Cy Twombly was an American painter, photographer and sculptor, who represented Abstract Expressionism movement. His iconic large-scale paintings consisted of looping marks, scribbled and smeared on raw canvas or linen, imbuing his pieces with a unique level of frenetic spirit and vitality, that remains unmatched to this day. Moreover, Twombly’s practice melded his interest in Roman and Greek mythological stories.
Background
Cy Twombly was born on April 25, 1928 in Lexington, Virginia, United States. He was a son of Edwin Parker Twombly Sr., a professional baseball player, who once pitched for the Chicago White Sox in the American League, and Mary Velma Richardson. Also, Cy's father acted as an Athletic Director of the Washington and Lee University in Lexington and he was so admired by the educational establishment, that a new swimming pool was named the "Twombly Natatorium" in his honor.
Education
Twombly's parents encouraged his interest in art, and at twelve years old, he started studying under the Spanish modern painter Pierre Daura.
In 1946, Cy graduated from Lexington High School. After that, he continued his studies at Darlington School in Rome, Georgia. During the period from 1948 to 1949, the painter attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. In 1949, Twombly entered Washington and Lee University, where he remained till 1950.
A little while later, Cy won a tuition scholarship to the Art Students League of New York, where he studied from 1950 till 1951. While at the League, he met Robert Rauschenberg, who became a close friend and artistic influence. At Rauschenberg's encouragement, Twombly studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the period from 1951 till 1952. There, his mentors included Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Ben Shahn.
In 1951, Cy had his first solo exhibition at Kootz Gallery in New York City. At this time, his work was influenced by Kline’s black-and-white gestural Abstract Expressionism, as well as by Paul Klee’s childlike imagery. The following year, in 1952, the painter obtained a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which allowed him to travel to North Africa, Spain, Italy and France. His friend, Robert Rauschenberg, joined him on this trip. Upon returning, the two artists had a joint 1953 exhibition at Stable Gallery in New York, which resulted in such a hostile and negative response from the public, that gallery director, Eleanor Ward, had to remove the visitor comments book.
In 1953, Cy was drafted into the army, where he served as a cryptographer at Camp Gordon near Augusta, Georgia, and at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. After military service, during the period from 1954 to 1956, he taught art at the Southern Virginia University. During this time, he became drawn to the primitivism of tribal art and developed a style of gestural painting, marked by thin white lines on dark canvases. He also produced a range of sculpture, assembled from discarded objects in the manner of junk art.
In 1957, Twombly left for Rome, a move, which reflected his closeness to European art in general, although it may have lowered his standing in America. Indeed, during the 1960's and 1970's, Cy was, like the calligraphic painter Mark Tobey, much more highly thought of in Europe, than in the United States. His oeuvre combined "low" art methods (graffiti-like pencil/crayon doodlings; all-over painting technique) with "high" art references to Classical Antiquity (reminiscent of Arte Povera), the Italian Renaissance and French Neoclassicism. His earlier paintings, typically monochrome works in greys and whites, often lie midway between drawing and writing, with coded allusions to erotic and emotive subjects. Later, he became one of the boldest users of colour in painting in contemporary art.
Also, Twombly developed his own brand of abstract sculpture, often combining pieces of wood, plant materials and other collected objects. He painted or plastered the sculptures in white colour, giving them a static, antique appearance. Some of his works directly evoked characters from classical mythology. One famous piece of 1978 incorporated an elegant, wing-like palm leaf. Twombly entitled this work "Cycnus", after the son of Apollo, who was turned from a hunter into a swan — a character, symbolic of the renewal of life.
Later in his career, Twombly began producing large-scale works, that harkened back to the tradition of historical painting. His multi-canvas Lepanto series vividly recalled the great sixteenth-century naval battle between forces of Catholic Europe and the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Ship-like forms are set alongside splashes of color, that resemble cannon fire and soldiers' torches.
Throughout the 1980's and 1990's, Twombly explored the Aegean art and mythology of the Mediterranean. In Europe, where his reputation remained high, he was given an important retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zurich in 1987, which travelled to Madrid, London and Paris.
Twombly's final burst of creativity revealed a dramatic new style of Neo-Expressionism. His "Bacchus" series of 2005, for example, featured vivid whorls of gestural energy, while his "Rose" paintings and prints vibrated with brilliant colour. At the end of his career, Cy was one of the most expensive living artists in the world and a major source of influence on generations of Neo-Expressionist painters.
Also, during his lifetime, the painter took part in many exhibitions, including Venice Biennale in 1964, 1989 and 2001. In 2010, Twombly was honored with the commission to decorate a part of ceiling within the Louvre Museum in Paris.
