One of the current exhibitions at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles is Cy Twombly: Making Past Present. The show explores the late American artist’s work “through the lens of ancient Greek and Roman culture, a consistent source of inspiration throughout his career.”
Twombly (1928-2011) moved to Italy in the 1950s and often quoted poets and classical myths and allegories in his works.
[Below: Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves (IV) (detail), 2009, Cy Twombly. Acrylic on canvas. Private Collection Courtesy Gagosian. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photograph: Mike Bruce]
When Twombly died in 2011 in Rome, his obituary in The New York Times referred to his watershed 1994 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The curator of that exhibition, Kirk Varnedoe, described Twombly’s work as “influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well.”
The Getty describes Twombly’s work: it “can be enigmatic, even perplexing. Making sense of it requires an appreciation of his attitudes toward history, place, and cultural memory.”
Cy Twombly: Making Past Present at the Getty Museum will close on October 30, 2022. It will be on view next at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from January 14 through May 7, 2023.
