CY TWOMBLY’S PHOTOGRAPHS are Weightless Still-Lifes

Like Freud, Irving Penn, Petra Cortright, Morrissey, and the editors of 032c Workshop, Cy Twombly loved flowers. Not only did he paint them, but he photographed them, near obsessively, throughout his life.

These pictures, alongside interiors, landscapes, and images from his time in Rome, Villetta Barrea, and Munich, are currently on show at Berlin’s Galerie Bastian. They are an invaluable insight into the vision of the last, and perhaps most pressing, of the abstract expressionists, and below you can click through a selection of them, taken between 1980 and 2008. His subject matter – human nature and the natural world, antiquity, masculinity, art history, the id – are here, though the view is infinitely more private than the monumental canvases for which he’s famous. It’s a look at what he saw, rather than what he made: Google Translate’s hack-job on the German-language press release mentions a “weightless subject”, which seems like a perfect description of these quiet, profound images.