Hero and Leandro (A Painting in Four Parts) Part II
Ferragosto V
Pan II
Untitled (Bastian 38)
Lepanto, Part IV
Untitled
Lepanto, Part X
Untitled
Nicola's Irises
Untitled
Untitled (Peonias series)
Hero and Leandro (A Painting in Four Parts) Part III
Untitled
Blue Room
Untitled
The Rose (V)
Lepanto, Part XII
Lepanto, Part II
The Rose (III)
Untitled Part VII
Untitled
Zyig
Camino Real (II)
Lepanto, Part VII
Coronation of Sesostris
Untitled
Untitled
Nine Discourses on Commodus
Solon I
Victory
Untitled, (Blooming, A Scattering of Blossoms & Other Things)
Hero and Leandro (A Painting in Four Parts) Part I
Quattro Stagioni. Primavera
Lepanto, Part VI
Suma
Ides of March
Untitled Part VI
Olympia
Pan
Anabasis
Quattro stagioni, Part IV Inverno
Night Watch
Untitled Part VIII
Fifty Days at Iliam. Shield of Achilles
Fifty Days at Iliam. Shades of Eternal Night
Leda and the Swan
Bay of Naples
Coronation of Sesostris
Quattro stagioni, Part II Estate
Untitled
Lepanto, Part I
The Rose (I)
Min-Oe
Myo
Ferragosto IV
Summer Madness
Untitled
Lepanto, Part V
Lepanto, Part IX
Untitled
The Geeks
Ferragosto III
The Rose (IV)
Untitled, Rome
Anabasis (Xenephon)
Leaving Paphos Ringed With Waves IV
III Notes from Salalah, (Note II)
Untitled
Leda and the Swan
Ritual
School of Athens
Untitled
Lepanto, Part VIII
Untitled
Leaving Paphos Ringed With Waves V
Untitled I
Lepanto, Part III
Quattro Stagioni, Estate
The Rose (II)
Untitled, (Blooming, A Scattering of Blossoms & Other Things)
Landscape
Returning from Tonnicoda
Lepanto, Part XI
Untitled
Hero and Leander (To Christopher Marlowe) Rome
III Notes From Salalah (Note I)
Cold Stream
Fifty Days at Iliam. Shades of Achilles, Patroclus, and Hector
Fifty Days at Iliam. Ilians in Battle
Untitled
Quattro stagioni, Part III Autunno
Leaving Paphos Ringed With Waves III
Academy
Tiznit
Untitled
Untitled
Untitled
School of Athens
Souvenir
Quarzeat
Wilder Shores of Love
Quattro stagioni, Part I Primavera
Camino Real (IV)
Untitled, (Peony Blossom Painting)
Quattro Stagioni, Estate
Untitled
Sunset
Fifty Days at Iliam. The Fire that Consumes All before It
Untitled Part V
Views
Quotations:
"Graffiti is linear and it's done with a pencil, and it's like writing on walls. But in my paintings it's more lyrical."
"When I work, I work very fast, but preparing to work can take any length of time."
"Paint is something that I use with my hands and do all those tactile things. I really don't like oil because you can't get back into it, or you make a mess. It's not my favorite thing...pencil is more my medium than wet paint."
"I sit for two or three hours and then in 15 minutes I can do a painting, but that's part of it. You have to get ready and decide to jump up and do it; you build yourself up psychologically, and so painting has no time for brush. Brush is boring, you give it and all of a sudden it's dry, you have to go. Before you cut the thought, you know?"
"For myself the past is the source."
Membership
American Academy of Arts and Letters
,
United States
Personality
The painter inherited his father’s baseball nickname "Cy", after the baseball player Cyclone Young.
For his work, entitled "Grey Paintings", he used to sit on the shoulders of his friend and slide along the length of the canvas, striking his fluid lines.
Also, Cy was in love with the city of Rome, which served as a source of inspiration for him.
Interests
Artists
Nicolas Poussin
Connections
In 1959, Twombly married Tatiana Franchetti, an Italian artist, whom he had met in Rome. Their marriage produced one son, Cyrus Alessandro Twombly, who is also a painter.
In 1964, Cy met Nicola Del Roscio, who became his longtime partner. However, Twombly and Tatiana, who died in 2010, never divorced and remained friends.
The Essential Cy Twombly
This work is the ultimate overview of Twombly's work, presenting the most important paintings and cycles of paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs from his diverse oeuvre. The most accessible survey of his work to date, this volume includes essays by Laszlo Glozer, Thierry Greub, Kirk Varnedoe and Simon Schama.
Cy Twombly: Fifty Days at Iliam
This revelatory publication provides a comprehensive and multifaceted account of Cy Twombly’s masterpiece "Fifty Days at Iliam" (1978), a series of ten paintings based on Alexander Pope’s 18th-century translation of Homer’s Iliad.