Cy Twombly
Encyclopedia
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr. (April 25, 1928July 5, 2011) was an American artist well known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic
-style graffiti
paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. He exhibited his paintings worldwide.
Twombly used the nickname "Cy", after his father
(also nicknamed Cy, who was briefly a pitcher
in Major League Baseball
) and the star baseball pitcher Cy Young
. Twombly's paintings blur the line between drawing and painting. Many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s are reminiscent of a school blackboard on which someone has practiced cursive "e"s. Twombly had at this point discarded painting figurative, representational subject-matter, citing the line or smudge – each mark with its own history – as its proper subject.
Later, many of his paintings and works on paper moved into "romantic symbolism", and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words. Twombly often quoted the poet Stéphane Mallarmé
, as well as many 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". 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.” After acquiring Twombly's Three Studies from the Temeraire (1998–99), the Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales
said "sometimes people need a little bit of help in recognising a great work of art that might be a bit unfamiliar". He is said to have influenced younger artists such as Anselm Kiefer
, Francesco Clemente
, and Julian Schnabel
.
, on April 25, 1928. Twombly's father, also nicknamed "Cy", pitched for the Chicago White Sox
. 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, he began to take private art lessons with the Spanish modern master Pierre Daura
. He served as a cryptographer in the U.S. army. 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
, who 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
.
Arranged by Motherwell, the Samuel Kootz Gallery in New York organized Twombly's first solo exhibition 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. Between 1954 and 1956, he taught at the Southern Seminary and Junior College
in Buena Vista, Virginia.
In 1957, Twombly moved to Rome, where he met the Italian artist Tatiana Franchetti – sister of his patron Baron Giorgio Franchetti. They were married at City Hall in New York in 1959 and then bought a palazzo on the Via di Monserrato in Rome. Later on, they preferred to dwell in Gaeta
near Rome. In 2011, Twombly died in Rome after being hospitalized for several days; he had had cancer
for many years. He has a son, Cyrus Alessandro Twombly, who is also a painter and lives in Rome.
, an activity that left a distinct mark on his artistic style. 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 had a relationship and was sharing a studio – 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 that was characterized by thin white lines on a dark canvas that appear to be scratched onto the surface. His early sculptures, assembled from discarded objects, similarly cast their gaze back to Europe and North Africa. He stopped making sculptures in 1959 and did not take up sculpturing again until 1976.
Just when Johns and Rauschenberg were starting to sell to museums as well as private collectors, Twombly, who was not yet 30, moved to Gaeta
in Southern Italy in 1957. This furthered his use of classical sources: from 1962 he produced a cycle of works based on subjects from history such as Leda and the Swan
. The subject of Leda and the Swan, like that of The Birth of Venus was one of the most dramatic and frequent themes of Twombly's work of the early 1960s. Between 1960 and 1963 Twombly painted the subject of Leda's rape by the god Zeus/Jupiter in the form of a Swan six times, once in 1960, twice in 1962 and three times in 1963.
The critical low point probably came after a widely panned 1964 exhibition of the nine-panel Discourses on Commodus (1963) at the Leo Castelli Gallery
in New York. The artist and writer Donald Judd
was especially damning, calling the show a fiasco. “There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line,” he wrote in a review. “There isn’t anything to these paintings.”
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. 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. In the summer and early autumn of 1969, Twombly made a series of fourteen paintings while staying at Bolsena
, a lake to the north of Rome. In 1971, Nini Pirandello, the wife of Twombly’s Roman gallerist Plinio De Martiis, died suddenly. In tribute, Twombly painted the elegiac "Nini’s Paintings".
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. Like his earlier works, these pieces are assembled from found materials such as pieces of wood or packaging, or cast in bronze and covered in white paint and plaster. 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. In 1978 he worked on the monumental historical ensemble Fifty Days at Iliam, a ten-part cycle inspired by Homer
's Iliad
; 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:
However, in a 1994 article Kirk Varnedoe thought it necessary to defend Twombly's seemimgly random marks and splashes of paint against the criticism that "This is just scribbles - my kid could do it".
Together with Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns
, Twombly is regarded as the most important representative of a generation of artists who distanced themselves from Abstract Expressionism
.
from 1953 to 1957, Twombly moved to Leo Castelli Gallery
.
