News / Cy Twombly / Museum Exhibitions

Closing this Week

Cy Twombly
Oeuvres sur papier (1973–1977)

Through September 24, 2023
Musée de Grenoble, France
www.museedegrenoble.fr

This exhibition, whose title translates to Works on Paper, presents a vast collection of works on paper made by Cy Twombly between 1973 and 1977, several of which have never before been exhibited. Realized in partnership with the Cy Twombly Foundation, the show explores how Twombly was able to evolve his artistic practice through drawing, collage, and printmaking—he produced only eight paintings during these years—and prepare for the creation of Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), his painting in ten parts based on Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Iliad.

On View

La vie en rose
Brueghel, Monet, Twombly

Through October 22, 2023
Museum Brandhorst, Munich
www.museum-brandhorst.de

La vie en rose is centered around Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Roses), a series of six paintings created for a room in Museum Brandhorst, and on permanent display in Munich since 2009. Taking Twombly’s poetic examination of death, freedom, isolation, and eroticism as its starting point, the exhibition brings together works by various artists who have engaged with floral subjects, including Claude Monet’s Water Lilies (1915) and Andy Warhol’s Flowers (1965). The show aims to reveal the complex, even contradictory motives that have inspired artists over the centuries to take on this subject matter.

Opening Soon

El eco de Picasso

October 3, 2023–March 31, 2024
Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain
museopicassomalaga.org

Organized as part of Picasso Celebración—1973–2023, a series of international exhibitions and events commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, The Echo of Picasso focuses on his influence on twentieth-century art. The exhibition places Picasso’s practice in dialogue with work by more than fifty artists, including Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willem de Kooning, Thomas Houseago, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Cy Twombly, Tom Wesselmann, and Franz West.

Closed

Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained

April 21–July 21, 2023
Hill Art Foundation, New York
hillartfoundation.org

Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained is an exhibition curated by David Salle that brings together paintings and sculptures by artists working across different eras, mediums, and geographies to explore the notion of affinity between works of art. Alongside a painting by Salle from 1988, work by Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Mark Grotjahn, Brice Marden, Albert Oehlen, Pablo Picasso, Cy Twombly, and Christopher Wool is included.

Closed

Cy Twombly
Morocco, 1952/1953

March 4–July 2, 2023
Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech, Morocco
www.museeyslmarrakech.com

In the fall of 1952, Cy Twombly met up with his friend Robert Rauschenberg in Casablanca and the two of them traveled to Marrakech, the Atlas Mountains, and then on to Tangier. Much of the surviving work from this trip consists of photographs taken with a Rolleiflex shared by the artists, and sketches preserved by their respective foundations. This exhibition, curated by Nicola Del Roscio, explores Twombly’s affinity for Morocco through his paintings, photographs, and sketches. Cy Twombly, Morocco, 1952/1953 is presented by the Fondation Jardin Majorelle, in partnership with the Cy Twombly Foundation and the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio.

Closed

Sally Mann and Cy Twombly
Remembered Light

November 23, 2022–May 7, 2023
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
www.mfa.org

This exhibition brings together three sculptures by Cy Twombly, on loan from the Cy Twombly Foundation, and thirteen photographs by Sally Mann from her Remembered Light series (1999–2012). Twombly and Mann were both born and raised in the southeastern state of Virginia. Mann photographed Twombly’s Lexington home and studio over several years, from 1999 until after his passing in 2011. Through her lens, she sought to capture aspects of his life, his inner world, and his appreciation for the past. Appearing alongside Twombly’s sculptures, the photographs—pervaded by the same themes of life, mortality, and remembrance present in Mann’s other work—form a poetic dialogue between these two friends and their powerful artistic visions.

Closed

Making Past Present
Cy Twombly

January 14–May 7, 2023
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
www.mfa.org

Cy Twombly’s engagement with the art and poetry of ancient Greece and Rome played a central role in his creative process. This exhibition explores the artist’s lifelong fascination with the ancient Mediterranean world through evocative groupings of his paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures made between the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Tracing an imaginative journey of encounters with, and responses to, ancient texts and artifacts, the presentation includes sculptures from Twombly’s personal collection, on public display for the first time. This exhibition has traveled from the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Closed

