Marks and Material in

CY TWOMBLY’S
North African Sketchbooks

S
itting next to an open window in a room
Anne-Grit Becker illuminated by the Mediterranean light of
Rome, Cy Twombly holds a musical instru-
ment in his hands. Frozen in a gesture of plucking
the strings of the instrument, the photograph shows
the artist examining what looks like a hand-crafted
object. Taken by Twombly’s colleague and travel
companion, Robert Rauschenberg, the picture dates
back to the beginning of 1953, when both artists
had returned from a three-month stay in North
Africa and were reinstalled in Rome. Though not
initially planned as part of a voyage that began like
a European grand tour, with stopovers in Florence,
Siena, or Assisi, their side trip to Morocco provided
encounters with a plurality of non-European cul-
tures that would prove significant for both of the
artists’ future productions.1
Rauschenberg’s photographic staging of his
companion not only throws light on a moment in
which Twombly is experiencing cultural differ-
ences, but it also exposes some of the procedures
that led Twombly to an encounter with African
cultures in particular. Probably not by chance, the
instrument to which the picture draws attention
duplicates the structure, form, and material compo-
nents of an object that is part of the African collec-
tion of the Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory
and Ethnography in Rome, the same museum that
Twombly visited after his detour to Morocco.2

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 41 • November 2017

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 Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled [Cy with Musical Instrument, Rome], 1953. Contact print, 2.25 x 2.25 in. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York

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 Furthermore, Rauschenberg’s photo documents
how the same object, reduced within the context of
the museum to its exhibition value, is transferred
into the domain of actual use. Twombly, as he han-
dles the object and engages with the instrument’s
sensual possibilities, seems to reenact the object’s
initial function of producing sound. With Twombly
as its actor, Rauschenberg’s depicted scene points
toward a new way of dealing with non-European
artifacts other than as a mere quest for new forms.
Instead, what appears to be at stake is the interest
in recovering the object (respectively, the object of
artistic production) as something manufactured, as
something opposed to the logic of the commodity.3
Accordingly, what we see scattered in the photo-
graph’s lower edge are raw materials such as wool or
wooden sticks. Though flattened by the photograph,
they stir the viewer’s sense of touch. They introduce
an intimate dimension, which transforms the space
of the rented room into a temporary artist’s studio.
Taking this photograph as a point of departure, a
first frame is set for investigating Twombly’s North
African sketchbooks: a group of drawings that may
provide a link between the artist and the musical
instrument depicted in the photo.
Although scholars have repeatedly noted the
importance of the sketchbooks, especially in
regard to Twombly’s later paintings of 1953, a close
analysis of the subject had to wait until after the
sketchbooks were published in their entirety in
2011.4 As documentation in the Catalogue Raisonné
of Twombly’s drawings shows, the sketchbooks
make up a group of four, with a few additional loose
pages.5 Their unity can be recognized not only by
means of formal analogies and recurrent motifs, but
also by their identical title, Untitled [North African
Sketchbook]. Combining a word that refuses to
assign a name and a supplement that connects the
work to a cultural geographic area, it is precisely this
semantic tension in the phrasing that anticipates an
aesthetic effect that runs through all of the sketches.
Already, before looking, the viewer is confronted
with an undecided situation between the open and
the delimited, the unspecified and the concrete.
Untitled [North African Sketchbook] thereby subverts
the logic of an either/or and enables spatial proximity
and relation through contrast. It was the parenthesis
that made scholars think the sketchbooks were
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produced directly on site. This assumption was
corrected much later, on the occasion of the artist’s
retrospective for the Museum of Modern Art in 1994.
In conversation with Kirk Varnedoe, curator of the
exhibition, Twombly explicitly related the sketches
to pieces he had seen in the Pigorini Museum.6 This
additional piece of information emphasizes that the
sketches are a mixture. They function not only as a
belated memory storage, in which impressions from
different locations and times are layered on one
another, but also as an archive that is fused with the
actual experience of viewing an exhibition.
The process of layering and interweaving as a
mode of production finds a striking correspondence
in the presentational structure of the sketchbooks
themselves. With the exception of one, they are
loosely stapled together to form booklets that vary
in number of paper sheets from twelve to thirty-two.
