Cy Twombly’s major retrospective is going up at the Guggenheim Bilbao. According to ArtInfo, this retrospective also coincides with the artist’s 80th birthday. So if the Gugg. Bilbao has this great exhibition going up tomorrow, NYC should be getting it soon, right? Let’s hope so. This collection of almost 100 of Twombley’s works would make my year.

This exhibition will highlight the series 9 Discourses pictured above, as well as other large scale series he has done, such as Le Quattro Stagione, and sculptures and drawings.

Invierno, Quattro Stagioni (1993-94)

Twombley, a fellow Southerner, is one of my favorite contemporary artist. His work is evocative and painterly in a smearing, emotional kind of way that still manages to impress with restraint and control. Le Quattro Stagione never fails to leave me spellbound, from when I first saw it at the Tate Modern to when I rediscovered it in the atrium of MoMA here in New York. At least now I know where it went.

In their press release for the exhibition, the museum states, “Committed to collecting Twombly’s work, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has recently acquired the series Nine Discourses on Commodus (1963). The work around which the exhibition is designed, it consists of nine distinct canvases and was the first of the artist’s series to be conceived as a unified whole….[it] offers a closer look at the spirit of this marvellous artist who, as exhibition curator Carmen Giménez points out, ‘not only irradiates a fascinating personal magic, but has also taken us to the most intricate frontiers of contemporary painting.'”

The below painting, from his 2007 show Blooming a scattering of blossoms and other things that I tragically missed at Gagosian, due primarily to Gagosian confusing me with the multiple addresses that make up his empire, has not been as well received in some circles. However, some found it particularly enticing. One, for example, was the French woman arrested for kissing it, later claiming “It was an act of love.” Untitled