Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. (; April 25, 1928July 5, 2011)The Sunday Times Magazine, The Sunday Times, December 18, 2011, page 64 was an American painter, sculptor, and photographer.
Twombly influenced artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. His best-known works are typically large-scale, freely-scribbled, calligraphic and graffiti-like works on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. His later paintings and works on paper shifted toward "romantic symbolism", and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words. Twombly often quoted poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke, and John Keats, as well as classical myths and allegories, in his works. Examples of this are his Apollo and The Artist and a series of eight drawings consisting solely of inscriptions of the word "Virgil".
Twombly's works are in the permanent collections of modern art museums globally, including the Menil Collection in Houston, the Tate Modern in London, New York's Museum of Modern Art and Munich's Museum Brandhorst. He was commissioned for a ceiling at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.
In a 1994 retrospective, curator Kirk Varnedoe described Twombly's work as "influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well." Writing in Artforum, Travis Jeppesen went further, declaring Twombly to be "the greatest American painter of the twentieth century, and the greatest painter after Picasso, period."Travis Jeppesen (2015) Cy Twombly July 12, 2024 at Artforum
Life and career Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia, on April 25, 1928. Twombly's father, also nicknamed "Cy", pitched for the Chicago White Sox.Alastair Sooke (February 9, 2009), Cy Twombly: late flowering for Mr Scribbles The Telegraph They were both nicknamed after the baseball great Cy Young, who pitched for, among others, the Cardinals, Red Sox, Indians, and Braves.
At age 12, Twombly began to take private art lessons with the Catalan modern master Pierre Daura.Cy Twombly Gallery Menil Collection. After graduating from Lexington High School in 1946, Twombly attended Darlington School in Rome, Georgia, and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1948–49), and at Washington and Lee University (1949–50) in Lexington, Virginia. On a tuition scholarship from 1950 to 1951, he studied at the Art Students League of New York, where he met Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he was briefly romantically involved. Rauschenberg encouraged him to attend Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina. At Black Mountain in 1951 and 1952 he studied with Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Ben Shahn, and met John Cage. The poet and rector of the College, Charles Olson, had a great influence on him.
Motherwell arranged Twombly's first solo exhibition, which was organized by the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery in New York in 1951. At this time his work was influenced by Kline's black-and-white gestural expressionism, as well as Paul Klee's imagery. In 1952, Twombly received a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts which enabled him to travel to North Africa, Spain, Italy, and France. He spent this journey in Africa and Europe with Robert Rauschenberg. In 1954, he served in the U.S. Army as a cryptographer in Washington, D.C., and would frequently travel to New York during periods of leave. From 1955 through 1956, he taught at the Southern Seminary and Junior College in Buena Vista, Virginia, currently known as Southern Virginia University; during the summer vacations, Twombly would travel to New York to paint in his Williams Street apartment.
In 1957, Twombly moved to Rome and made it his primary city, where he met the Italian artist Tatiana Franchetti – sister of his patron Baron Giorgio Franchetti. They were married at New York City Hall in 1959Jonathan Jones (April 10, 2004), The last American hurrah The Guardian. and then bought a palazzo on the Via di Monserrato in Rome. In addition, they had a 17th-century palace in Bassano in Teverina, near Viterbo. In 2023, the palace was restored and reopened to the public as an artists' residence and an exhibition center. The first artist to be hosted was American painter Robert Nava. Twombly and Franchetti had a son, Alessandro.
Around 1961, through their mutual relationship with the artist Afro Basaldella, Twombly met the American artist Joseph Glasco in Mykonos. According to Glasco, he and Twombly "saw each other every summer in Mykonos for years ... and saw a lot of each other daily".
In 1964, Twombly met Nicola Del Roscio of Gaeta, Italy who became his longtime assistant, companion, and archivist. Twombly bought a house and rented a studio in Gaeta in the early 1990s. Twombly and Tatiana, who died in 2010, never divorced and remained friends.
In July 2011, after suffering from cancer for several years, Twombly died in Rome after a brief hospitalization. A plaque in Santa Maria in Vallicella commemorates him.Commemorative plaque in Santa Maria in Vallicella
Work Painting
After his return in 1953, Twombly served in the United States Army as a cryptologist, an activity that left a distinct mark on his artistic style.Cy Twombly Biography From 1955 to 1959, he worked in New York, where he became a prominent figure among a group of artists including Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he was sharing a studio,Holland Cotter (February 4, 2005), A Sensualist's Odd Ascetic Aesthetic The New York Times. and Jasper Johns. Exposure to the emerging New York School purged figurative aspects from his work, encouraging a simplified form of abstraction. He became fascinated with tribal art, using the painterly language of the early 1950s to invoke primitivism, reversing the normal evolution of the New York School. Twombly soon developed a technique of gestural drawing characterized by thin white lines on a dark canvas that appear to be scratched onto the surface. He would apply bitumen on the canvas in a quick and coarse fashion, making the painting tactile and scarred with his energetic, gestural lines that would become his signature style. He stopped making sculptures in 1959 and did not take up sculpting again until 1976.Carol Vogel (March 11, 2011), MoMA to Acquire Cy Twombly Works The New York Times.
