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stuart brent
presents
Cy Twombly
Notes by Robert Motherwell

Cy Twombly, whose pictures will be on view at The Seven Stairs Gallery, at Stuart Brent's, 670 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, was born at Lexington, Va., April 25th, 1928. He has painted seriously since the age of twelve. He first studied at The Boston Museum School, at Boston, Mass. He later studied at the Art Students League in New York City on a tuition scholarship and $1000.00 Fellowship from the Virginia Museum, Richmond, Va. He is now at Black Mountain College, Black Mountain, N.C.

EXHIBITION - Nov. 2 to Nov. 30.
RECEPTION - Nov. 2, from 7 to 10 P.M.
ALL PICTURES ON SALE.

I believe that Cy Twombly is the most accomplished young painter whose work I happen to have encountered: he is a "natural" in regard to what is going on in painting now. I say "now" because I believe that painting differs greatly from moment to moment in history, and from place to place. It is not only that the aspirations of men, and the conditions under which we work, change from time to time and place to place as humanity continually struggles against the various obstacles that block the satisfaction of our basic needs and desires, it is that, in any given moment, as William James noted, the "world resists some lines of attack on our part and opens herself to others, so that we must go on with the grain of her willingness." At a remarkably early age, Twombly has come upon the grain of present day painting's willingness. To find oneself in this position demands a certain amount of learning, and it is no less remarkable how thorough his knowledge is of those works (if not of their background of thought, which he would no doubt regard with impatience) that would help in his specific expressive aims: the more abstract drawings and paintings of Picasso, the massive, decadent surface (in being only surface) of Dubuffet, the deliberate abandon and sensuality of the present-day New York School of abstract expressionists, and the art of Savages. (He is a Virginian, of Yankee descent.) Still, the substance of this learning is accessible to everyone now, through reproductions and museums and quick travel, though surprisingly few acquire it: it requires a certain animation of mind to make one's own imaginary museum, and most young painters begin with the one next door, too rarely outgrowing it. So that perhaps what is most remarkable of all about Twombly, what leads one quite spontaneously to call him a "natural," is his native temperamental affinity with the abandon, the brutality, the irrational in avant-garde painting of the moment. His painting process, of which the pictures are the tracks that are left, as when walks on a beach, is orgastic: the sexual character of the fetishes half-buried in his violent surface is sufficiently evident (and so is not allowed to emerge any more). Yet the art in his painting is rational, often surprisingly simply symmetrical, and invariably harmonious.

Robert Motherwell,
October, 1951