Twombly was invited to exhibit his work at the Venice Biennale
in 1964, 1989 and 2001. In 1968, the Milwaukee Art Museum
mounted the first retrospective of his art. Twombly had his next retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art
in 1979, curated by David Whitney
. The artist has later been honored by retrospectives at the Kunsthaus Zürich
in 1987 (curated by Harald Szeemann
), the Musée National d'Art Moderne
, Paris, in 1988, and the Museum of Modern Art
, New York, in 1994, with additional venues in Houston, Los Angeles, and Berlin. In 2001, the Menil Collection
, the Kunstmuseum Basel
, and the National Gallery of Art
presented the first exhibition devoted entirely to Twombly's sculpture, assembling sixty-six works created from 1946 to 1998. The European retrospective "Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons" opened at the Tate Modern
, London, in June 2008, with subsequent versions at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
and the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna
in Rome in 2009. Opening in conjunction with the Modern Wing, Twombly's most recent solo exhibition —Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works 2000–2007— was on display at the Art Institute of Chicago
in 2009.
In 1993, at Matthew Marks Gallery
in New York, an exhibition of Twombly's photographs offered a selection of large blurry color images of tulips, trees and ancient busts, based on the artist's Polaroids. In 2008, a specially curated selection of Twombly's photographic work was exhibited in "Huis Marseille", the Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; the exhibition was opened by Sally Mann
. In 2011, the Museum Brandhorst
, mounted a retrospective of Twombly's photographs from 1951 to 2010. It later was passed over to the "Museum für Gegenwartskunst" at Siegen
(July-October 2011).
(France), at the Lambert Foundation (Hôtel de Caumont). On July 19, 2007, police arrested Cambodian-French artist Rindy Sam after she kissed one panel of Twombly's triptych Phaedrus. The panel, an all-white canvas, was smudged by Sam's red lipstick. She was tried in a court in Avignon for "voluntary degradation of a work of art".
Sam defended her gesture to the court: "J'ai fait juste un bisou. C'est un geste d'amour, quand je l'ai embrassé, je n'ai pas réfléchi, je pensais que l'artiste, il aurait compris... Ce geste était un acte artistique provoqué par le pouvoir de l'art" ("It was just a kiss, a loving gesture. I kissed it without thinking; I thought the artist would understand.... It was an artistic act provoked by the power of Art").
The prosecution, calling it "A sort of cannibalism, or parasitism", while admitting that Sam is "visibly not conscious of what she has done", asked that she be fined €4500 and compelled to attend a citizenship class. The art work, which is worth an estimated $2 million, was on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Avignon. In November 2007 Sam was convicted and ordered to pay €1,000 to the painting's owner, €500 to the Avignon gallery that showed it, and €1 to the painter.
, in London, from June 19 to September 14, 2008. Text for the showing read:
in London from June 29, 2011 less than a week before Twombly's Death. The show was built on a quote by Twombly stating that “I would’ve liked to have been Poussin
, if I’d had a choice, in another time” and is the first time that his work was put in an exhibition with Poussin.
opened permanent rooms dedicated to his monumental 10-painting cycle, Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), based on Alexander Pope
’s translation of “The Iliad.” The Cy Twombly Gallery of the Menil Collection
in Houston, which was designed by Renzo Piano
and opened in 1995, houses more than thirty of Twombly's paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, dating from 1953 to 1994. A large collection of Twombly's work is also kept by the Museum Brandhorst
and the Pinakothek der Moderne
in Munich.
In 1995, The Four Seasons entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art
as a gift from the artist. A recent (1998–1999) Twombly work, Three Studies from the Temeraire, a triptych
, was purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales
for A$4.5 million in 2004. In 2010, Twombly’s permanent site-specific painting, Ceiling was unveiled in the Salle des Bronzes at the Musée du Louvre; he is only the third artist to have been invited to do so as well as only the first artist given this honor since Georges Braque
in the 1950s. In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, made a large acquisition of nine works worth about $75 million.
(1996). In 2001 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the 49th Venice Biennale
. In 2010, he was made Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur by the French government. During fall 2010, Tacita Dean
produced a film on Twombly, titled "Edwin Parker".
auction set a record for Twombly, with his 1971 untitled blackboard painting fetching $5.5 million. In 2011, a Twombly work from 1967, "Untitled", sold for $15.2 million at Christie
's in New York.
