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PUBLISHER
MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.5 x 11 in. / 264 pgs / 170 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2020 p. 6   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780878468744 TRADE
List Price: $65.00 CAD $91.00 GBP £50.00

AVAILABILITY
Out of stock

TERRITORY
WORLD

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

Los Angeles, CA
The J. Paul Getty Museum, 08/02/22–10/30/22

Boston, MA
Museum of Fine Arts, 01/14/23–05/07/23

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MFA PUBLICATIONS, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON

Cy Twombly: Making Past Present

Edited with text by Christine Kondoleon, Kate Nesin. Text by Anne Carson, Jennifer R. Gross, Brooke Holmes, Mary Jacobus.

Cy Twombly: Making Past Present

Luscious reproductions of more than 50 of Twombly's paintings, drawings and little-known sculptures, along with classical works of art, tell the story of an American abstractionist’s poetical dialogue with antiquity

Cy Twombly's first visit to Italy as a young man ignited a lifelong passion for classical culture that is everywhere present in his art. Painted canvases, works on paper and small-scale sculptures reveal the historical soul of Twombly's abstract compositions. Taking on myths and heroes as personal guides, he created a psychologically complex dialogue with the visual and literary art of antiquity.

This sumptuously illustrated publication reproduces a carefully chosen selection of the artist's paintings, drawings and sculptures alongside works of classical antiquity, including a number from his personal collection. Illuminating essays by leading scholars and writers, including Anne Carson, Jennifer R. Gross, Brooke Holmes and Mary Jacobus, explore the often enigmatic engagement of Twombly's art with the world of the past.

Cy Twombly (1928-2011) was born in Lexington, Virginia, and lived and worked in New York in the early 1950s and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. After traveling around North Africa, Spain and Italy, he settled in Rome, where he remained for the rest of his life.


Featured image is reproduced from 'Cy Twombly: Making Past Present.'

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

Visionary Projects

Sam Duplessis

a volume that I find myself drawn to again and again...

Milieu

Editors

In preparation for an exhibition at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, this volume recounts the artist's lifelong passion for classical antiquity—references to which appear regularly in his paintings, drawings, and sculpture. The exhibition and book also feature items of classical sculpture that come from the late artist's personal collection.

LitHub

Ann Carson

To mingle together exposure and erasure...is a philosophic instinct and an artistic method that Twombly and Catullus share... Illegibility, unloveliness, misspelling are all ways to disavow ownership or power over its meaning, while retaining an ancient presence that glows up through the work.

Financial Times

Baya Simons

Photographs of Cy Twombly’s home in Rome, with its baroque golden chairs and severe-looking marble busts, reveal that the artist, known for his modernist, abstract expressionist paintings, was in fact fascinated by antiquity. This obsession forms the subject of a new book on his work, Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, which places the artist’s paintings, drawings and sculptures alongside classical works, including some from his own collection, and essays from writers such as Anne Carson and Brooke Holmes.

Boston Home

Andrea Timpano

Although he spent many of his adult years living and working in Rome, painter Cy Twombly first got his start in another great city: Boston, where he began attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1948. Learn more about the abstractionist in this locally published text, where a selection of his works—including sculptures and drawings—are showcased alongside the classical masterpieces that inspired them.

Forbes

Natasha Wolff

The catalog for the Museum of Fine Art, Boston exhibition this year features a selection of the American artist Cy Twombly’s paintings, drawings and sculptures alongside works of classical antiquity, including a number from his personal collection.

Patron

Doug King

This expertly researched book...showcases the artist’s sculptures, works on paper, and paintings alongside classical works of antiquity, revealing the historical inspiration. The sumptuously illustrated book, includes a number of pieces from the artist’s personal collection along with detailed essays, written by leading scholars, to offer a deeper look at an artist more often associated with scribble abstract compositions. For any collector who believes they know Cy Twombly, this book provides a different facet of the artist and the often-enigmatic engagement he had with the past.

Burlington Magazine

Isabelle Loring Wallace

Complementing one another and furthering established lines of inquiry, the volume is thus a significant contribution to literature on the artist as well as a source of pleasure.

Los Angeles Times

Christopher Knight

Twombly’s invocation of the past asserts our present conviction of artistic immortality.

Cy Twombly: Making Past Present

STATUS: Out of stock

Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.

FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/2/2022

'Cy Twombly: Making Past Present' opens at the Getty!

'Cy Twombly: Making Past Present' opens at the Getty!

Painted in Gaeta, Italy, in 2009, "Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves (III)" is reproduced from Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, the blockbuster catalog to the exhibition opening August 2, 2022, at the Getty, en route to MFA Boston in January of 2023. Pairing a selection the artist's paintings, drawings and sculptures alongside works of classical antiquity—some of which were in Twombly's own collection—this is truly a book for art lovers. "Cy Twombly was fascinated by ancient Greece and Rome. This much is incontestable," Brooke Holmes writes. "But when it comes to what we should make of Twombly's lifelong engagement with 'the ancients,' critics have found far less to agree on. What is the status of his knowledge? Erudition? Inspiration? What is the mode of his engagement? Ambition? Play? Affection? Escapism? Iconoclasm? Given the integral place of classical antiquity in Twombly's work—and his move to Italy in the late 1950s—the terms of his reception were, for much of his career, yoked to the broader fortunes of some of the more troubled terms of later twentieth-century criticism: humanism, classicism, aesthetics. The result is that conjugating Twombly with 'the ancients' has tended to sharpen the contrast between two opposed Twomblys: one sited firmly within the canon, alive to timeless truths but inured to the present; the other consummately anticanonical—the 'irreverent schoolboy' who, bored in Latin class, carves the names of dead poets into his desktop, or the Zen master who pricks 'the humanist turgescence.' Twombly's work has always forced a negotiation between the classical and the contemporary…" continue to blog


CY TWOMBLY MONOGRAPHS + ARTIST'S BOOKS

Cy Twombly: Making Past Present

CY TWOMBLY: MAKING PAST PRESENT

MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

ISBN: 9780878468744
USD $65.00
| CAD $91 UK £ 50

Pub Date: 8/25/2020
Active | Out of stock


Cy Twombly

CY TWOMBLY

Glenstone Museum

ISBN: 9780980108699
USD $35.00
| CAD $47.5 UK £ 30

Pub Date: 10/23/2018
Active | Out of stock


The Essential Cy Twombly

THE ESSENTIAL CY TWOMBLY

D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers

ISBN: 9781938922459
USD $75.00
| CAD $99

Pub Date: 9/30/2014
Active | In stock


Cy Twombly Photographer, Friends and Others: Le Temps Retrouvé

CY TWOMBLY PHOTOGRAPHER, FRIENDS AND OTHERS: LE TEMPS RETROUVé

Actes Sud

ISBN: 9782742797417
USD $80.00
| CAD $107.5 UK £ 70

Pub Date: 4/30/2012
Active | In stock