Sally Mann Show, ‘Suffused With Grief’
LEXINGTON, Virginia — “It’s just indescribable,” said Sally Mann, the photographer and writer, as she stood in the kitchen of the home she built on her family’s farm with Larry Mann, her husband of 46 years, and erupted in tears.
“I’m just trying to keep moving,” she said.
In June, Ms. Mann’s eldest child, Emmett, who had struggled with schizophrenia, took his own life, at the age of 36.
On the dining table were her haunting, evocative photographs taken over the years of the studio in downtown Lexington where her friend, the painter Cy Twombly, had worked. Twombly was born 23 years before Ms. Mann in this same small town. In her intimate and elegiac images, some of the emptied studio, after his death in 2011, it was hard not to feel an acute absence.
Now the Twombly catalog and the show, called “Remembered Light,” which opened September 22 at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan, are “suffused with grief,” she said.
The name Sally Mann is inseparable from the indelible images of her children, Emmett, Jessie and Virginia, in their unfettered youthful play, sometimes naked. In her memoir, “Hold Still,” published last year, Ms. Mann wrote that her family pictures — which in the early 1990s became engulfed in morality debates about the depiction of children’s bodies and judgment of Ms. Mann as a mother — could not be completely understood outside the context of this farm.
The farm is remote and sylvan. A communal family space flows into Ms. Mann’s office and leads into her studio hung with photographs of her children. “I never separated myself as an artist and a mother,” said Ms. Mann, 65.
In this local realm, she has created photographs of lush Southern landscapes and studies of her husband’s body revealing the effects of his progressive muscular dystrophy.
Ms. Mann had barely left the farm since Emmett’s death. In late July she offered to take a visitor into Lexington to tour the markers in Twombly’s life, and her own. Her first stop was Walmart, where she said Twombly liked to sit on a bench outside. “One of the most urbane, sophisticated humans alive, he would just sit there and watch the people come out and look at the mountains,” she said. “He was fascinated.”
Ms. Mann’s kinship with Twombly began with her parents. Her father invited Twombly, a high school senior, to dinner in the mid-1940s. Ear- ly patrons, her parents bought one of Twombly’s house-paint and pencil paintings in 1955 for $150.
When Twombly moved back to his hometown in 1993 from Gaeta, Italy, for six months each year, “we became friends and compatriots and companions and helpmates,” Ms. Mann said. A record of their admiration for each other as artists is captured in the new exhibition.
A painter of grand, abstract canvases, Twombly set up his studio in a pedestrian storefront in downtown Lexington. “It was crude as can be, drop ceiling with water stains,” Ms. Mann said. Her earliest photograph in the Gagosian exhibition focuses on Twombly’s tidy lineup of paints, brushes and stained cloths in a spartan linoleum-floored room.
Ms. Mann next visited the Lexington Restaurant, a diner where Twombly came for the grits and banter. “He would take really high-powered art people from Europe here,” she said. At the diner, Ms. Mann brought up her son. “Emmett had three terrible brain injuries,” she said. He was hit by a car when he was young. There were two accidents in adulthood. “That’s when the schizophrenia took over,” she explained.
On this day, as in her writing and through her view camera, she stared as squarely as she could, contemplating the passage of time and the transience of life.