Calligraphy
Calligraphy is a type of visual art. It is often called the art of fancy lettering . A contemporary definition of calligraphic practice is "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner"...
-style graffiti
Graffiti
Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....
paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. He exhibited his paintings worldwide.
Twombly used the nickname "Cy", after his father
Cy Twombly (baseball)
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly was an American right-handed pitcher in Major League Baseball who appeared in seven games for the Chicago White Sox. Born in Groveland, Massachusetts, he attended Lehigh University and Springfield College. His namesake son was a major American artist. He died at age 77...
(also nicknamed Cy, who was briefly a pitcher
Pitcher
In baseball, the pitcher is the player who throwsthe baseball from the pitcher's mound toward the catcher to begin each play, with the goal of retiring a batter, who attempts to either make contact with the pitched ball or draw a walk. In the numbering system used to record defensive plays, the...
in Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...
) and the star baseball pitcher Cy Young
Cy Young
Denton True "Cy" Young was an American Major League Baseball pitcher. During his 22-year baseball career , he pitched for five different teams. Young was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937...
. Twombly's paintings blur the line between drawing and painting. Many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s are reminiscent of a school blackboard on which someone has practiced cursive "e"s. Twombly had at this point discarded painting figurative, representational subject-matter, citing the line or smudge – each mark with its own history – as its proper subject.
Later, many of his paintings and works on paper moved into "romantic symbolism", and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words. Twombly often quoted the poet Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
, as well as many 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". In a 1994 retrospective, curator Kirk Varnedoe
Kirk Varnedoe
John Kirk Train Varnedoe was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia and was an American art historian and writer, a Professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a noted curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.-Life:He studied...
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.” After acquiring Twombly's Three Studies from the Temeraire (1998–99), the Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Art Gallery of New South Wales
The Art Gallery of New South Wales , located in The Domain in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, was established in 1897 and is the most important public gallery in Sydney and the fourth largest in Australia...
said "sometimes people need a little bit of help in recognising a great work of art that might be a bit unfamiliar". He is said to have influenced younger artists such as Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac...
, Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente is an Italian and American contemporary artist. Influenced by thinkers as diverse as Gregory Bateson, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and J Krishnamurti, the art of Francesco Clemente is inclusive and nomadic, crossing many borders, intellectual and geographical.Dividing his time...
, and Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel is an American artist and filmmaker. In the 1980s, Schnabel received international media attention for his "plate paintings"—large-scale paintings set on broken ceramic plates....
.
Early life and career
Twombly was born in Lexington, VirginiaLexington, Virginia
Lexington is an independent city within the confines of Rockbridge County in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The population was 7,042 in 2010. Lexington is about 55 minutes east of the West Virginia border and is about 50 miles north of Roanoke, Virginia. It was first settled in 1777.It is home to...
, on April 25, 1928. Twombly's father, also nicknamed "Cy", pitched for the Chicago White Sox
Chicago White Sox
The Chicago White Sox are a Major League Baseball team located in Chicago, Illinois.The White Sox play in the American League's Central Division. Since , the White Sox have played in U.S. Cellular Field, which was originally called New Comiskey Park and nicknamed The Cell by local fans...
. They were both nicknamed after the baseball great Cy Young
Cy Young
Denton True "Cy" Young was an American Major League Baseball pitcher. During his 22-year baseball career , he pitched for five different teams. Young was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937...
who pitched for among others the Cardinals, Red Sox
Boston Red Sox
The Boston Red Sox are a professional baseball team based in Boston, Massachusetts, and a member of Major League Baseball’s American League Eastern Division. Founded in as one of the American League's eight charter franchises, the Red Sox's home ballpark has been Fenway Park since . The "Red Sox"...
, Indians
Cleveland Indians
The Cleveland Indians are a professional baseball team based in Cleveland, Ohio. They are in the Central Division of Major League Baseball's American League. Since , they have played in Progressive Field. The team's spring training facility is in Goodyear, Arizona...
, and Braves.
At age 12, he began to take private art lessons with the Spanish modern master Pierre Daura
Pierre Daura
Pedro Francisco Daura y Garcia was born on Minorca, Balearic Islands, Spain, a few days before his parents returned to their home in Barcelona and registered his birth there as February 21, 1896...
