Floor 4: Cy Twombly: North entrance from City Gallery

Wall Text

1962
Crayon, graphite, and oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1997

Twombly created this work several years after moving to Rome, following his second trip there. The title, scrawled at the top left, calls to mind not only the artist’s own journey but also that of a classical Greek hero, while the vertical lines on the far right suggest an ancient column. As in much of Twombly’s work, references to the higher ground of intellect and culture are combined with a tumultuous spray of marks—graffiti-like scribbles and clots and smears of paint—that point to the more bodily, uninhibited elements of human existence.

Wall Text

1968
Oil-based house paint, crayon, and graphite on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1991

Wall Text

1971
Oil-based house paint and crayon on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, fractional purchase through gift
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2000

In the mid-1960s, Twombly began a series of restrained gray paintings that are often referred to as “blackboards” due to their visual resemblance to the familiar smudged chalkboards found in schoolrooms. Here, bundles of spirals stack up like waves rolling toward a beach. Like earlier and later paintings in which Twombly used words and images to refer to historical places and moments, this abstract composition suggests a narrative that is both grand and unstable.

Wall Text

2005–7
Acrylic paint on wood in wood artist’s frame
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2008

This work is part of III Notes from Salalah, a series in which Twombly’s signature blurring of the boundaries between painting and handwriting is magnified on an enormous scale. The watery cascade of lettering could represent segments of his blackboard paintings, now cropped and enlarged into a messy and majestic composition. The series title refers to the coastal oasis of Salalah in the Middle Eastern nation of Oman. This region is noted for its lush landscape, heavy mists, and seasonal waterfalls—features that result from its monsoon rains and set it in striking contrast with the surrounding desert.