Collector Walls: The Twombly That Got Away
John Stefanidis, who befriended Cy Twombly in the ’50s, recalls his summers with the artist on Patmos and the painting that he thought had disappeared.
W hen I showed John Stefanidis a photograph of Cy Twombly in his Rome apartment in 1961, in the middle of painting a canvas that would eventually hang in Stefanidis’ own dining room, something shifted in his expression. He had never seen the photo before, and he was reminded of a time in his life that now feels impossibly distant.
Stefanidis, a cosmopolitan, sharply curious interior designer, now 89, first met Twombly in Rome in the late 1950s, while living a short walk from Twombly’s fabled apartment on the Via di Monserrato.
Stefanidis would often visit Twombly and his wife, Tatiana Franchetti, at home. The young designer found their apartment endlessly astonishing. Within its walls unfolded a series of rooms filled with fragments of the past: busts of emperors, pieces of classical statuary, ornate chairs. “One day you would go and it was a sitting room,” he recalls, “and on the next visit it would be a bedroom. It was constantly changing.” Nothing stayed fixed for long, and Twombly would set up his monumental canvases throughout the rooms and work on them, rearranging objects around them. The apartment was a reflection of Twombly’s lifelong obsession with Greek and Roman mythology: a meticulously constructed world of marble and ruins, a world away from the clapboard houses and Blue Ridge Mountains of the artist’s childhood in Lexington, Virginia.
As a friendship between the two men blossomed, Twombly and his companion Nicola Del Roscio soon went to stay with Stefanidis and the painter Teddy Millington-Drake at their house on Patmos. The Greek island offered refuge for a small circle of artists and aesthetes, far removed from the machinations of the art world. “We spent that whole summer laughing together,” Stefanidis recalls. It was around this time that he bought a painting from Twombly—the monumental 1961 “Untitled [Rome],” brimming with energy, its paint dripping, Twombly’s own finger marks visible across the surface.
Stefanidis took the canvas back to London, where he hung it in his home in Chester Square. “No one knew what it was,” Stefanidis says. He believes he was the first person ever to have a Twombly hanging in a private home in London during the ’60s and remembers vividly how confused visitors were by the sight of it, as if it were an alien object that had arrived in the city unannounced. One afternoon, Stefanidis’ godchild wandered up to the painting and started picking at it, thinking that food had been flung on the surface.
In those early years, it was only Fred Hughes, the longtime business manager of Andy Warhol and close friend of Stefanidis’, who understood the painting’s significance. But “things began to change when the prices went up for Twombly’s work,” Stefanidis notes. “People started to take notice in London.”
In the 1970s, Stefanidis crossed paths with a bright young art dealer, Thomas Ammann. Completely taken by Ammann’s charm and handsome looks, Stefanidis confided in Ammann about the Twombly painting he had hanging in London. “Thomas inspired confidence,” says the designer. “I deeply admired him.” Stefanidis made the decision to sell his painting to Ammann, a choice that he still reflects on to this day. “I had made a plan with Thomas for the painting to end up in a museum, but you see, then his death happened,” Stefanidis says, his voice trailing off. Ammann died unexpectedly in 1993, at the age of 43. The painting remained with his gallery until 1999, after which Stefanidis didn’t hear of it again.
As the decades passed, the friendship between Stefanidis and Twombly faded, not through any kind of falling out, but simply through distance. Twombly never came to London, spent less time in Rome and began wintering in America. “We would send each other fond messages,” Stefanidis says, “but that was all that was left.”
Meanwhile, Stefanidis’ painting had made its way to the U.S. In 2009, it reappeared when Andrew Fabricant, then director at Richard Gray Gallery, placed the work with the collector Mitchell Rales, who was building out the collection for his Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, then just a few years old. Rales, an ardent admirer of Twombly’s work—a similar canvas had once taken pride of place in his Manhattan apartment—had long sought out the artist’s finest work for the museum he and his then-wife, Emily Wei Rales, had built. He acquired the painting, and it has hung in Glenstone’s galleries ever since.
As we sit in his living room, Stefanidis tells me he often revisits the photographs of the painting hanging in his former home in London, and the memories of vacationing with Twombly on Patmos, with a hint of regret for letting go of something so special. But unbeknownst to him, his old hope that the painting might one day end up in a museum had in fact come true after all.