. He served as a cryptographer in the U.S. army. After graduating from Lexington High School in 1946, Twombly attended Darlington School
Darlington School
Darlington School is an American independent, coeducational, college-preparatory day and boarding school in Rome, Georgia. It offers classes ranging from kindergarten to grade 12, divided into a lower, middle and upper school. The headmaster is Thomas C...
in Rome, Georgia
Rome, Georgia
Located in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, Rome is the largest city and the county seat of Floyd County, Georgia, United States. It is the principal city of the Rome, Georgia Metropolitan Statistical Area which encompasses all of Floyd County...
, and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is an undergraduate and graduate college located in Boston, Massachusetts, dedicated to the visual arts. It is affiliated with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and offers undergraduate and graduate degree programs in partnership with Tufts University...
(1948–49), and at Washington and Lee University
Washington and Lee University
Washington and Lee University is a private liberal arts college in Lexington, Virginia, United States.The classical school from which Washington and Lee descended was established in 1749 as Augusta Academy, about north of its present location. In 1776 it was renamed Liberty Hall in a burst of...
(1949–50) in Lexington, Virginia. On a tuition scholarship from 1950 to 1951, he studied at the Art Students League of New York
Art Students League of New York
The Art Students League of New York is an art school located on West 57th Street in New York City. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists, and has maintained for over 130 years a tradition of offering reasonably priced classes on a...
, where he met Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
, who encouraged him to attend Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College, a school founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, was a new kind of college in the United States in which the study of art was seen to be central to a liberal arts education, and in which John Dewey's principles of education played a major role...
near Asheville, North Carolina
Asheville, North Carolina
Asheville is a city in and the county seat of Buncombe County, North Carolina, United States. It is the largest city in Western North Carolina, and the 11th largest city in North Carolina. The City is home to the United States National Climatic Data Center , which is the world's largest active...
. At Black Mountain in 1951 and 1952 he studied with Franz Kline
Franz Kline
Franz Jozef Kline was an American painter mainly associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement centered around New York in the 1940s and 1950s. He was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and attended Girard College, an academy in Philadelphia for fatherless boys...
, Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell American painter, printmaker and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School , which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston....
and Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content.-Biography:...
, and met John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
.
Arranged by Motherwell, the Samuel Kootz Gallery in New York organized Twombly's first solo exhibition in 1951. At this time his work was influenced by Kline's black-and-white gestural expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
, as well as Paul Klee
Paul Klee
Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism...
's imagery. In 1952, Twombly received a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
The Virginia Museum of Fine arts, or VMFA, is an art museum in Richmond, Virginia, in the United States, which opened in 1936.The museum is owned and operated by the Commonwealth of Virginia, while private donations, endowments, and funds are used for the support of specific programs and all...
, which enabled him to travel to North Africa, Spain, Italy, and France. Between 1954 and 1956, he taught at the Southern Seminary and Junior College
Southern Virginia University
Southern Virginia University is a liberal arts college located in Buena Vista, Virginia that promotes standards and values of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while not being owned nor operated by the Church...
in Buena Vista, Virginia.
In 1957, Twombly moved to Rome, where he met the Italian artist Tatiana Franchetti – sister of his patron Baron Giorgio Franchetti. They were married at City Hall in New York in 1959 and then bought a palazzo on the Via di Monserrato in Rome. Later on, they preferred to dwell in Gaeta
Gaeta
Gaeta is a city and comune in the province of Latina, in Lazio, central Italy. Set on a promontory stretching towards the Gulf of Gaeta, it is 120 km from Rome and 80 km from Naples....
near Rome. In 2011, Twombly died in Rome after being hospitalized for several days; he had had cancer
Cancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
for many years. He has a son, Cyrus Alessandro Twombly, who is also a painter and lives in Rome.
Work
After his return in 1953, Twombly served in the U.S. army as a cryptologistCryptography
Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...
, an activity that left a distinct mark on his artistic style. From 1955 to 1959, he worked in New York, where he became a prominent figure among a group of artists including Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
– with whom he had a relationship and was sharing a studio – and Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
. Exposure to the emerging New York School
New York School
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City...
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
New York School
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City...
