Podcast #132: Sally Mann on Cy Twombly and the Babushkas Who Saved Russian Art
In 2001, Sally Mann was named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time magazine. In a career spanning decades, she has exhibited her work at the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has published several books, including Immediate Family and What Remains. On September 22, her exhibition Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington, which includes black and white photographs of her friend and fellow artist Cy Twombly, opened at the Gagosian Gallery. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Mann discussing Lexington, Kentucky, Cy Twombly, and the Russian babushkas who saved Russian art.
Mann met Twombly in Lexington, Kentucky, where Twombly kept a studio. She described his work space as a prosaic one transformed when Twombly moved in:
"You would not believe this place. You think of Cy Twombly — what did someone say? — he wanted to live like a prince but in a poor neighborhood or something. So it's sort of like in a rich neighborhood living like a pauper. It was this funny old building that as it turns out used to be the Columbia Gas Offices for Rockbridge County, really just the most humdrum little storefront basically. Glass. You would never, ever think of Cy Twombly working there. You'd think of him as being some poetic, lyrical place filled with ossified Greek heads and this kind of stuff. No, no, no not at all. It was a storefront and it had these shabby little Venetian blinds. I had no idea why he chose them. I never asked them. Someone will know maybe. But when he moved in, it had been the Columbia Gas Offices and then an eye doctor had been in there. And when he moved in, he set up everything perfectly like in little rows and all of his paints from left to right, red orange yellow, green, just right on through the spectrum. All of his brushes were brand new. It was kind of sweet seeing him begin."
Asked about why she and Twombly were attracted to Lexington, Mann described the physical beauty of the geography:
"Geographically, it's just so special. It's right in the middle of the Shenandoah Valley, but in all of the nine hundred miles of the Shenandoah Valley, there's these three mountains that have just erupted like wayward molars in the middle of this big open mall of Shenandoah Valley, and the three mountains surround Lexington so that wherever you are in Lexington, you can not only see the blue ridge on one side and the Appalachians on the other, but there are these three gorgeous mountains, and it's just beautiful there."
Often, Mann would drive Twombly around. She spoke fondly of their sprawling conversations in the car:
"We would drive together a lot. I had a big, old, lazy, old, old, old BMW, and he felt so comfortable in it because he was a big man and he could stretch out, and it was one of those big, sloppy cars that like Bruce Springsteen sings about. Driving down the road, and we would just drive. We would just drive places and talk about Napoleon. I vividly remember this conversation. I was reading this book called The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier. Fabulous book if any of you want to read it. It's a quick read because of course everybody dies. But we got to talking about that then, and he got to talking about his great affection for the Russian babushkas who he felt saved Russian art. We would just leap from that to that. Classical. We spoke a lot about classical nudes. And then it would be Walmart. There was always this strange dichotomy."
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