Hors-Les-Murs Gribouillage–Scarabocchio
De Léonard de Vinci à Cy Twombly

February 19–April 30, 2023
Beaux-Arts de Paris
www.beauxartsparis.fr

This exhibition, whose title translates to Outside the Walls Scribbling and Doodling: From Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly, includes nearly three hundred original works from the Renaissance to the present day and aims to shed light on these unconventional and often overlooked aspects of the practice of drawing. By exploring scribbling and doodling, from sketches scribbled on the backs of canvases to expansive doodles conceived as artworks in themselves, the show unveils how these experimental, transgressive, regressive, or liberating mark-making gestures, which appear to flout all laws and conventions, have punctuated the history of artistic creation. This exhibition traveled from the Villa Medici–Académie de France à Rome. Work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pablo Picasso, and Cy Twombly is included.

Closed

Cy Twombly
Making Past Present

August 2–October 30, 2022
Getty Center, Los Angeles
www.getty.edu

Cy Twombly’s engagement with the art and poetry of ancient Greece and Rome played a central role in his creative process. This exhibition explores Twombly’s lifelong fascination with the ancient Mediterranean world through evocative groupings of his paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture made from the mid-twentieth to the early twenty-first century. Tracing an imaginative journey of encounters with and responses to ancient texts and artifacts, the presentation includes sculpture from the artist’s personal collection, on public display for the first time.

Closed

Gribouillage/Scarabocchio
Da Leonardo da Vinci a Cy Twombly

March 3–May 22, 2022
Villa Medici–Académie de France à Rome
www.villamedici.it

This exhibition, whose title translates to Scribbling and Doodling: From Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly, includes nearly three hundred original works from the Renaissance to the present day and aims to shed light on these unconventional and often overlooked aspects of the practice of drawing. By exploring scribbling and doodling, from sketches scribbled on the backs of canvases to expansive doodles conceived as artworks in themselves, the exhibition unveils how these experimental, transgressive, regressive, or liberating mark-making gestures, which appear to flout all laws and conventions, have punctuated the history of artistic creation. Work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pablo Picasso, and Cy Twombly is included.

Closed

Hey! Did you know that art does not exist…

July 27, 2021–January 8, 2022
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel
www.tamuseum.org.il

This exhibition presents more than one hundred works from Sylvio Perlstein’s intensely personal collection, which traces artists and trends that have defined the avant-garde, complex, and experimental nature of twentieth-century art. Work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Duane Hanson, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Brice Marden, Ed Ruscha, Rudolf Stingel, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol is included.

Closed

Degree Zero
Drawing at Midcentury

October 31, 2020–June 5, 2021
Museum of Modern Art, New York
www.moma.org

Bringing together approximately eighty works on paper from the museum’s collection, Degree Zero illuminates how artists used drawing to forge a new visual language in the aftermath of World War II. Modest, immediate, and direct, drawing was the ideal medium for this period of renewal. The exhibition looks across movements, geographies, and generations to highlight connections between artists who shared common materials and ideas between 1948 and 1961. Work by Jay DeFeo, Willem de Kooning, Alberto Giacometti, and Cy Twombly is included.

Closed

How Far Can Creativity Take You
VMFA Fellowship Artists

October 30, 2018–May 16, 2020
VMFA on the Road: An Artmobile for the 21st Century, various locations throughout Virginia
www.vmfa.museum

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’s new state-of-the-art traveling museum and art studio offers an opportunity for residents of the Commonwealth to see and experience works of art from the collection up close. The inaugural exhibition, How Far Can Creativity Take You, celebrates the role this institution has played in the lives of fellowship recipients. Work by Sally Mann and Cy Twombly is included.

Closed

Epic Abstraction
Pollock to Herrera

December 17, 2018–February 4, 2020
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
www.metmuseum.org

Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera explores large-scale abstract painting, sculpture, and assemblage, from the 1940s to the twenty-first century, through works from the Met collection and special loans. Many of the artists in the exhibition worked in large formats not only to explore aesthetic elements of line, color, shape, and texture, but also to activate scale’s metaphoric potential to evoke expansive—“epic”—ideas and subjects, including time, history, nature, and existential concerns of the self. Work by Helen Frankenthaler and Cy Twombly is included.

