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Tate Modern Exhibition

Cy Twombly Cycles and Seasons

19 June – 14 September 2008
Exhibition banner for Cy Twombly at Tate Modern

Tate Modern presents a major exhibition of works by Cy Twombly, one of the most highly regarded painters working today and a foremost figure among the generation of American artists that includes Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. Twombly rose to prominence through a distinctive style characterised by scribbles and vibrantly daubed paint. This is his first solo retrospective in fifteen years, and provides an overview of his work from the 1950s to now.

Twombly emerged as a painter at the height of Abstract Expressionism, then in 1957 he left America for Italy, where he drew inspiration from European literature and classical culture. At the heart of the exhibition is Twombly’s work exploring the cycles associated with seasons, nature and the passing of time. Several key groups are brought together for the first time, such as Tate’s Four Seasons 1993–4 with those from the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition also explores how Twombly is influenced by antiquity, myth and the Mediterranean, for example the violent red swirls in the Bacchus 2005 paintings which bring to mind the drunken god of wine.

This exhibition provides a unique opportunity to see the full range of Twombly’s long and influential career from a fresh perspective.

33797603001

TateShots: Cy Twombly

Tate Modern

Bankside
London SE1 9TG
Plan your visit

Dates

19 June – 14 September 2008

Sponsored by

The Cy Twombly Exhibition Supporters Group

The Cy Twombly Exhibition Supporters Group

Tate International Council

Tate International Council

American Patrons of Tate

American Patrons of Tate

Find out more

  • Turner Monet Twombly Later Paintings exhibition banner

    Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings

    22 June – 28 October 2012 'Turner Monet Twombly' at Tate Liverpool brings together works by J.M.W Turner, Claude Monet and Cy Twombly, three of the most prolific and well-known artists of all time.

  • Robert Rauschenberg Cy Twombly with Artworks at Fulton Street 1954

    Some Notes on Words and Things in Cy Twombly’s Sculptural Practice

    Kate Nesin

    This paper presents an extended close reading of Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Funerary Box for a Lime Green Python), 1954, particularly as it relates to his later sculptural work and engages the terms fetish object, modernist sculpture, monument and poetics. Twombly’s constructions are found less to defy description and categorisation than to position themselves productively in between such discourses.

  • Cy Twombly MIN-OE 1951

    Cy Twombly’s Humanist Upbringing

    Carol A. Nigro

    In the United States postmodern scepticism often has relegated Cy Twombly’s engagement with classical and humanist themes to nostalgia, irrelevance or an over-indulgence in European tropes. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, two of the most active polemicists of the period, Robert Motherwell and Charles Olson, the leader of the Black Mountain poets, saw Twombly’s early works as compatible with their own ideologies and artistic strategies. This paper argues that Twombly learned from his mentors and participated in an American revision of humanism that prepared a foundation for his lifelong commitment to humanist discourse.

  • Detail from Cy Twombly Quattro Stagioni: Primavera

    Cy Twombly Symposium audio recordings

    Coinciding with the major Cy Twombly exhibition at Tate Modern, audio coverage of this past symposium presenting new research on the artist and his works

  • Artist

    Cy Twombly

    1928–2011
  • Artist

    Jasper Johns

    born 1930
  • Artist

    Robert Rauschenberg

    1925–2008
  • Artist

    Andy Warhol

    1928–1987
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