Through each semitransparent typewriter sheet the
viewer can see the faded drawings underneath: traces
with conté crayon and/or pencil that foreshadow
what is to come next. The overlapping of successive
planes activates the ground, revealing an image that
hovers in a different spatial level. What appears to be
“half-buried” becomes fully articulated only when
the pages turn.7 The resulting gradual exchange
between figure and ground has the effect of making
the shapes and forms seem to move, mirror, and
alter their position, appearing and disappearing, not
unlike characters in a slide show. Operated through
the mechanism of the casually stapled book, this
nearly narrative metamorphosis and interaction of
forms is characteristic of the first three sketchbooks
in particular. They display some of the configura-
tions used in later paintings such as Tiznit (1953).
The use of the drawings for different media also
becomes evident when looking at the last sketch-
book. It is annotated as “study for sculpture,” and
concomitantly Twombly here deploys an opposite
visual syntax. It parallels the enumerating logic of
a list and may even correspond to the typological
order known from the museum’s displays.8 The
shifting of one form into another is replaced by a
frontal depiction of each element with clearly sepa-
rated contours. Consequentially, the medium of
wax is substituted for an equalizing trace in pencil.
Figures of the same shape are repeated, with small
variations either in the outer structure or their inner
 Cy Twombly, Untitled [North African Sketchbook], cat. no. 17, III, 1953. Conté crayon on typewriter paper, 8.63 x 11 in. Courtesy Cy Twombly Foundation, New
York. © Cy Twombly Foundation
pattern. Though most of the fan- or tubelike forms
undermine the attempt at identification, some of
the elements indicate relations. For example, the
lozenge shape with three or more dots inside is a
recurrent motif in the sketchbooks and may refer
to a good luck charm, called after its formal resem-
blance to a pea-in-a-pod that Twombly had seen in
Morocco.9 Discovering such a magical symbol in
Twombly’s inventory of things does not mean it is
given a special or prominent place. Instead, it is lev-
eled down by the enumerative pattern itself and (in
case of missing information) even made invisible.
The continuation of the list leads to objects
or shapes that have very different connotations;
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spearheads or arrowheads, as well as other knife-
like forms, are instruments that imply violence and
mutilation. Since the late nineteenth century, the
Pigorini Museum has possessed a wide collection
of these arms, comprising all kinds of spearheads
(simple ones as well as others sharpened with
barbs).10 Founded on the ethnographic premises
of the late nineteenth century—that is, the cultural
evolutionist assumption that knowledge about non-
Western cultures, regarded as primitive (or worse),
could enhance the understanding of past stages of
the so-called Western civilization—the museum
aimed to provide the visitor with an idea of how other
peoples had actually lived.11 Hunting equipment
Becker Nka • 63
 Cy Twombly, Untitled [North African Sketchbook], cat. no. 20, IV, 1953. Pencil on typewriter paper, 8.63 x 11 in. Courtesy Cy Twombly Foundation, New York.
© Cy Twombly Foundation

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 Cy Twombly, Untitled [North African Sketchbook], cat. no. 20, IX, 1953. Pencil on typewriter paper, 8.63 x 11 in. Courtesy Cy Twombly Foundation, New York.
© Cy Twombly Foundation

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 and objects of daily life were given the same impor-
tance as items with aesthetic or religious value.
When Twombly visited the museum, then located
in the former building of the Collegio Romano
(which also housed the Museum Kircherianum), he
could see displayed in at least ten rooms a mass of
artifacts, ranging from weapons, clothes, cooking
devices, musical instruments, and figurative sculp-
tures, arranged without hierarchies but organized
according to their assumed provenance.
This geographic mapping was expanded on enter-
ing the adjacent rooms that showcased Oceanic and
ancient American cultures. The resulting panoramic
vision, in the end a reflection of colonial expansion,
essentially relied on a comparative approach that
was considered by Twombly in 1952 while prepar-
ing for his upcoming travel. Writing his letter of
application for the Out-of-State Fellowship from the
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts—the same fellowship
that would enable him to travel—he states:
The twentieth century is the great period of
revaluation of all known past cultures—the art of
the Africans and Indians and etc. which have been
considered barbarian, thus inferior cultures, have
taken their due places of importance in relationship
to our own present cultural patterns. The static classic
cast and the eighteenth-century artificiality, which as
art concept, has thus been broken to a great degree.
What I am trying to establish is—that Modern Art
isn’t dislocated, but something with roots, tradition
and continuity. For myself the past is the source
(for all art is vitally contemporary). I’m drawn to
the primitive, the ritual and fetish elements, to the
symmetrical plastic order (peculiarly basic to both
primitive and classic concepts, so relating the two).12
Though the all-encompassing tone of this state-
ment is at least partly due to its function as a letter
of application, the argument developed here clari-
fies Twombly’s attitude toward his upcoming travel.
