[caption id="attachment_13241" align="alignnone" width="367" caption="CY TWOMBLY Camino Real II, 2010 Acrylic on plywood"][/caption]
American artist Cy Twombly passed away in Rome on July 5 at age 83. Edwin Parker Twombly Jr. was born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia. Twombly studied art in Boston, New York, and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he met John Cage, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Ben Shahn.
In the mid-1950s, Twombly surfaced in New York with works that combined action painting, gestural abstraction, drawing, and writing. He continued to study art at the Art Students League of New York where he became acquainted with fellow classmate, and American artist Robert Rauschenberg.
Randy Kennedy of The New York Times reports that critic Robert Hughes called Twombly “the Third Man, a shadowy figure, beside that vivid duumvirate of his friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.”
Mr. Twombly may be best known for his large-scale, loosely drawn, looping paintings that look like graffiti on chalkboard. Moving to Rome, Italy in the late 1950s, he began to create elaborate pieces referring to literature, ancient Rome, the antiquities of the Mediterranean, and the classical form.
Following Twombly’s death, his gallerist Larry Gagosian sent out a statement saying, “The art world has lost a true genius and a completely original talent, and for those fortunate enough to have known him, a great human being. We will not soon see a talent of such amazing scope and intensity. Even though Cy might have been regarded as reclusive, he didn't retreat to an ivory tower. He was happy to remain connected and live in the present. Despite his increasing fame, he never lost the playfulness and sense of humor that was his true nature and, more importantly, he retained his humility. For me personally, it is an incredibly sad day and my thoughts are with Cy’s family and close friends.”
While considering the rising movement of neo-Expressionism in the 1980s, The New York Times reports, “A generation of younger artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat found inspiration in Mr. Twombly’s skittery bathroom-graffiti scrawl. Coupled with rising interest in European artists whose work shared unexpected ground with Twombly’s. And by the next decade, he was highly sought after not only by European museums and collectors, who had discovered his work early on, but also by those back in his homeland who had not known what to make of him two decades before.”
In 1995 a permanent exhibition of the artist’s career opened at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. In addition, Twombly installed a painted ceiling for the Salle des Bronzes at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, where his work will also be featured as a permanent exhibition.
The only written statement Mr. Twombly ever made about his work was a brief essay in 1957 in an Italian art journal. About the essay, Randy Kennedyreports, “he tried to make clear that his intentions were not subversive but elementally human.” Each line he made, Twombly explained in the essay, was “the actual experience [of making the line]. It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Twombly later said, “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.”
Image courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.
