Cy Twombly and the Art of Hunting Mushrooms

Art historians have linked Cy Twombly’s works to a range of movements, from abstract expressionism and minimalism to arte povera and neo-expressionism. And while some have associated Twombly’s oeuvre with antiquity, referencing the classical names of people and places scrawled across his canvases, most have eschewed nominal specificity. The artist’s lithographic portfolio Natural History Part I, Mushrooms (1974) allows us to reconsider these conventional characterizations, proposing, instead, that his primary creative endeavor was exploring and articulating the relation between natural history and human history. Viewed against the mycological activities of John Cage, who created his own Mushroom Book (1972), Twombly’s work helps us view our interaction with nature, here manifest through the act of mushroom hunting, as a pretext for artistic production, In attending to the natural world, Twombly compels us to wonder what we have left to history in our insistence upon objective truth and the primacy of vision.