. Twombly soon developed a technique of gestural drawing that was characterized by thin white lines on a dark canvas that appear to be scratched onto the surface. His early sculptures, assembled from discarded objects, similarly cast their gaze back to Europe and North Africa. He stopped making sculptures in 1959 and did not take up sculpturing again until 1976.
Just when Johns and Rauschenberg were starting to sell to museums as well as private collectors, Twombly, who was not yet 30, moved to Gaeta
Gaeta
Gaeta is a city and comune in the province of Latina, in Lazio, central Italy. Set on a promontory stretching towards the Gulf of Gaeta, it is 120 km from Rome and 80 km from Naples....
in Southern Italy in 1957. This furthered his use of classical sources: from 1962 he produced a cycle of works based on subjects from history such as Leda and the Swan
Leda and the Swan
Leda and the Swan is a motif from Greek mythology in which Zeus came to Leda in the form of a swan. According to later Greek mythology, Leda bore Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus, while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Tyndareus, the King of Sparta. In...
. The subject of Leda and the Swan, like that of The Birth of Venus was one of the most dramatic and frequent themes of Twombly's work of the early 1960s. Between 1960 and 1963 Twombly painted the subject of Leda's rape by the god Zeus/Jupiter in the form of a Swan six times, once in 1960, twice in 1962 and three times in 1963.
The critical low point probably came after a widely panned 1964 exhibition of the nine-panel Discourses on Commodus (1963) at the Leo Castelli Gallery
Leo Castelli
Leo Castelli was an American art dealer. He was best known to the public as an art dealer whose gallery showcased cutting edge Contemporary art for five decades...
in New York. The artist and writer Donald Judd
Donald Judd
Donald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism . In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy...
was especially damning, calling the show a fiasco. “There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line,” he wrote in a review. “There isn’t anything to these paintings.”
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. 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. In the summer and early autumn of 1969, Twombly made a series of fourteen paintings while staying at Bolsena
Bolsena
Bolsena is a town and comune of Italy, in the province of Viterbo in northern Lazio on the eastern shore of Lake Bolsena. It is 10 km north-north west of Montefiascone and 36 km north-west of Viterbo...
, a lake to the north of Rome. In 1971, Nini Pirandello, the wife of Twombly’s Roman gallerist Plinio De Martiis, died suddenly. In tribute, Twombly painted the elegiac "Nini’s Paintings".
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. Like his earlier works, these pieces are assembled from found materials such as pieces of wood or packaging, or cast in bronze and covered in white paint and plaster. 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. In 1978 he worked on the monumental historical ensemble Fifty Days at Iliam, a ten-part cycle inspired by Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
's Iliad
Iliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...
; 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."
However, in a 1994 article Kirk Varnedoe thought it necessary to defend Twombly's seemimgly 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 RodinRodin- People :* Auguste Rodin , French sculptor, for whom is named:** The Musée Rodin in Paris, France** The Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA** The Rodin Gallery in Seoul, South Korea** Rodin , a crater on the Moon...
did, or any house painter could spatter pain as well as PollockPollockPollock is the common name used for either of the two species of marine fish in the Pollachius genus. Both P. pollachius and P. virens are commonly referred to as pollock. Other names for P...
. 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."
Together with Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
, Twombly is regarded as the most important representative of a generation of artists who distanced themselves from Abstract Expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
.
Exhibitions
After having shown at Stable GalleryStable Gallery
The Stable Gallery, originally located on West 58th Street in New York, was founded in 1953 by Eleanor Ward. The Stable Gallery hosted early solo New York exhibitions for artists including Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol.-History:...
from 1953 to 1957, Twombly moved to Leo Castelli Gallery
Leo Castelli
Leo Castelli was an American art dealer. He was best known to the public as an art dealer whose gallery showcased cutting edge Contemporary art for five decades...
.
Twombly was invited to exhibit his work at the Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
in 1964, 1989 and 2001. In 1968, the Milwaukee Art Museum
Milwaukee Art Museum
The Milwaukee Art Museum is located on Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Beginning around 1872, multiple organizations were founded in order to bring an art gallery to Milwaukee, as the city was still a growing port town with little or no facilities to hold major art exhibitions...
mounted the first retrospective of his art. Twombly had his next retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
in 1979, curated by David Whitney
David Whitney
David Whitney was an American art curator, collector, gallerist and critic. He led a very private life and was not well known outside the art world, even though he participated naked in the 1965 Claes Oldenburg happening Washes...
