and early Byzantine art and mosaics.
This exhibition is organized with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