It indicates the discourses he could draw on and
confirms his already existing attraction to African
art. In contrast to the reference to Native American
art, this attraction proved to be enduring, as the
artist later called his sculptures of the early 1950s his
“African things” and his early paintings his “vodoo
things.”13
A close reading of this passage positions the artist
within a sociopolitical context strongly associated
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with Franz Boas’s conception of anthropology. Boas
propagated cultural relativism and fought against
racism on scientific grounds. Following this direc-
tion, Twombly emphatically turns to “all” cultures
and declares their importance with respect to “our
own present cultural patterns.” With the latter phras-
ing he seems to take up a further line of theory that
was popularized by Ruth Benedict’s classic Patterns
of Culture (1934). Benedict advocated the tech-
nique of conceiving one’s own situation through an
engagement with the other. One consequence of this
relativistic approach was the construction of “cul-
tural” and even “national types.”14 In his fellowship
application letter Twombly alludes to this approach
when mentioning Mondrian as “an outgrowth of
Vermeer and the Flemish tradition.”15 On the other
side he questions it when referring to Picasso, who
“draws directly and freely on the Spanish, French,
African and Classic cultures.” Further, when
describing his own artistic aim, Twombly prefers to
speak in general terms. He insists that “Modern Art
isn’t dislocated.” Within the fracture of Western art,
brought by the recognition of others, Twombly sets
out to trace a “continuity.”16 Introducing an archeo-
logical dimension, he opposes the isolation of the
present and shows his program, again, as structured
by a quest for digging up and reconnecting distant
things.17
That such an aim, perhaps necessarily, implies
raising the degree of ambiguity can be observed in
the North African sketches in an exemplary way.
They produce a double-faced effect. On the one
hand, they seem to refer to concrete objects because
of the great variety of forms, and on the other hand,
they remain distanced from mere representation
through their sometimes tumbling and stiff, some-
times volatile, line. What appears to be drawn with
the left hand does not remain invariable but shows
the ability to slip away. Roland Barthes would later
describe this performative aspect of the line as a
“reversal” of the gauche.18
Accordingly, to follow the “trajectory of the
hand” has the effect of deferring the question of
representation.19 The viewer starts to shift from
detail to detail, tracing like a seismograph the hand’s
reaction. Note, for example, how the rows of phal-
luslike shapes, characterized at first only by hori-
zontal flattening stripes, become at last the target of
 Cy Twombly, Untitled [North African Sketchbook], cat. no. 20, I, 1953. Pencil on typewriter paper, 8.63 x 11 in. Courtesy Cy Twombly Foundation, New York. ©
Cy Twombly Foundation

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 repeated attacks. With the surrounding strokes of
pencil thrown at the forms, the practice of drawing
seems to be turned against itself. The “rush of mark-
ing” breaks with the line’s fluid continuity and now
operates within a rhythm of staccato.20 Within this
action the flatness of the surface seemingly bends
forward. If Twombly here investigated three-dimen-
sional objects (if we choose thus to follow him in his
account), we can see how he finds an articulation by
probing the resistance of the pencil and the ground.
The almost aggressive tactility of the marking affects
the shapes within their contour and generates a field
of tension. The same mark that is perceived as spiky
can become hairy; what appears as soft can turn into
something sharp. From this perspective the African
exhibits might be understood as a kind of genera-
tive model for working through different forms and
ambiguous aspects of material.
Since Twombly’s study prepares the transi-
tion into the three-dimensional, it is revealing
how Rauschenberg, showing a similar attraction
to the tactile, worked within this medium as well.
A photograph, likely taken by Twombly, docu-
ments how he has delicately arranged some of the
materials he could have collected in North Africa.
Rauschenberg prepares something that seems to
be a horse’s mane in a construction that also pro-
duces sound (attached are bells) and is part of his
so-called feticci personali (personal fetishes) series.21
The handling of these low and sensual materials
gains its subversive and surrealist tone in the way
Rauschenberg photographed these ephemeral
works. By staging them within the public context
of the Pincio Gardens in Rome—a place for com-
memorating distinguished personalities that reads
like a Who’s Who in Italian history—Rauschenberg
creates a strange constellation of overlapping tem-
poral spheres; by using his assemblages as indices of
wind and weather, he reconnects a place that looks
as if it were arrested in a former time. Contrasting a
marble bust, which functions as a pars pro toto for
the nineteenth-century construction of a national
identity, with a carefully balanced mobile, he partly
covers the name on the bust with a tuft of hair. In
concealing the sculpture’s referential tie to history,
Rauschenberg breaks with the nostalgic atmosphere
and binds the masqueraded figure to the viewer’s
present by stirring anew the sense of touch.
