Ewa Monika Zebrowski is a Montreal-based photographer and poet. Her photographs and artist’s books touch on themes of displacement and memory, place and time, and traces. She creates visual narratives often inspired by art and literature, sometimes collaborating with writers and poets. She worked in the film industry for seventeen years before obtaining a BFA in Fine Arts and an MA in Visual Arts, having previously completed a degree in English Literature. Zebrowski has had thirty-six solo exhibitions and produced twenty-four artist’s books. Her work can be found in many museum and institutional collections in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Denmark, and Australia. Her newest book, I Never Knew Cy Twombly, Bassano in Teverina, was published by Nearest Truth Editions in November.
Dean Rader has authored or co-authored twelve books, including Works & Days, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, a Barnes & Noble Review Best Book, and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. His writing has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art Omi, and the MacDowell Foundation. Rader is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry 2023. Ewa and Dean held a series of conversations over Zoom, phone, and email about a shared obsession: the celebrated artist Cy Twombly. In March, Zebrowski, who has produced five artist’s books and a portfolio of prints in response to Twombly’s work, had an exhibit of her photographs and artist’s books at Luisa Cevese Riedizioni in Milan. Just three days after her exhibit closed, Dean’s book, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, a collection of poems in conversation with Twombly’s drawings and paintings, was published on the 95th birthday of the famed abstract artist.
Though originally attracted to different aspects of Twombly’s artistic practice, Zebrowski and Rader discovered an astonishing overlap in terms of how Twombly inspired them and what drove them to engage in this work. It is through that engagement with Twombly that they found each other and began exploring the ways in which their respective practices could speak to each other.
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Dean Rader: Ewa, it has been such a great pleasure to get to know you and discover your work, which I love so much. Based simply on our lives, biographies, career paths, and geographical location, one might assume that we would have little in common. But we have both spent several years deeply immersed in projects that engage with the work of Cy Twombly—one of the most enigmatic and inscrutable American artists. You told me once that you first discovered him through his Polaroids. How did that come about? And what drew you to these photos?
Ewa Monika Zebrowski: I was aware of Twombly’s blackboard paintings which I loved but was not aware that he was also a photographer and that he had lived in Italy for 50 years, a country for which I feel a strong affinity.
When I discovered a book of his Polaroids published by Schirmer Mosel at Ursus Books in New York in 2012 I wanted to know more! His Polaroids, reflecting intimate details of his life, a fading bouquet, gnarled lemons, his slippers, reminded me of my own photographs and of how I see things.
You just published a book of 50 poems inspired by Twombly. Can you describe the first time you were moved by Twombly’s work?
DR: I think the first time I was moved by Twombly was when I visited the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil in Houston not long after it opened. I was there with my friend Chris, also a writer, who was eager to visit the Rothko Chapel. We both were. However, I found the Rothko space depressing, even oppressive, compared to the Twombly space which was light, airy, gorgeous. I remember standing in front of Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) and thinking, Now this is heavenly. It was not in the chapel, but in that space, among those paintings, that I felt the presence of the divine. I suspect this is because I felt an affinity with how Twombly saw (and articulated) what was in his head (and heart).
Which brings me back to something you say above. How do you see things? What moves you as a photographer? In the Venn diagram of your work and Twombly’s, where do you see the overlap?
EMZ: I love the layers in Twombly’s work: poetry, numbers, words, erasures. I feel like an archaeologist when I look at his work trying to decipher his meaning. In Rome, Cy lived on Via Monserrato, the same street I lived on in the eighties. I was not aware of him then. Now I wonder if I ever saw him walking down the street.
You ask about my photographs. Fragments and moments. I try to imagine what he would see in his daily walks on Via Monserrato. I try to imagine his daily life. I wonder what would make him pick up his Polaroid and take a photo.
The Venn intersection: the smell of lemons, the cypress trees, a fading fresco on Piazza de Ricci. And the sounds of the Italian language. A plate of pasta. The view of the sea from his window in Gaeta.
What inspired you to write your first poem?
DR: In late 2017, right around Christmas, my father died. A couple of months later, my sister and I met in Oklahoma, where I am from and where my father lived, to go through his things. My dad was an unusual man—I’m not sure many folks like him exist any longer. He did not graduate from college but was the longest serving mayor of our hometown and had even run for state senate. In addition, he was a bail bondsman, a private process server, president of the local Kiwanis club, winner of a hog calling competition, and a state-championship winning baseball coach. When I was young, he was a bookie and had played near-professional level poker. He also started a hugely popular youth baseball tournament; there is even a Gary Rader mentor award.
