Image: Museum Brandhorst, Munich
Museum Brandhorst has drawn attention to Cy Twombly’s photographs of the sea at Gaeta, the Italian coastal town where the artist spent part of each year for roughly 25 years. A collection note published by the Munich museum describes Twombly’s use of a Polaroid camera and his frequent images of the water at Miramare beach.
According to the note, Twombly began living and working in Gaeta for several months each year in 1983. After purchasing a house there in 1985, the town became one of his most important studios and places of residence. The museum’s account presents the photographs as part of his sustained engagement with the landscape around him, focusing in particular on the sea and shoreline.
The newsletter accompanying the note identifies an image as Cy Twombly’s ‘Miramare - By the Sea (Gaeta)’, dated 2008. The image credit names the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio and credits Sibylle Forster and Museum Brandhorst, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, for the photograph. The supplied collection material does not provide further technical information about the work.
The feature forms part of Museum Brandhorst’s online collection presentation, which offers a selection from the Udo and Anette Brandhorst Collection and the Eva Felten Photo Collection. The museum houses more than 2,000 works by international artists, with its holdings extending from the 1930s to the present. Cy Twombly is among the artists represented in the collection, alongside works including ‘Lepanto III’, ‘Lepanto XI’ and ‘Untitled (Roses)’.
Twombly’s relationship with Italy is also reflected in the museum’s exhibition programme. Museum Brandhorst has presented a dedicated Cy Twombly display as a permanent exhibition since 1 June 2009. The museum’s current collection exhibitions include Twombly works in both ‘Long Story Short. An Art History of the Brandhorst Collection from the 1960s to the Present’ and ‘Confrontations. Pairings from the Collection’. ‘Long Story Short’, on view from 23 October 2025 through 31 January 2027, places Twombly within a chronological account of post-1960s art drawn from the museum’s holdings.
‘Confrontations’, on view through 27 September 2026, includes 55 works by 39 artists and sets works together in pairings without an established formal or art-historical relationship. Its listed Twombly work is ‘Untitled (New York City)’, dated 1968. The museum’s online note on the Gaeta photographs provides a separate view of the artist through images made outside the better-known contexts of his paintings and sculptures, while locating that photographic activity within the years he lived and worked at Miramare.
