Ex Libris Twombly

Jamie Danis, M.A.

Ex Libris Twombly is a monograph offering the first comprehensive bibliographic record and interpretation of Cy Twombly’s extensive personal library. The book will document each of Twombly’s three major personal libraries, with bibliographic entries supplemented by provenance and usage data. These three bibliographic catalogues will be interspersed with five discursive chapters, each of which focuses on a single case study of an author or subject in his library and its role in his practice. The book argues for the importance of Twombly’s library in two ways: first, to Twombly’s artistic practice, and second, as a major twentieth-century book collection in its own right.

For the first time, Ex Libris Twombly will make available the record of Twombly’s reading and “absorption,” as he termed it, of the collection of references that constitute the structuring intellectual framework of his oeuvre. The fuller picture that emerges of Twombly and his practice is one that thoroughly disputes the dominant esoteric image of the artist, instead revealing the depth and precision of Twombly’s engagements, the breadth of his interests across geographic, temporal, content-related, artistic, and literary axes, and the vast network of synthetic connections Twombly integrated into his artistic practice.