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As Cy Twombly’s art continues its upward curve on the market, his foundation continues to smartly bolster the museum representation of his work. The Philadelphia Museum has his painting cycle, Fifty Days at Iliam. Now it will have five sculptures from the foundation and one from a private donation that the artist himself considered related to the larger work.
Here’s the Times coverage of the announcement:Continue Reading
Randy Kennedy reports in the New York Times an 11th-hour lawsuit by two founders of Dia against the foundation to halt the sale of works in Sotheby’s Contemporary art sales next week. Particularly interesting is the suggestion that Dia rejected an offer by another museum to buy Cy Twombly’s ‘Poems to the Sea’ which raises the biggest question about museum de-accessioning: do museums have a responsibility to place de-accessioned works with other institutions even if it reduces the money generated for acquisitions?
Heiner Friedrich and Fariha de Menil Friedrich, who formed Dia in 1974 to support contemporary artists doing challenging work, filed suit in state court in Manhattan on Thursday, seeking an injunction against the foundation and Sotheby’s, which is planning to auction Dia works by luminaries like Cy Twombly, John Chamberlain and Barnett Newman — on Wednesday. Many of the works named in the lawsuit were donated by Mr. and Ms. Friedrich when they created the foundation with the artist-historian Helen Winkler. The lawsuit claims that selling the works to private collectors would remove them “from public access and viewing in direct contravention of Dia’s entire intent and purpose.” The auction would be a breach of an “implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing” with the Friedrichs and the artists who made the works, the suit states. […]
But the court papers also raise the possibility that Twombly’s “Poems,” as well as some Chamberlain works and other Twomblys, might not be legally owned by Dia but might be long-term loans from the Friedrichs. The suit claims that a museum, possibly the Menil, was in discussions to buy “Poems” but that Dia rejected the offer.
Eykyn MacLean officially opens on Februrary 7th their new space in London (30 St. George Street) with a show of 11 Cy Twombly works once owned by the dealer Ileana Sonnabend (the show will move to New York in April):
Twombly (1928 –2011) drew upon ideas expressed in poetry, literature and classical mythology. Full of surface complexity and whirlwinds of tiny detail, his works convey an intense physicality and a real sense of the artist at work.
Untitled (New York City), (1956) is the earliest work in the exhibition. Vigorous gestures are built up layer upon layer, the surface revealing the strata of scrawls partially buried beneath each successive mark, resulting in a painting that is at once archaeology and abstraction.
Another five works from 1959 to 1962 continue to blur the line between painting and writing, with symbols, scribbles, and words occupying the same energised field. With references to cultural figures such as Vivaldi, mythological tales like the Triumph of Galatea, and geographical names such as Roma and Sperlonga, Twombly’s work from this period is rich with narrative evocations
A key work in the show is Untitled (1969), a gouache and wax crayon on paper. Reminiscent of a blackboard, it is part of a series of works from the late 1960’s that comprise Twombly’s signature ‘grey paintings’.
The two works in the show from the 1970s – Untitled (1975) and Napoli (1975) – signal a new direction in his work, with the use of large-scale gestures in bold, vibrant colours, that he would go on to explore throughout the rest of his working life.
A fully-illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition with essays by Annie Cohen-Solal, author of the recent biography of dealer Leo Castelli, and James Lawrence, a critic and historian of post-war and contemporary art and frequent contributor to Burlington Magazine