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A further tension arises in the visible character
“R” on the bust that coincides with Rauschenberg’s
initial, thereby putting notions of the self and the
other in an unstable relation, testing to what degree
the fragmented identity of the temporally distant
other can function as, or at least allude to, the mark-
ing of one’s own identity.22 Beyond dichotomies, a
chiasm is constructed here that is also reflected in
the title, Personal Fetishes, a combination that sig-
nals the intertwining of the intimate with the social
function of the ritual. Rauschenberg’s adoption of
and play with the word fetish can be seen further in
one context with the recurrent interest in powerful
objects, also observed in Twombly’s work. Within the
science of religion and ethnological discourse, the
term is abandoned as a European misconstruction,
dating back to the Portuguese encounter of African
ritual objects. Borrowed from the Portuguese word
feitiço (the latter goes back to the Latin adjective
facticius, meaning something manmade, in opposi-
tion to terrigenus as something naturally grown),
the term fetish was used to refer to an artifact and
to something acting on the sphere of social life.23
Oscillating in this way between an overtly exposed
materiality and the idea of an exceptional power, it
is this insecure and potentially transgressive status
of the fetishized object that remains provocative.
Speaking about modern art in general, Hal Foster
asks: “Could it be that the ‘magic’ perceived in the
object was in part its difference from the commod-
ity form, which modern art resisted but to which
it was partly reduced?”24 Foster’s question origi-
nally appeared in parentheses; the same question
that he directs toward Picasso and Braque may be
redirected toward Twombly and Rauschenberg.
For them, the ritual object could have presented
(at least during this early time) a path for opposing
the object’s equivalence with the commodity, as it
resisted abstraction from the manufactured.
To alter and empty out fixed meanings via the
inherent potentials of materials is a strategy that
differentiates the American artists from those
European avant-garde artists who traveled to North
Africa in the beginning of the twentieth century.
Although these earlier travelers represent a Western
encounter of what was then understood as the
Oriental, an artist like Paul Klee (indeed interested
in the opaque surface qualities of painting) provides
 Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled [Feticcio Personale, Rome], 1953. Gelatin silver print, 15 x 15 in. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York
a useful contrast. Investigating luminosity and tonal
gradations within nature, the aesthetic effects Klee
produced on site tend to show color as nearly imma-
terialized. The medium of watercolor was appropri-
ate for this study, as it enabled Klee to capture an
atmosphere in which the physicality of the making
was more or less dissolved.25 In comparison to Klee’s
approach, Twombly pursues an opposite direc-
tion: even when he notates colors through words,
he speaks of earth colors such as “chalk white” (his
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favorite ground in later painting), “dust,” “black
brown,” and “faded siena” [sic].26 Twombly’s colors
are materials, and yet they contain a spectrum, too:
just as dust can function as the index of passing
time, “faded” reflects the reverse effect, the washing
out of pigments toward transparency.The changes
within the material properties work as measure-
ments of time, tying the effects of light not to one
specific moment of the day (as it might seem with
Klee), but to duration and repeated action.
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 Cy Twombly, Untitled [North African Sketchbook], cat. no. 20, XII, 1953, Rome. Pencil on typewriter paper, 8.63 x 11 in. Courtesy Cy Twombly Foundation, New
York. © Cy Twombly Foundation

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 Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1953, Monotype in paint, 23.5 x 26.5 in. Courtesy Cy Twombly Foundation, New York. © Cy Twombly Foundation
This sensibility for material alterations is taken
to another level in the last sheet of Twombly’s
sculpture booklet. Having already filled his last
typewriter page, Twombly arrives at an opaque,
apparently thicker sheet. He starts filling this page
with drawings, too, but having notated several times
before such words as “nails” or “brass taks” [sic], he
now switches to use these references as actual tools.
