Cy Twombly: An Untitled Painting

This book was published on the occasion of Cy Twombly: Untitled Painting at Gagosian, Wooster Street, New York. The exhibition featured a single expansive painting measuring over fifty-two feet in length that is now part of the Menil Collection, Houston. Twombly developed the work intermittently, beginning it in Rome in 1972 and completing it in 1994 in Virginia. After this exhibition, he finalized its title as Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor), a reference to the ancient Roman poet Catullus. The imagery unfolds across three abutting panels in oil, acrylic, oil stick, and graphite, including multiple inscriptions among its drawn passages and bursts of color.

The oversize book features a gatefold of the painting, alongside numerous details. An essay by Robert Pincus-Whitten analyzes the work within the context of Twombly’s oeuvre, examining its forms and allusions. As Pincus-Whitten notes, Twombly thought of the painting as occupying a “generic space, a loose gravitation comparable to mythology itself which also has no center of gravity,” and suggesting a sea drama with an elegiac character.