Cy Twombly. Bilder, Arbeiten auf Papier, Skulpturen

In 1987 the Kunsthaus devoted a comprehensive exhibition to the then just sixty-year-old American Cy Twombly, who had been living in Rome for thirty years. Although the reception of Twombly’s work in Europe had started in the sixties, it was not until the 1980s that he was seen properly. The show in Zurich was one of the large monographic exhibitions conceived by the long-term guest curator Harald Szeemann. On view were 42 paintings, twenty sculptures and 68 drawings, all made between 1952 and 1987. Szeemann describes Twombly as an artist with his roots in Abstract Expressionism, but one who has developed his art quite independently and uniquely. For example, Twombly is clearly less heroic in his expression than the grand masters of that first uniquely American art form. Hans-Joachim Müller correctly calls his work ‘light, broken écriture’ (Basler Zeitung). Szeemann uses an almost theological vocabulary when he attributes to Twombly ‘dematerialization, transubstantiation, and spiritualization of the content.’ He describes line and color as the two most important aspects of his work. ‘The line is autonomous, vibrating statement, color is not slave to representation but is a matter of design, material and substance.’ And Szeemann rightly emphasizes that what could be mistaken for mere doodling, is a dynamic, unconscious notation, which cannot be analytically broken into separate parts but can only be understood as a whole. Significantly, Twombly chose Rome as his home of choice, rather than one of the global art centers of the time, Paris or New York. His stay in Rome enhanced his relationship to myths, visible in the titles of works, in his writings, and in his conversation with the Baroque and the Renaissance. Nevertheless: Twombly‘s art remains, as Ludmila Vachtova summarizes it, ‘distant, untouchable, resting within its own secret’ (Frankfurter Allgemeine). Hans-Joachim Müller even calls it a miracle that Twombly, who has preserved a high level of independence, has asserted himself in the noisy art industry (Basler Zeitung). The exhibition with its catalog travelled on to Madrid, Düsseldorf and London.