Needless to say, he and I took very different paths.
As my sister and I were going through boxes and boxes of photos, newspaper clippings, plaques, ribbons, trophies, certificates, and other awards, I kept asking: what makes a life? How does one contribute? Almost immediately after this trip, I visited a career retrospective of Twombly drawings at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan. As I walked through this stunning show, I was looking at the Twombly pieces through the lens of my father’s choices, and again I was asking those same two questions.
Clearly, I have chosen the path of Twombly. But, that evening, as I left the gallery, I walked along the High Line thinking about these convergences. In my hotel room that night, I was remembering a Twombly drawing from his Orpheus series and started working on what would become the first poem in my book:
Cy Twombly, Orpheus (1979)
(Courtesy of Emanual Hoffmann Foundation, on permanent loan to the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel; photo: Kunstsammlung Basel, Martin P. Bühler)© Cy Twombly Foundation.
TROUBLED BY THOUGHTS ABOUT INFINITY AND OBLIVION, I EXIT THE TWOMBLY RETROSPECTIVE AT DUSK AND WALK THE HIGHLINE WITH THE GHOST OF MY FATHER
This evening, the unknown waves its wand,
and a beam of light disappears into the sky’s black hat.
The moon has never known its true home.
The stars do not remember when they began their journey.
Out of that forgetting,
they begin their own making.
Just like us.
Soon the sun will take off its cape,
and open a door to a place that is not there.
Out of that absence,
the questions:
What black bones hang above the unseen?
What name does the fire give to flame?
What burns through existence to endlessness?
We are not here long enough to believe in anything but language,
and yet we know what awaits us is silence—
somehow always rising above the darkness
into darkness,
always drawn to our own obscurity.
Future self,
I think of you arriving at our ending—
last line on the last page—
the trace within the vanishing,
the final sleight of hand in which everything disappears.
Remember: the unseen is never truly empty.
Despite erasure,
the canvas never blank.
What about you? What was your first poem about Twombly?
EMZ: I do not remember what the first poem was that I wrote about Twombly. But I do remember that I was in Rome as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy spending time looking at Twombly’s Polaroids at the Archive in Gaeta. I went to Rome to take photographs and ended up writing. I remember that I was working on a few poems simultaneously. Writing somehow complemented the experience of photographing. I needed both words and images to express my feelings about Twombly and his 50 years in Italy.
twombly, italia was my first project inspired by Cy. The idea was to produce an artist’s book. I am not sure if my first poem was “Boats,” “Bacchus,” “Lemons,” “The White Sculptures,” or “Procession.” I remember reading “Procession” and a few other early poems to Nicola Del Roscio. He was Twombly’s partner and is the director of the Cy Twombly Foundation.
He liked my poems and ended up collaborating with me to publish this first work. I was and still am thankful for his generous collaboration and enthusiasm.
How did you select the drawings and paintings that you responded to in your poems?
DR: It was pretty random, to be honest.
My original plan was to write a poem in response to every piece in the Gagosian exhibit. But that started to feel limiting. There were other pieces that had moved me for a long time, many of which I had seen in person and had really strong emotional attachments to.
For instance, there are two exquisite Twomblys here in San Francisco at the SFMoMA that I knew I wanted to write poems to/for. There are two others that I absolutely love at the Menil, as well as the massive Fifty Days at Iliam sequence at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And, then there is Synopsis of a Battle—one of the first pieces I remember seeing in person and being wholly blown away by. So, I quickly decided this was going to be a labor of love; I would only talk to the pieces I had fallen for.
During the pandemic this interest morphed into a true obsession. I kept requesting volumes of Twombly’s Catalogue Raisonné through Interlibrary Loan or tracking down used copies on eBay. I would spend hours looking at Twombly’s work and taking notes. Those notes led to poems and then more poems and then more poems and ultimately to my book.
Speaking of Twombly poems, I’m wondering if you would select one of your poems and sort of walk us through it. How did it come about? Is there a specific Twombly image it responds to? What work are you hoping it does both as a poem and as a kind of letter to Twombly?
