Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr. 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 died from cancer he was , 83.
(April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011)
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.
[1] 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.”
[2] 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".
[3] He is said to have influenced younger artists such as
Anselm Kiefer,
Francesco Clemente, and
Julian Schnabel.
[4]
Early 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.
[5] They were both nicknamed after the baseball great
Cy Young who pitched for among others the
Cardinals,
Red Sox,
Indians, and
Braves.
At 12 he began to take private art lessons with the Spanish modern master Pierre Daura.
[6] 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
[7] 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.
[8] 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
cryptologist, 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
[9] and was sharing a studio
[10] – 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.
[11]
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.
[12]
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.”
[13]
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.
[14] 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.
[15] 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.
[16] 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.
Apart from Rauschenberg and
Jasper Johns, Twombly is regarded as the most important representative of a generation of artists who distanced themselves from
Abstract Expressionism.
[17]
Exhibitions
After having shown at
Stable Gallery 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.
[18] 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.
[19] 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 an retrospective of Twombly's photographs from 1951 to 2010. It later was passed over to the "Museum für Gegenwartskunst" at
Siegen (July-October 2011).
[20]
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
Avignon (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.
[21][22][23] 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.
[24]
Tate exhibition
Twombly's work was on exhibition at the
Tate Modern, in London, from June 19 to September 14, 2008. Text for the showing read:
Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibition
Twombly's work went on display as part of Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters at the
Dulwich Picture Gallery 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.
[25]
Collections
In 1989, the
Philadelphia Museum of Art opened permanent rooms dedicated to his monumental 10-painting cycle,
Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), based on
Alexander Pope’s translation of “The Iliad.”
[13] 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.
[26] In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, made a large acquisition of nine works worth about $75 million.
[11]
Recognition
Twombly was a recipient of numerous awards, most notably the
Praemium Imperiale (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".
[27]
At auction
Already in 1990, a
Christie's 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.
[28]
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
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He was on his way to become one of the greatest stars in cross country skiing history, until he was caught doping in the Finnish 2001 FIS Nordic World Ski Championships scandal for taking hydroxyethyl starch (HES), a blood plasma expander usually used to cover up the use of erythropoietin (EPO) in athletes. The scandal also affected five other Finnish skiers, including Jari Isometsä and Harri Kirvesniemi. Myllylä received a two year suspension from the FIS as a result. In connection with a 2011 court case, Myllylä gave a sworn statement where he admitted using EPO in the 1990s, during his career.[2]