Closed

Cy Twombly
Portraits

November 1, 2019–January 19, 2020
National Portrait Gallery, London
www.npg.org.uk

Exploring figuration and portraiture in Cy Twombly’s practice, across the media of painting, drawing, and photography, this exhibition centers on two paintings of the artist’s friends: the set designer Henry Heymann, whom Twombly painted in 1956, and the philanthropist J. Paul Getty Jr., represented in an abstract work from 1967. The exhibition also includes Twombly’s photographs of friends, family, and himself, alongside never-before-seen drawings that reveal the importance of classical art and figuration within his oeuvre.

Closed

Cy Twombly
Photographs

August 26–November 4, 2018
Château La Coste, Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, France
chateau-la-coste.com

Cy Twombly: Photographs is comprised of thirty photographs, taken between 1985 and 2008, variously depicting intimate spaces, landscapes, and natural subjects. This exhibition has traveled from the Sursock Museum in Beirut.

Closed

Divine Dialogues
Cy Twombly and Greek Antiquity

May 25–September 3, 2017
Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens
www.cycladic.gr

Works by Cy Twombly, inspired by Greece and Greek mythology, come together with ancient artworks in this exhibition, curated by Professor Nikolaos Stampolidis, director of the Museum of Cycladic Art, and Jonas Storsve, curator at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and of the recent major Cy Twombly retrospective exhibition.

Closed

The American Dream
Pop to the Present

March 9–June 18, 2017
British Museum, London
americandreamexhibition.org

This exhibition traces the past six decades of American history through prints of unprecedented scale and ambition. Starting with the explosion of Pop art in the 1960s, the show includes works by many of America’s most celebrated artists. Works by Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann are on view.

Closed

The Beginning of Everything
Drawings from the Janie C. Lee, Louisa Stude Sarofim, and David Whitney Collections

February 24–June 18, 2017
The Menil Collection, Houston
www.menil.org

In anticipation of the October 2017 opening of the Menil Drawing Institute, the museum is exhibiting a selection of drawings spanning the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century. The show highlights promised gifts from the collections of Janie C. Lee and Louisa Stude Sarofim, as well as works from David Whitney’s 2005 bequest, which include those by Balthus, Georg Baselitz, Helen Frankenthaler, Alberto Giacometti, Anselm Kiefer, Brice Marden, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, and Rachel Whiteread.

Closed

The Great Graphic Boom

March 3–May 28, 2017
Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo
www.nasjonalmuseet.no

This exhibition explores the intense interest in graphic art among many leading artists of the postwar art period. With works from twenty-five artists, including Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol, the show highlights the use of graphic media both as a refined form of expression and as an important phase in the artistic process. The exhibition has been organized with support from Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany.

Closed

Cy Twombly

November 30, 2016–April 24, 2017
Centre Pompidou, Paris
www.centrepompidou.fr

This is the final week of the Centre Pompidou’s major retrospective of Cy Twombly’s work, with more than one hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs covering the artist’s entire career.

Closed

Hartung and Lyrical Painters

December 11, 2016–April 17, 2017
Fonds Hèlène & Èdouard Leclerc pour la Culture, Landerneau, France
www.fonds-culturel-leclerc.fr

Exploring the history of lyrical abstraction, this exhibition, curated by Xavier Douroux, brings together notable modern and contemporary artists who resonate with the work of Hans Hartung. Works by Helen Frankenthaler, Albert Oehlen, Cy Twombly, and Christopher Wool are on view.

Closed

Literary Devices

October 11, 2014–March 15, 2015
Fisher Landau Center for Art, New York
flcart.org

Literary Devices, which comprises works representing text, literary themes, and books themselves, explores the tension between language and image. The exhibition features works by over forty artists, including Richard Artschwager, Gregory Crewdson, Neil Jenney, Donald Judd, Mike Kelley, Anselm Kiefer, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Mark Tansey, and Cy Twombly.

Closed

Legacy
The Emily Fisher Landau Collection

June 5–September 14, 2014
San José Museum of Art, California
sjmusart.org

Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection presents a selection of works from the historic gift of art pledged to the Whitney in May 2010 by longtime museum trustee Emily Fisher Landau. The exhibition, which includes more than seventy works by thirty-eight artists, traces many of the ideas that have preoccupied artists in the United States, particularly since the 1960s. Questions about the relevance of painting in the aftermath of Minimalism, debates about representation, “culture wars,” and a revived interest in personal narratives are explored. This exhibition has traveled from the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Work by Richard Artschwager, Gregory Crewdson, Willem de Kooning, Nan Goldin, Neil Jenney, Vera Lutter, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Mark Tansey, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol is included.