Latency of work and trace of life: overall presentation of Cy Twombly's œuvre

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Thierry Greub
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 460271256

The aim of the research project applied for is the comprehensive scientific overview of Cy Twombly’s (1928–¬2011) artistic legacy, which has been outstanding since 2004 and on which no archival research has been conducted since 1994. The hitherto unsearched archives of the Cy Twombly Foundation (Gaeta, Rome, New York) and at the artist’s former residences and studios (Gaeta, Bassano in Teverina, Lexington, VA) promise a critical examination of his work and a revision of his spectrum of interpretation on the basis of hitherto unknown traces of the artist’s work and ‘life’. In addition to viewing, digitising and scientifically processing the research-relevant archival documents and, based on this, re-evaluating the research literature, the planned project includes oral art history discussions with people relevant to the project. A scientific workshop will be held to evaluate the findings. The research results will be made available to the research community in a book publication.The processing of the source material is intended to provide a clearer contouring of Twombly’s intermedial and intertextual image strategies as well as a better understanding of his pictorial concept and to open up new dimensions of meaning for his pictorial creations. The evaluation of the documentary material will be oriented towards current issues that have so far been only marginally or not at all addressed. With regard to Twombly’s work process, this is particularly the question of the intermediality and interpictorial referentiality of his works. The global-transcultural frame of reference of his model references implies the question of the persistence of intercultural dynamics in his work development. Cy Twombly’s position between two cultural spheres brings his processes of integration and establishment in the European context into focus, as well as the contextualisation in terms of time politics and the socio-political relevance of his art to the present. The voluntary nature of his European exile and his social role model as a married homosexual and father will also be examined. Twombly’s self-image as an artist, his self-mythification and censorship of his own traces of life up to and including withdrawal from the public sphere and the targeted control of media perception by means of a targeted work policy will also be questioned.In terms of methodology, the planned project, with a view to the corporeal indexicality of Twombly’s line, is oriented towards the trace model as a paradigm of interpretation and the concept of latency associated with this problem.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants