Cy Twombly

18 October - 15 November 1997
  • Overview
    Cheim & Read is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Cy Twombly from the years 1963 to 1979.

    On view for the first time in America will be Souvenir de l'Ile des Saintes, a suite of eight watercolors. Painted in 1979 these pictures represent the artist's first venture into the medium of watercolor. Also on exhibit will be two important paintings from the artist's so called "blackboard period", otherwise known as the Grey Series: Night Watch 1966 and Untitled, 1971 (Rome). At fifteen feet in length, the Untitled, 1971 is one of the largest and most austere of Twombly's works. About Twombly, and in particular the painting Night Watch, David Sylvester has said:

    It is emphatically a hands-on art. It is deeply dependent for its effect upon our sense of the varied pressure of the artist upon the canvas – from a brush, from fingers steeped in paint, from a pencil gouging lines through wet paint, from a pencil delicately touching the surface here and there. It is wholly antithetic to those typical parts of Pollock's technique by which he puts paint on the canvas from a distance – poured through a hole in a can, flicked from the end of a stick…

    The examples which do not consist of rows of figures tend, as in Night Watch of 1966, to present some sort of diagram which might have served to illustrate a lesson in geometry or mechanics. But then all the grey paintings return us that schoolroom. Only, the artist is playing a different role. He is no longer the boy covertly scribbling erotica in an exercise book but the agent of authority besides the blackboard.

    The exhibition opens Saturday, October 18th, 1997 and will remain of view through Saturday, November 15th, 1997.
  • Installation Images

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  • Artists