Twombly often inscribed on paintings the names of mythological figures during the 1960s.Graig G. Staff, "A Poetics of Becoming: The Mythography of Cy Twombly". In: Hirsh, Jennie, and Wallace, Isabelle D., eds. Contemporary Art and Classical Myth. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Twombly's move to Gaeta in Southern Italy in 1957 gave him closer contact with classical sources. From 1962 he produced a cycle of works based on myths including Leda and the Swan and The Birth of Venus; myths were frequent themes of Twombly's 1960s work. Between 1960 and 1963 Twombly painted the rape of Leda by the god Zeus/Jupiter in the form of a Swan six times, once in 1960, twice in 1962 and three times in 1963.Cy Twombly, Leda and the Swan (1963), Sale 2355 Christie's New York, Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale, November 10, 2010.
Twombly's 1964 exhibition of the nine-panel Discourses on Commodus (1963) at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York was panned by artist and writer Donald Judd who said "There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line," he wrote in a review. "There isn't anything to these paintings."Randy Kennedy (July 5, 2011), American Artist Who Scribbled a Unique Path The New York Times. They are currently exhibited at the Guggenheim Bilbao.Cy Twombly Nine Discourses on Commodus (1963) Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Erotic and corporeal symbols became more prominent, whilst a greater lyricism developed in his 'Blackboard paintings'. Between 1967 and 1971, he produced a number of works on gray grounds, the 'grey paintings'. This series features terse, colorless scrawls, reminiscent of chalk on a blackboard, that form no actual words and are examples of asemic writing. Twombly made this work using an unusual technique: he sat on the shoulders of a friend, who shuttled back and forth along the length of the canvas, thus allowing the artist to create his fluid, continuous lines.Cy Twombly Untitled (1970) MoMA Collection
His later sculptures exhibit a similar blend of emotional expansiveness and intellectual sophistication. From 1976, Twombly again produced sculptures, lightly painted in white, suggestive of Classical forms. In an interview with critic David Sylvester, on the occasion of the large exhibition of his sculpture at Kunstmuseum Basel in 2000, Twombly revealed that, for him, the demands of making sculpture were distinctly different from those required of painting. "[Sculpture is] a whole other state. And it's a building thing. Whereas the painting is more fusing—fusing of ideas, fusing of feelings, fusing projected on atmosphere."
In the mid-1970s, in paintings such as Untitled (1976), Twombly began to evoke landscape through colour (favouring brown, green and light blue), written inscriptions and collage elements.Cy Twombly Untitled (1976) MoMA Collection. In 1978 he worked on the monumental historical ensemble Fifty Days at Iliam, a ten-part cycle inspired by Homer's Iliad, specifically Alexander Pope's 1720 translation of the poem, with which Twombly was "fixated ... in an almost fanatical way", according to his long-time assistant Nicola del Roscio. Since then Twombly continued to draw on literature and myth, deploying cryptic pictorial metaphors that situate individual experience within the grand narratives of Western tradition, as in the Gaeta canvases and the monumental Four Seasons concluded in 1994.
In an essay in the catalogue to the 2011 Dulwich exhibition (see below), Katharina Schmidt summarizes the scope and technique of Twombly's œuvre:
Cy Twombly's work can be understood as one vast engagement with cultural memory. His paintings, drawings and sculptures on mythological subjects have come to form a significant part of that memory. Usually drawing on the most familiar gods and heroes, he restricts himself to just a few, relatively well-known episodes, as narrated by poet-historians, given visible shape by artists and repeatedly reinterpreted in the literature and visual art of later centuries ... His special medium is writing. Starting out from purely graphic marks, he developed a kind of meta-script in which abbreviated signs, hatchings, loops, numbers and the simplest of pictographs spread throughout the picture plane in a process of incessant movement, repeatedly subverted by erasures. Eventually, this metamorphosed into script itself.Katherina Schmidt, "Immortal and Eternally Young. Figures from classical mythology in the work of Nicolas Poussin and Cy Twombly", in Nicholas Cullinan (ed) Twombly and Poussin – Arcadian Painters. London: Dulwich Picture Gallery/Paul Holberton Publishing, 2011.
However, in a 1994 article Kirk Varnedoe thought it necessary to defend Twombly's seemingly random marks and splashes of paint against the criticism that "This is just scribbles – my kid could do it".
One could say that any child could make a drawing like Twombly only in the sense that any fool with a hammer could fragment sculptures as Rodin did, or any house painter could spatter paint as well as Pollock. In none of these cases would it be true. In each case the art lies not so much in the finesse of the individual mark, but in the orchestration of a previously uncodified set of personal "rules" about where to act and where not, how far to go and when to stop, in such a way as the cumulative courtship of seeming chaos defines an original, hybrid kind of order, which in turn illuminates a complex sense of human experience not voiced or left marginal in previous art.