EMZ: This poem, “Gaeta (Riviera d’Ulysee),” is a kind of refrain about time passing and Twombly’s love for Gaeta, his last home. I first visited Gaeta in the summer of 2014. A seaside town on the Mediterranean halfway between Rome and Naples.
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Wild orchids hide amongst the palms, lizards scamper,
crickets protest the heat,
figs ripen,
The sea of Aeneas languid blue.
fifty years have passed.
Summer was your season. The Tyrrhenian, your sea. Cicero’s burial place nearby.
A place to smell summer.
fifty years have passed.
nothing has changed (and) everything has changed.
Twombly loved the sea and loved his perch on the coast. He could stare at the sea from his house on the hill. And enjoy the lush vegetation. I remember the heat and the scampering lizards and the chirping crickets. The flowering trees. A sweet smell in the air. A mythological place which appealed to him. The sea of Aeneas.
The poem was easy to write.
I wanted to invoke Gaeta, his home on the sea and the summer season. You may be able to get a sense of that in these photographs.
Ewa Monika Zebrowski, Top: Riviere de Ulysse; Middle: Boats; Bottom: Cactus
As a poet what do you think of Twombly’s use of poetry in his drawings, paintings, and sculptures? What was he trying to evoke? Which are your favorite quotes?
DR: Well, I love that aspect of his work. Incorporating lines of poetry in his drawings and paintings, is, in some ways, his signature. His brand. On one hand, it makes no logical sense—why would an artist write out a line of poetry in barely legible script, when there is a perfect version of the poem in a book (or now on the Internet) in utterly legible font? It is irrational. And yet, I find that gesture so endearing.
I love the Sappho fragments, the lines from Keats, but what I most adore is how much he adores Rilke. My favorite is probably these lines from Rilke’s “Ninth Elegy,” from The Duino Elegies, which appear in Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor):
this fleeting world, which in some way
keeps calling to us.
Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing
Just once; no more. And we too, just once
and never again
Twombly’s line breaks (which I have replicated here) are much different than Rilke’s. Twombly makes the poem more vertical, and he plays with the Stephen Mitchell translation a tiny bit, but wow—how glorious!
How about you? As a visual artist and a poet, what do you make of Twombly’s inscriptions?
EMZ: I like discussions about drawing, writing, and mark making. There is definitely an intersection. In these electronic times there is a certain poignancy to seeing the written word.
Twombly’s writing, or scrawl as it is sometimes referred to, often in pencil, is at times illegible. This adds a certain mystery. I love the poetry fragments he includes.
I like Twombly’s drawings that include the singular name of a poet, god, goddess: Aphrodite, Venus, Plato, Bacchus and others. Interesting that a name can evoke so much. The written name, a visual representation of that being, becomes a kind of portrait.
I find it interesting that Twombly was a cryptographer for the US army between 1953 and 1954. In his work he leaves secret messages for us to decipher.
DR: Right? Codes. Ciphers. Symbols. Secrets.
I often wonder what he might be hiding. Or revealing. I feel like his scrawls are often a kind of code. His lines of poetry are always bordering on the illegible.
I am not a sculptor, nor have I written much about sculpture. I feel like I know much less about it than drawing or painting. You seem more knowledgeable about architecture and sculpture—how does Twombly’s sculptural practice inform your own work?
EMZ: I certainly appreciate Cy’s sculptures. I find them whimsical, imaginative, and spontaneous. They are interesting, moving metaphors that touch me in their simplicity and directness.
I think it is important to acknowledge that both photography and sculpture are an integral part of Cy’s artistic expression. His photography was spontaneous. Using the Polaroid process, he recorded intimate, fleeting moments of his daily life. Cy’s sculptures are for me mythical objects. Made of humble materials, they make statements about war, music, myths, ancient civilizations. They are unique artifacts.
Cy loved to frequent yard sales and would find elements for his sculptures on these occasions. He used wood., string, wire, nails to create his sculptures, often painting everything white. He once said, “White paint is my marble.” Sometimes he would write on the sculptures using a pencil.
I first discovered Cy’s sculptures at the Menil in Houston. When one enters the Cy Twombly Gallery there is a small room to the right that contains a few of his white sculptures. The room felt like a sanctuary, a space for meditation. I entered the room and was moved.
What do you think about his sculptures? Do you think his own sculptures reflect his love for ancient civilizations?
DR: Twombly’s sculptures are particularly interesting to me, in part because they do not obviously resemble his drawings or paintings. You could show his paintings and sculptures to someone who did not know his work, and they would never guess they are by the same artist. I love that he branches out into sculpture. To me, they add a dimensionality to his oeuvre.