. The artist has later been honored by retrospectives at the Kunsthaus Zürich
Kunsthaus Zürich
The Kunsthaus Zürich houses one of the most important art museums in Switzerland and Europe, collected by the local Kunstverein, called Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft, and holdings running from the Middle Ages to contemporary art, with an emphasis on Swiss art.Kunsthaus is also the name of the tram stop...
in 1987 (curated by Harald Szeemann
Harald Szeemann
Harald Szeemann was a Swiss curator and art historian.-Life:Szeemann was born in Bern. He studied art history, archaeology and journalism in Bern and Paris, and in 1956 he began working as an actor, stage designer and painter, as well as doing one-man shows. He started creating exhibitions in 1957...
), the Musée National d'Art Moderne
Musée National d'Art Moderne
The Musée National d'Art Moderne is the national museum for modern art of France. It is located in Paris and is housed in the Centre Pompidou in the 4th arrondissement of the city. Created in 1947, it was then housed in the Palais de Tokyo and moved to its current location in 1977...
, Paris, in 1988, and the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, New York, in 1994, with additional venues in Houston, Los Angeles, and Berlin. In 2001, the Menil Collection
Menil Collection
The Menil Collection, located in Houston refers either to a museum that houses the private art collection of founders John de Menil and Dominique de Menil, or to the collection itself...
, the Kunstmuseum Basel
Kunstmuseum Basel
The Kunstmuseum Basel houses the largest and most significant public art collection in Switzerland, and is listed as a heritage site of national significance. Its lineage extends back to the Amerbach Cabinet purchased by the city of Basel in 1661, which made it the first municipally owned museum...
, and the National Gallery of Art
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...
presented the first exhibition devoted entirely to Twombly's sculpture, assembling sixty-six works created from 1946 to 1998. The European retrospective "Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons" opened at the Tate Modern
Tate Modern
Tate Modern is a modern art gallery located in London, England. It is Britain's national gallery of international modern art and forms part of the Tate group . It is the most-visited modern art gallery in the world, with around 4.7 million visitors per year...
, London, in June 2008, with subsequent versions at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a museum of modern and contemporary art, designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, built by Ferrovial, and located in Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain. It is built alongside the Nervion River, which runs through the city of Bilbao to the Atlantic Coast. The...
and the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, or the National Gallery of Modern Art , is an art gallery in Rome, Italy, dedicated to modern art....
in Rome in 2009. Opening in conjunction with the Modern Wing, Twombly's most recent solo exhibition —Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works 2000–2007— was on display at the Art Institute of Chicago
Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...
in 2009.
In 1993, at Matthew Marks Gallery
Matthew Marks Gallery
Matthew Marks is an art gallery located in the New York City neighborhood of Chelsea. Founded in the early 1990s by Matthew Marks, it specializes in modern and contemporary art in a variety of media: including painting, sculpture, photography, installation art, film, and drawings and prints...
in New York, an exhibition of Twombly's photographs offered a selection of large blurry color images of tulips, trees and ancient busts, based on the artist's Polaroids. In 2008, a specially curated selection of Twombly's photographic work was exhibited in "Huis Marseille", the Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; the exhibition was opened by Sally Mann
Sally Mann
Sally Mann is an American photographer, best known for her large black-and-white photographs—at first of her young children, then later of landscapes suggesting decay and death.-Early life and education:...
. In 2011, the Museum Brandhorst
Museum Brandhorst
The Brandhorst Museum was opened in Munich on May 21, 2009. It displays about 200 exhibits from collection of modern art of the heirs of the Henkel trust Udo and Anette Brandhorst...
, mounted a retrospective of Twombly's photographs from 1951 to 2010. It later was passed over to the "Museum für Gegenwartskunst" at Siegen
Siegen
Siegen is a city in Germany, in the south Westphalian part of North Rhine-Westphalia.It is located in the district of Siegen-Wittgenstein in the Arnsberg region...
(July-October 2011).
Phaedrus incident
In 2007, an exhibition of Twombly's paintings, Blooming, a Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things, and other works on paper from gallerist Yvon Lambert's collection was displayed from June to September in AvignonAvignon
Avignon is a French commune in southeastern France in the départment of the Vaucluse bordered by the left bank of the Rhône river. Of the 94,787 inhabitants of the city on 1 January 2010, 12 000 live in the ancient town centre surrounded by its medieval ramparts.Often referred to as the...
