While the Metropolitan Museum of Art has just announced a major exhibition of Lee Krasner-Jackson Pollock for the fall, it now appears that the show isn’t the only major show of postwar painters slated for the New York institution.
Last week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art posted a position for a fellow who will oversee a Cy Twombly retrospective that will open in 2029. “The Cy Twombly Retrospective will be a retrospective of the artist’s paintings, sculptures and drawings,” the job posting notes. “It will examine the artist’s trajectory between two continents and how ancient mythology, literature and travel influenced his work.”
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Spokespersons for the Met and Cy Twombly Foundation did not respond art newsconfirmation request. The Met’s listings remain active on Indeed, LinkedIn and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among other sites.
If the retrospective comes to fruition, it will be an important moment. Twombly retrospectives have been held abroad, at the Tate Modern and Center Pompidou in 2008 and 2016 respectively. But the last time a Twombly retrospective was held in the United States was more than 30 years ago, when the artist was still alive.
Twombly’s last American retrospective opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1994, at a time when the artist’s reputation was less certain than it is now. It subsequently traveled to the Menil Collection in Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Neues Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
Critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote on the eve of the show: “I would not be unhappy if Twombly’s MoMA show suited my taste and that of the collectors who, with their checkbooks held high, seemed to single him out as the eldest abstract painter after the New York School.” Once the work was shown, critic Michael Kimmelman wrote, “Mr. Twombly occupies a place among the leading group of postwar American abstract artists, just not at the forefront.”
Since then, Twombly has moved ever more firmly into the upper echelons of the postwar canon, with his “blackboard” paintings, each consisting of repeated white scrawls against a gray background, highly regarded by curators and collectors. (In 2015, one such painting sold for $70.5 million at Christie’s, setting Twombly’s auction record.)
Twombly also drew criticism from critics for the large paintings he produced later in his career, which feature red swirls and graffiti-like marks. In 2015, for example, at an exhibition at Palazzo Pesaro in Venice, critic Travis Jeppesen wrote: “Cy Twombly is the greatest American painter of the twentieth century and the greatest since Picasso.”
Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928, and attended Black Mountain College, an art school that became a hotbed of experimental activity in the 1950s. His circle eventually included Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and other giants of the era. In 1957, Twombly moved to Rome, where he lived for the rest of his life. He died there in 2011 at the age of 83. He received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2001.
While we wait for firm news on whether the Met will mount a Twombly retrospective, you can at least visit the Menil Collection, which has an entire gallery dedicated to the artist’s work, including his “blackboard” paintings and less common sculptures. The Menil Museum calls the space “the only permanent retrospective” dedicated to Twombly.