I will also say that I think he is an under-appreciated collagist. And indeed, his collages often contain sculptural components. He will often affix a postcard to paper, sometimes in vertical stacks, creating a sense of dimensionality. The postcards are often photographs of landscapes, so that adds a sense of verisimilitude to the Twombly field. It can be jarring but lovely.
I was actually going to ask you about his love of the ancient world.
We both attended the Making Past Present exhibit, in which Twombly is contextualized among artifacts from the ancient world. And so, yes, when viewed through that lens, one does see Twombly attempting to reach back to that era by way of his time-washed sculptures. Your observation about his desire for the pieces to be white (a la Greek and Roman sculpture) does not seem random. What are your thoughts on this?
EMZ: Cy Twombly came to Rome in 1957 with Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg returned to New York, and Twombly stayed. Rome and the Ancient World seduced him. His first apartment was across the street from the Coliseum.
The Cycladic Museum Athens, the Getty Museum Los Angeles, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston all presented his work in the context of works of antiquity, his inspiration evident. His contemporary art was rooted in another era where myth, gods and goddesses prevailed, a notion I try to capture in one of my poems:
III
Orpheus, Proteus, Venus, Apollo.
The ancient gods whisper your name.
Remembering, your brush
moves, the colors unfurl.
The ancient graffiti transformed into poetry
onto canvas for posterity.
Speaking of posterity, you mentioned earlier that your father died, but I know your mother also passed away as you were completing this book. How did her death affect this project?
DR: That is true. Right after I submitted the completed manuscript to my publisher (this was late 2020), my mother passed away from complications related to COVID-19. She either caught it right before coming to visit our family and brought it with her, caught it somewhere on her trip from Oklahoma to San Francisco, or more tragically, caught it here—perhaps from one of us. We will never know for sure. Just a couple of days after she returned home, she and my mother-in-law tested positive. The next day, my wife tested positive, then my oldest son, then me, and then, on December 31, our youngest son. That same day, within hours of my son testing positive, my mother was admitted to Mercy Hospital in Oklahoma City.
She never left.
That these events transpired on the final day of one of the worst years in recent memory, seemed a brutal way for 2021 to ensure we would never forget it. I asked my editor if I could add a poem to/for her to the manuscript, and he gave the green light. So, there is one poem in the book to my mother, who was herself an artist. She would have loved this book.
I was also thinking about how spontaneous Twombly’s work feels. How un-precious, un-honed. How raw. And so, at the end of this very messy, very un-honed poem that talks to Twombly’s Letter of Resignation series, I just tacked on this spontaneous, un-precious prose poem:
Dear Cy,
Everything is ending.
My mother, an artist, painted her final work on the cast covering my son’s arm. I think about her dying every day. I feel it is impossible to write. I feel as though this book, composed almost entirely during the pandemic, is both bookended and wholly inscribed by death. Twombly is dead. My father is dead. My mother is dead. My father-in-law is dead. One of my closest friends is dead. She drank herself to death. I’ve not told you that before. Will you forgive me? Can you even read this? Did you notice, Cy, that in my book of poems, this section is in prose? Why do you think that is? I wonder if the equivalent for you is including text in your paintings. What if I painted this? Or drew it? Could you see it then? Dear Cy, I know I just told you my mother is dead, but I feel I need to say it again. And do you know what else? When I tried to type dead above, I spelled dean. Dear Cy, did you know that dead and dean are only one letter apart? My friend Elizabeth noticed before me that Dean Rader is only two letters from Dear Reader.
Dear Reader/Dean Rader Please accept my resignation.
Cy Twombly, from Letter of Resignation (1959-67)
Courtesy of the Cy Twombly Foundation – © Cy Twombly Foundation.
I do not want to resign from our conversation, but I feel like this might be an opportune time to wrap things up.
EMZ: Agreed. We have covered a lot of territory. It is clear from our shared correspondences with Cy that we both love his work and love engaging with it.
How interesting that we both found our way to him through text and image but through different venues and genres. He would have appreciated this.
Neither of us ever met Cy Twombly. Yet, somehow, he has touched both our spirits. In a profound way. An emotional connection. We are moved to spend time with his art, to learn about his life. It is as if we are having a conversation with him, and through him, with each other.
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