(France), at the Lambert Foundation (Hôtel de Caumont). On July 19, 2007, police arrested Cambodian-French artist Rindy Sam after she kissed one panel of Twombly's triptych Phaedrus. The panel, an all-white canvas, was smudged by Sam's red lipstick. She was tried in a court in Avignon for "voluntary degradation of a work of art".
Sam defended her gesture to the court: "J'ai fait juste un bisou. C'est un geste d'amour, quand je l'ai embrassé, je n'ai pas réfléchi, je pensais que l'artiste, il aurait compris... Ce geste était un acte artistique provoqué par le pouvoir de l'art" ("It was just a kiss, a loving gesture. I kissed it without thinking; I thought the artist would understand.... It was an artistic act provoked by the power of Art").
The prosecution, calling it "A sort of cannibalism, or parasitism", while admitting that Sam is "visibly not conscious of what she has done", asked that she be fined €4500 and compelled to attend a citizenship class. The art work, which is worth an estimated $2 million, was on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Avignon. In November 2007 Sam was convicted and ordered to pay €1,000 to the painting's owner, €500 to the Avignon gallery that showed it, and €1 to the painter.
Tate exhibition
Twombly's work was on exhibition at the Tate ModernTate Modern
Tate Modern is a modern art gallery located in London, England. It is Britain's national gallery of international modern art and forms part of the Tate group . It is the most-visited modern art gallery in the world, with around 4.7 million visitors per year...
, in London, from June 19 to September 14, 2008. Text for the showing read:
- This was his first solo retrospective in fifteen years, and provides an overview of his work from the 1950s to now.... At the heart of the exhibition is Twombly’s work exploring the cycles associated with seasons, nature and the passing of time. Several key groups are brought together for the first time, such as Tate’s Four Seasons (1993–94) with those from the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition also explores how Twombly is influenced by antiquity, myth and the Mediterranean, for example the violent red swirls in the Bacchus 2005 paintings which bring to mind the drunken god of wine. The exhibition provides a unique opportunity to see the full range of Twombly’s long and influential career from a fresh perspective.
Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibition
Twombly's work went on display as part of Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters at the Dulwich Picture GalleryDulwich Picture Gallery
Dulwich Picture Gallery is an art gallery in Dulwich, South London. England's first purpose-built public art gallery, it was designed by Regency architect Sir John Soane and opened to the public in 1817. Soane arranged the exhibition spaces as a series of interlinked rooms illuminated naturally...
in London from June 29, 2011 less than a week before Twombly's Death. The show was built on a quote by Twombly stating that “I would’ve liked to have been Poussin
Nicolas Poussin
Nicolas Poussin was a French painter in the classical style. His work predominantly features clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. His work serves as an alternative to the dominant Baroque style of the 17th century...
, if I’d had a choice, in another time” and is the first time that his work was put in an exhibition with Poussin.
Collections
In 1989, the Philadelphia Museum of ArtPhiladelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the largest art museums in the United States. It is located at the west end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. The Museum was established in 1876 in conjunction with the Centennial Exposition of the same year...
opened permanent rooms dedicated to his monumental 10-painting cycle, Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), based on Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...
’s translation of “The Iliad.” The Cy Twombly Gallery of the Menil Collection
Menil Collection
The Menil Collection, located in Houston refers either to a museum that houses the private art collection of founders John de Menil and Dominique de Menil, or to the collection itself...
in Houston, which was designed by Renzo Piano
Renzo Piano
Renzo Piano is an Italian architect. He is the recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, AIA Gold Medal, Kyoto Prize and the Sonning Prize...
and opened in 1995, houses more than thirty of Twombly's paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, dating from 1953 to 1994. A large collection of Twombly's work is also kept by the Museum Brandhorst
Museum Brandhorst
The Brandhorst Museum was opened in Munich on May 21, 2009. It displays about 200 exhibits from collection of modern art of the heirs of the Henkel trust Udo and Anette Brandhorst...
and the Pinakothek der Moderne
Pinakothek der Moderne
The Pinakothek der Moderne is a modern art museum, situated in the city centre of Munich, Germany. Together with its two predecessors Alte Pinakothek and Neue Pinakothek The Pinakothek der Moderne (= "(Art) Gallery of the Modern"; from Greek: "pinax" = "board", "tablet") is a modern art museum,...
in Munich.
