Cy Twombly. Image, Text, Paratext


Thierry Greub (Ed.)

Wilhelm Fink Verlag (Paderborn), 1. Aufl. 2018, 516 Seiten, 23 s/w und 181 farb. Abb., 3 s/w Tab., Franz. Broschur

The artworks of the US artist Cy Twombly (1928–2011) are considered to be hermetic and inaccessible. Pencil scribblings, explosions of paint, tumbling lines, overlapping layers of color, and inscriptions, geometrical figures, numerals, rows of numbers, words, fragments of quotations, and enigmatic work-titles present very special challenges to both researchers and viewers. In the interdisciplinary and transcultural research method of the Morphomata International Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Cologne, a conference was held in June 2012 that brought art historians together with renowned scholars of Egyptology, Archaeology, German, Greek, English, Japanese, and the Romance languages, i.e. all the fields and cultural spheres that were a source of inspiration for the œuvre of Cy Twombly.
While these scholars inquire into the relation between title, work, and inscribed quotations, leading representatives of research on Twombly focus on the visual language and scriptural-imagistic quality of Cy Twombly’s work.
Through comprehensive interpretations of famous single works and groups in all the artistic media employed by Twombly, the volume’s cross-disciplinary view opens up a route into the associative-referential visual language of Cy Twombly.