Art Club #16 Cy Twombly

Art Club pays tribute to Cy Twombly (Lexington, 1928-Rome, 2011) with a rare piece of his plastic work. It is Untitled, a work in wood, plastic sheet, plaster, red pigment and industrial paint, which he made in 1959, before interrupting his activity as a sculptor, which he would not resume until 1976. Exceptionally loaned by the Cy Twombly Foundation, the work is housed in the Chambre des Amours, in the Cardinal’s private apartments, giving rise to a unique and almost magical event: a virtual dialogue between Twombly’s sculpture, an allegory of feminine sensuality, and the room in which it is housed, once decorated with paintings of erotic subject matter – the loves of Jupiter. This is the beginning of a visual and semantic short-circuit, rich in iconographic and iconological reminders, in which Balthus, the Villa’s genius loci, who rediscovered the decoration of the Cardinal’s apartments, and Nicolas Poussin, who, as the Academy’s first director, shared Twombly’s love of Rome, the destination chosen by both of them and where they spent a large part of their lives, participate in an idealized way.