Cy Twombly and Sally Mann’s Studio Days

Painter Cy Twombly and photographer Sally Mann developed a special bond through many shared days in Twombly’s studio, documented by Mann and compiled in her upcoming book Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington, published by Abrams in association with Gagosian Gallery

By Stephen Wallis

Sept. 7, 2016

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cy-twombly-and-sally-manns-studio-days-1473270128

IT WAS INEVITABLE that Cy Twombly and Sally Mann would find each other. After all, the two most famous artists from Lexington, Virginia, were both misfits. He was the idiosyncratic painter whose mix of graffiti-like scrawls and literary references defied easy categorization, and she the photographer of evocative family pictures and landscapes who always cleaved a distinctive path. Both chose to work outside the glare of art-capital spotlights: Mann has always been based in rural Lexington, while Twombly spent most of his career in Gaeta, Italy. But in the early ’90s, when he started returning home for half the year, they developed a special bond that lasted until his 2011 death.

“We thought of each other as kindred spirits,” says Mann, who recounts how the two often took walks, went for long rides in her old BMW (“Cy loved that car because it was like a luxury boat, and he could stretch out in it”) and spent time in each other’s studios. His unlikely workspace, a former gas company office, was a humdrum, 1950s brick building with single-pane windows. But there, amid low ceilings and fluorescent lighting, Twombly completed a number of major works. One day in 1999, Mann decided to take a few pictures of his studio, and it turned out to be the start of a 13-year project.

“It began very casually and became sort of a labor of love,” she says. “It never occurred to me that they would ever be published or exhibited.” But this fall, Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington, a book of those photographs, will be published by Abrams in association with Gagosian Gallery, which will exhibit a selection of the images at its Madison Avenue location through October 29. The pictures capture works in various stages of progress, tabletops piled with materials, walls and floors splashed with paint. “Cy had these competing impulses between personal restraint and this feeling of Dionysian excess and celebration,” says Mann. “In the earliest photographs, the studio was pristine. And by the end you could barely walk through.”