Natural History Part I: Mushrooms

In 1974, at the request of curator and collector Heiner Bastian, Cy Twombly began work on a set of ten ambitious mixed‑media prints that would become Natural History Part I: Mushrooms. For this portfolio, Twombly selected an illustration sourced from a scientific book on fungi as his central motif. Using this single image as a point of departure, he subjected it to a wide range of technical processes—including lithography, grano‑lithography, collotype and photochrome. Twombly then heightened each print with collage elements and hand‑worked passages in crayon and pencil, allowing his hallmark visual cues of spontaneity and gesture to partner with external source material.

Natural History Part I: Mushrooms and its companion series, Natural History Part II: Some Trees of Italy, draw thematically from Naturalis Historia, the encyclopedic text compiled by Pliny the Elder in 77–79 AD. Pliny’s monumental treatise sought to catalogue the natural world while also framing nature as a site of wonder, divinity and inherent meaning. Twombly absorbed this conception of nature as both subject and metaphor, creating works in which scientific illustration becomes a structure through which to explore memory, myth and the act of mark‑making itself. In Part I, the mushroom appears in dialogue with an array of visual fragments: magazine clippings, photographic montages, color‑chart swatches and the artist’s own calligraphic interventions.