33 Meters of Immortality: Cy Twombly’s Ceiling for the Louvre

Abstract

In 2006 Cy Twombly was chosen to decorate the ceiling of the Louvre’s Salle des Bronzes. The latest ceiling commission at the museum dated back to 1953, when Georges Braque executed Oiseaux for the ceiling of Salle Henri II. Completed in 2010, Ceiling (le Plafond) departs from the artist’s signature trembling line while retaining other characteristics of his pictorial language. Twombly treated the ceiling as an easel painting of monumental dimensions: a surface he filled with an almost monochromatic blue field, evoking the sky and recalling Giotto’s Arena Chapel vault. Simple, geometric motifs trace the ceiling’s contours, while inscriptions naming seven sculptors from ancient Greece invite the visitor for a walk around the gallery. This paper shows how Twombly participated in the long tradition of ceiling painting by building a strong connection between the space, content, and context of the room: a site in which the viewer plays a decisive role. With a rare example of monumental 21st century painting, sited where one might not expect to encounter abstraction, Twombly made his entrance into the Louvre’s pantheon of great artists, gaining, as one critic put it, «33 meters of immortality».