Scratching several rows of perforated lines into the
ground, he depersonalizes his marks (no more sign
of the gauche) and subtly mutilates his support. By
trying out and recognizing the properties of his
catalogued materials as active and resisting parts
within his making, Twombly, similar to his touching
of the musical instrument in Rauschenberg’s pho-
tograph, exemplifies the procedure of pins or nails
carving into the surface structure.
When looking for the context in which these
centrally placed incisions appear, we find next to
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Twombly’s indexical marks some vertical, tubular
lines with spikes. They are drawn below the heading
“Sacred substance.” Though it remains unclear to
what these shapes refer, there seems to be a curi-
ous coincidence when asking what is done and with
which materials: the Pigorini Museum’s collection
comprises several Congolese power figures, which
were most likely on display during the time of
Twombly’s visit.27 The minkisi (of the type nkondi),
still called nail fetishes during the 1950s, are part of
a ritual practice. Regarded as material conductors of
an exterior power, their wooden surface is covered
with nails, and in the middle of their bodies they
contain something that is described as sacred or
“magic substance.”28 Even though Twombly did not
draw anything akin to the shape of a human figure—
and, therefore, the mentioning of these objects shall
detect corresponding uses of material only—it nev-
ertheless seems significant that he was exposed to
Becker Nka • 71
 objects like these, objects on which material altera-
tions were actually performed. Not by accident, it
is in the context of minkisi (the singular: nkisi) that
Wyatt MacGaffey states: “Without its constituent
elements, a nkisi is nothing: a pot, a cloth, a carving.
The questions to ask, therefore, would not be, ‘What
does it represent?’ but ‘What is it made of?’ and
‘What does it do?’” Questions, one might think, that
can be asked in regard to Twombly’s drawings, too. 29
A group of monotypes Twombly produced when
he returned to New York, made from cardboard
scored with a nail, show that it was the scratching
of the picture’s surface, the activating of its ground,
that the artist further pursued.30 With this incis-
ing he took an experimental step, anticipating the
marks in his contemporaneous and later paintings
and what since then has often been called graffiti.31
On a small scale this imprint of an imprint indicates
how marks and material not only complement each
other, but also merge into one effect. The African
objects may have bolstered Twombly’s discovery
of this. Stimulating drawing as a physical activity,
these artifacts within their displacement may have
helped to turn the focus on the material possibilities
at hand.
Anne-Grit Becker teaches art history at Free
University Berlin, Germany.
Notes
1 The tour covered a period of around nine months, beginning
in late August 1952 and ending sometime in April 1953. Cities
visited in Morocco were Casablanca, Marrakech, Tangier, and
Tetuán, the latter in company with the writer Paul Bowles. See
Kirk Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” in Cy Twombly: A
Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994); 16–19;
and Nicholas Cullinan, “Double Exposure: Robert Rauschenberg’s
and Cy Twombly’s Roman Holiday,” Burlington Magazine 150, no.
1264 (2008): 460–70.
2 The musical instrument identified as a “lyra from the Sudan”
is reproduced in Oggetti e Ritmi: Strumenti Musicali dell’Africa,
ed. Soprintendenza Speciale al Museo Preistorico ed Etnografico
“Luigi Pigorini” (Rome: De Luca Editore, 1980), 36. Not dated, the
object was donated to the museum by an Italian collector in 1881.
Note further that this type of lyre shows a long history of migration,
connecting the spaces of Ancient Greece, Egypt, and northeastern
and eastern Africa. See Martha Maas and Jane McIntosh Snyder,
Stringed Instruments of Ancient Greece (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1989), 81–83; and Ulrich Wegner, Afrikanische
Saiteninstrumente (Berlin: Museum für Völkerkunde, 1984),
93–100.
3 In contrast to assumptions about the tactility of African
sculpture as proposed by the controversial MoMA exhibition
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“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the
Modern (1984), this article discusses tactility as an aspect within
Twombly’s (and Rauschenberg’s) procedures of investigating
African material cultures and not as a somehow essential character
of the latter. For a comprehensive critique of the exhibition and its
premises see Hal Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern
Art,” October 34 (1985): 45–70.
4 See as examples Varnedoe, “Inscriptions,” 17–19; Martina
Dobbe, Querelle des anciens, des modernes et des postmodernes.
Exemplarische Untersuchungen zur Medienästhetik der Malerei
im Anschluß an Positionen von Nicolas Poussin und Cy Twombly
(Munich: Fink, 1999), 225n186; Achim Hochdörfer, Cy Twombly:
Das skulpturale Werk (Klagenfurt, Germany: Ritter, 2001), 34–38;
and Cullinan, “Double Exposure,” 466.
