Into Cy Twombly's world: paintings, Roman sculpture busts, and hurried scribbles.

Thanks to my childhood obsession with museums, my double major in Art History/Museum Studies, and my string of internships and jobs in art spaces, I’ve been unsheltered from the creations of Cy Twombly. I am drawn to his paintings because they are 1. often muted in color so, at first, I believed them to be easy to visually digest, but then, 2. I can’t possibly pinpoint what any of his markings represent—and I wholly appreciate the confusion. There’s a feeling of hurriedness in his œuvre; is it enthusiasm, anxiety, or something else? Vogue describes his work as “often seeming to be as much written as painted.” I am dying to be able to translate this illegible, fictitious writing!

Speaking of anxieties, back when The Broad in Los Angeles was recently opened, I remember watching a young woman horrifically back into a Giacometti sculpture while trying to take a photograph of a Twombly painting. I was inches away as the tall, emaciated sculpture began swaying. I was imagining being the prime witness to its sharp form cutting into Cy’s adjacent canvas. Thankfully, the crisis was adverted! Surely that wouldn’t have been the first encounter between the two artists.

It’s no surprise to learn that Cy Twombly’s artistic eye carried over to the homes he lived in (can anyone name a famous artist who lived in an unsightly home?). Thanks to a share by Jared Frank, my curiosity over Twombly’s interiors began with a hyper-elongated, rose-colored sofa.

Vogue interviewed Twombly just before he passed away in 2011. “I fall in love with places,” he admitted. And, I fall in love with his places. It seems that I’m not the only one. Magazine 032c called him the “emperor of the decorators,” and a New York Times article remarked that he, “lived the poetry of his work.”

Photographs by Horst P. Horst.

Related Notes:

• Oil painter Miki Matsuyama painted four works inspired by photographs of Twombly’s home, taken by the above-mentioned photographer, Horst P. Horst. “[The apartment] showcases the perfect juxtaposition of classical sculpture, ornate furnitures, and modern art. It mirrors the duality of Twombly’s drawings and paintings, which ties ancient mythology and contemporary society.”

• It’s impossible for me to see images of Cy’s home and not think of Constantin Brâncuși—and especially his sculpting studio which is immortalized in a subterranean space at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

• As soon as I got engaged, I reached out to Villa Magnan in the Basque Country to see if we could get married there. They never responded (that’s okay because we found *the dream*), and now, a year later, they are a booming European hipster hotspot. Their website just launched hours ago. Please visit (the website or the villa) to see every crazy, insane, beautiful detail and to stalk their donkey, Hector. I could imagine Twombly liking this place.

• Carlos de Beistegui, who our fav, Wikipedia, describes as: “an eccentric French-born Mexican multi-millionaire art collector and interior decorator who was one of the most flamboyant characters of mid-20th-century European life,” had a home that I find to be Twombly-level of good. CJ Dellatore said of this Parisian apartment: “It is one of the great moments in the annals of decorative arts. The melding of the flamboyant taste of De Beistegui with the stark, sculptural architecture of Le Corbusier, and the whimsically garish furnishings designed by Emilio Terry all explode onto the serene and stately 8th arrondissement of Paris. It must have been viewed as shocking at the time.”

• If I was invited to a dinner party at Cy’s home, I’d imagine wearing something Surrealist like this Bill Cunningham clamshell hat. Although I hope it opens wide enough for me to squeeze my fork through. Speaking of dinner! Look at this precious photograph of Cy eating a plate of pasta in Rome.

xx

See you at Cy’s place. Can you bring some olives?

Kelsey