Cy Twombly FIFTY YEARS OF WORKS ON PAPER

Marking the 10th anniversary of the Cy Twombly Gallery at The Menil Collection, which opened in 1995, this exhibition will present more than 75 works on paper by one of the most important American artists living today.

Cy Twombly (b. 1928) holds a solitary position among artists of his generation. Although emerging in 1950s New York alongside contemporaries Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, he continues to evade clear-cut affiliation with Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism. Twombly’s breadth of imagination and interdisciplinary tendencies traverse vast distances of time and place, resulting in an art at once Dionysian and Apollian, lavish and spare, modern and ancient.

Twombly has used a variety of materials and methods — paint, crayon, collage — and drawn inspiration from diverse sources ranging from famous battles of classic history to Russian Constructivism. The works span the last half century and include examples from his early years in the 1950s, his famous chalkboard period of the early 1970s, as well as works as recent as 2002. Among the key works in the show are Apollo and the Artist (1975), Proteus (1984), and Petals of Fire (1989). The exhibition has been organized by Julie Sylvester, associate curator of Contemporary Art at The State Hermitage Museum, where it was first shown. It has subsequently traveled to the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Serpentine Gallery in London. The U.S. tour is coordinated by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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Cy Twombly "FIFTY YEARS OF WORKS ON PAPER"
Kurator: Julie Sylvester