5 See Nicola Del Roscio, ed., Cy Twombly: Drawings; Catalogue
Raisonné Vol. 1, 1951–1955 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2011),
34–77, catalogue numbers 14 (private collection), 17, 18, and 20
(artist’s former collection). The loose pages, possibly separated
from one or several of the books, are catalogue numbers 15 and
16 and probably also numbers 19 and 21, although these are not
explicitly annotated as such. In the following I will refer to the
order proposed by the Catalogue Raisonné, identifying for practical
reasons number 20 as the last of the sketchbooks.
6 Varnedoe, “Inscriptions,” 17.
7 In 1951 Robert Motherwell, in his accompanying text for
Twombly’s exhibition at the Seven Stairs Gallery, spoke of the “half-
buried” aspects in Twombly’s paintings. They revealed the “sexual
character” of the shapes, which Motherwell called “fetishes.” See
the reprint of his text in Nicola Del Roscio, ed., Writings on Cy
Twombly (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2002), 14.
8 There is a documentary gap within the records of the museum’s
archive during the time of Twombly’s visit. Photographs of displays
exist, yet only a few of the Prehistoric and Oceanic sections are
published, dating back to the period of the museum’s inauguration
in 1876. For the photographs, see Maria Gabriella Lerario, “The
National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography ‘Luigi Pigorini’
in Rome: The Nation on Display,” in EuNaMus Report No. 4, ed.
Dominique Poulot, Felicity Bodenstein, and José María Lanzarote
Guiral (Linköping, Sweden: Linköping University Electronic Press,
2011), 53, 59, 61.
9 This possible relation is again based on the artist’s own
retrospective account. In this case it was Richard Shiff who drew
attention to a taped remark by Twombly, when he was interviewed
for the Menil Collection in 2000. In the interview Twombly related
the pea-pod form (apparent in an untitled painting from 1959) to a
“silver good-luck charm from Morocco.” Regarding the similar but
not identical shapes within the earlier North African Sketchbook,
Shiff states with caution that “these early drawings . . . indicate the
likelihood that Twombly had encountered either a real ‘silver good-
luck charm’ or something much like it” while traveling. See Shiff,
“Charm,” in Cy Twombly. Cycles and Seasons, ed. Nicholas Serota
(London: Tate, 2008), 11, 15.
10 See also Hochdörfer, Cy Twombly, 35. Most of the African
exhibits, numbering up to ten thousand, were acquired between
1876 and 1920 and thus document the nineteenth-century colonial
conquests. For this and examples of collected weapons, see Africa.
Guida alle sale espositive (Rome: Museo Nazionale Preistorico
Etnografico “Luigi Pigorini,” 1995), 14–21. The first guide of the
museum from 1937 provides a detailed map and an illustrated
overview of what was formerly on display. Among many other
things, musical instruments from the Sudan as well as several
power figures are mentioned. See Piero Barocelli, “Il Regio Museo
Preistorico-Etnografico ‘Luigi Pigorini’ Di Roma,” in Itinerari dei
 Musei e Monumenti d’Italia (Rome: Libreria dello stato, 1937),
18–21, 60–62. According to the account of Pigorini officials, the
arrangement of the exhibits did not change significantly until
the moving of the museum to its present-day location in the
Esposizione Universale Roma district of Rome between 1962 and
1977. Therefore, the listing provided by the earlier guide can be
taken as an indication of what was on display during Twombly’s
visit: Egidio Cossa, curator at Pigorini Museum, telephone com-
munication by author, September 2013.
11 The museum’s problematic attempt to construct an Italian
national identity leading back to prehistory has been reconstructed
historically by Lerario, “National Museum,” 49–67.
12 The entire statement is published in Varnedoe, “Inscriptions,”
56n48.
13 Ibid., 55n34. See Hochdörfer, Cy Twombly, 34n59, and
Cullinan, “Double Exposure,” 466n45. Note further that in 1955
Twombly’s exhibition in Washington, DC, comprised not only his
own paintings, but also several African masks. Whether this com-
bination reflected Twombly’s choice or the curator’s is not clear. See
Varnedoe, “Inscriptions,” 59n78.
14 For a critique of Benedict’s construction of a “catalog of
genres” and her recurrent use of the “us/not-us motif,” see Clifford
Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 102–28. On the tensions
within cultural relativism, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the
Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983), 46–49.