In 1995, The Four Seasons entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
as a gift from the artist. A recent (1998–1999) Twombly work, Three Studies from the Temeraire, a triptych
Triptych
A triptych , from tri-= "three" + ptysso= "to fold") is a work of art which is divided into three sections, or three carved panels which are hinged together and can be folded shut or displayed open. It is therefore a type of polyptych, the term for all multi-panel works...
, was purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Art Gallery of New South Wales
The Art Gallery of New South Wales , located in The Domain in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, was established in 1897 and is the most important public gallery in Sydney and the fourth largest in Australia...
for A$4.5 million in 2004. In 2010, Twombly’s permanent site-specific painting, Ceiling was unveiled in the Salle des Bronzes at the Musée du Louvre; he is only the third artist to have been invited to do so as well as only the first artist given this honor since Georges Braque
Georges Braque
Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...
in the 1950s. In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, made a large acquisition of nine works worth about $75 million.
Recognition
Twombly was a recipient of numerous awards, most notably the Praemium ImperialePraemium Imperiale
The Praemium Imperiale is an arts prize awarded since 1989 by the imperial family of Japan on behalf of the Japan Art Association in the fields painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and theatre/film...
(1996). In 2001 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the 49th Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
. In 2010, he was made Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur by the French government. During fall 2010, Tacita Dean
Tacita Dean
Tacita Dean is an English visual artist who works primarily in film. She is one of the Young British Artists, and was a nominee for the Turner Prize in 1998.-Life and work:...
produced a film on Twombly, titled "Edwin Parker".
At auction
Already in 1990, a Christie'sChristie's
Christie's is an art business and a fine arts auction house.- History :The official company literature states that founder James Christie conducted the first sale in London, England, on 5 December 1766, and the earliest auction catalogue the company retains is from December 1766...
auction set a record for Twombly, with his 1971 untitled blackboard painting fetching $5.5 million. In 2011, a Twombly work from 1967, "Untitled", sold for $15.2 million at Christie
Christie
Christie can refer to:* Christie * Christie's, the auction house* Christie, California, in Contra Costa County* Christie, the Canadian division of Nabisco* Christie , subway station in Toronto, Ontario, Canada...
's in New York.
Publications
A first monograph of drawings edited by Heiner Bastian was published in 1972. In 1977, the first monograph on the paintings was published by Propyläen Verlag in Berlin, followed by the publication of his catalogue raisonne of sculpture by Nicola Del Roscio in 1997.Sources
- Chicago Art Institute Retrieved May 18, 2011
- Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons. Edited by Nicholas Serota. London: Tate PublishingTate Publishing LtdTate Publishing is a publisher of visual arts books, associated with the Tate Gallery in London, England. It was established in 1911; nowadays it is a division of Tate Enterprises Ltd, an independent company wholly owned by the Trustees of Tate, and is based at Tate Britain, Millbank, London...
and Distributed Art Publishers, 2008. - Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters – Dulwich Picture Gallery June 29 – September 25, 2011.
External links
- Cy Twombly: Comprehensive collection of more than 200 images of artist's works with biography, articles and exhibition information.
- From VOGUE to NEST: 032c activates the secret history of CY TWOMBLY by HORST P. HORST in 032, Issue #19, Summer 2010.
- NY Times ArtsBeat, Cy Twombly, Idiosyncratic Painter dies at 83
- Abstract Expressionism at ArtLex Paintings by Cy Twombly and similar artists
- Gagosian Gallery: Cy Twombly
- The Menil Collection: Cy Twombly
- Rosalind Krauss "Cy was here; Cy's up – Cy Twombly" ArtForum, September, 1994.
- Roland BarthesRoland BarthesRoland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
"Cy Twombly: Works on Paper" and "The Wisdom of Art" in The Responsibility of Forms University of California Press, 1991. - Cy Twombly "Blooming" at Gagosian Gallery A James Kalm Report on Cy Twombly (video, 9:13).
- Cy Twombly – Photographs 1951–2007, Huis Marseille – Museum for Photography
- John Squire speaking about 4 paintings by Cy Twombly at Tate Modern (video)