From State of Mind to the Tangible: The Photographic Cosmos of Cy Twombly

This book explores Cy Twombly’s pursuit of photography, from his very first black-and-white shots, taken at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College in 1951, to his last color series, taken in a cemetery in Saint-Rémy, France, in 2011. Essayist Carlos Peris examines the artist’s use of the camera as a tool; his early tendency to confine the photographs to “aesthetic quarantine” before later integrating them more thoroughly and transparently into his practice as a painter, sculptor, and draftsman; and his distinctive mastery of the Polaroid print. For Twombly, Peris writes, photography represented “a conscious and intentional practice carried to its full potential.”

Along with Peris’s illuminating text, the bilingual (English/Spanish) book reproduces in color a selection of Twombly’s transcendent photographs, many of which picture the artist’s studios in Bassano in Teverina, Gaeta, Lexington, New York, and Rome. It also features documentary shots of the artist reviewing his prints in the offices of Schrimer/Mosel, the Munich publisher with whom he worked on several catalogues. Revealing the striking contemporaneity of Twombly’s photographic vision and technical approach, this book constitutes an important addition to the literature on his life and work.