15 Varnedoe, “Inscriptions,” 56n48.
16 Ibid.
17 That digging up the past (Twombly sees the past as his “source”)
can at the same time mean to dig up a future, that is, a reversal of
the notions of backward and forward is a figure of thought that
Twombly could have shared with the poet Charles Olson at Black
Mountain College.
18 See Roland Barthes, “Cy Twombly: Works on Paper,” in
Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms. Critical Essays on
Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1985), 165.
19 Ibid., 164.
20 This phrase is from Richard Serra. See Kirk Varnedoe
and Richard Serra, “Cy Twombly: An Artist’s Artist,” in RES:
Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 28 (1995): 173.
21 The picture is published in Walter Hopps, Robert
Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s (Houston: Houston Fine Art Press,
1991), 112, fig. 40.
22 On Rauschenberg’s Italian works as partly indicating a sense
of Benjaminian aura, see Branden W. Joseph, Random Order:
Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2003), 132–35.
23 Regarding the notion of the fetish, I refer to Hartmut
Böhme, Fetischismus und Kultur. Eine andere Theorie der Moderne
(Reinbek bei Hamburg, Germany: Rowohlt, 2006), 178–89;
and to Reinhard Sachs, “Fetisch/Fetischismus,” in Handbuch
religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe, ed. Hubert Cancik,
Burkhard Gladigow, and Matthias Laubscher vol. 2 (Stuttgart,
Germany: Kohlhammer, 1990), 425–28. For the career of the
concept of fetishism within Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis,
see Böhme’s discussion on pages 307–52, 396–418. For an attempt
to read Twombly’s practice of drawing as a mode of fetishizing itself,
see Shiff, “Charm,” 11–31.
24 Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,” 57.
25 A good example of this tendency to immaterialize color is
Klee’s Blick zum Hafen von Hammamet (1914), in Die Tunisreise:
Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/nka/article-pdf/2017/41/60/521001/2017060.pdf
by BROWN UNIVERSITY, edwardgeoffrey@gmail.com
on 22 February 2018
Klee, Macke, Moilliet, ed. Ernst-Gerhard Güse (Stuttgart, Germany:
G. Hatje, 1982), 181.
26 See the reproduction in Nicola Del Roscio, ed., Cy Twombly:
Drawings, vol. 1, 74, cat. no. 20, fig. X.
27 See Barocelli, “Il Regio Museo,” 20. On the relation between
Twombly’s sculptures and African power figures, see Hochdörfer,
Cy Twombly, 38–44.
28 Africa. Guida alle Sale Espositive, 47. See also Wyatt
MacGaffey, “The Eyes of Understanding: Kongo Minkisi,” in
Astonishment and Power, ed. National Museum of African Art
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 21–103.
For reproductions of the minkisi, see Bruno Brizzi, ed., Museo
Preistorico-Etnografico Luigi Pigorini: The Pigorini Museum (Rome:
Quasar, 1977). Regarding the agency of minkisi and the practice
of nailing as a possible method of activation, see Jason R. Young,
Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the
Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2007), 105–17.
29 See Wyatt MacGaffey, “Minkisi on the Loano Coast,” in
Minkisi. Skulpturen vom unteren Kongo, ed. Grassi Museum für
Völkerkunde zu Leipzig (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstbuchverlag,
2012), 27–33, here 29.
30 Twombly had already used the technique of scratching during
his studies at the Art Students League in New York. However,
these works are not preserved and are only mentioned in a letter
of his to Leslie Cheek Jr., dating January 21, 1951. See Varnedoe,
“Inscriptions,” 58n 67.
31 The analogy of Twombly’s works to graffiti first appears in
1953 in a review by James Fitzsimmons describing paintings such
as Tiznit, which were indeed based on the North African sketches.
In a slightly earlier review of the same exhibition, Lawrence
Campbell, though not using the term, further noted an essential
feature of graffiti when relating the paintings to “anonymous draw-
ings on walls.” For reprints of both reviews, see Del Roscio, ed.,
Writings on Cy Twombly, 27, 25. More recently, Rosalind Krauss
read Twombly’s marks as graffiti. See, as an example, her text in
the exhibition catalog Formless, in which Krauss draws on Georges
Bataille’s understanding of alteration as comprising two opposite
directions: the “decomposition” and the “transcendence” of matter.
See “Olympia,” in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless:
A User’s Guide (1997; repr. New York: Zone, 1999), 147–52.
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