Misplaced Pages

Cy Twombly: Difference between revisions

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
Browse history interactively← Previous editContent deleted Content addedVisualWikitext
Revision as of 16:27, 31 January 2016 editTcheetham (talk | contribs)3 editsm External linksTag: Visual edit← Previous edit Latest revision as of 21:10, 4 January 2025 edit undoSer Amantio di Nicolao (talk | contribs)Autopatrolled, Administrators6,296,715 edits Works in edition: CapitalizationTags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit Advanced mobile edit 
(261 intermediate revisions by more than 100 users not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
{{Short description|American painter, sculptor and photographer (1928–2011)}}
{{for|the American pitcher in Major League Baseball|Cy Twombly (baseball)}}
{{Use mdy dates|date=March 2012}} {{Use mdy dates|date=March 2012}}
{{for|his father|Cy Twombly (baseball)}}
{{Infobox artist {{Infobox artist
| bgcolour = #6495ED
| name = Cy Twombly | name = Cy Twombly
| image = Cy_Twombly.jpg | image = Cy Twombly.jpg
| imagesize = | image_size = 300px
| caption = Cy Twombly in his studio <!--A ] and chalk painting by Cy Twombly--> | caption = Twombly in his studio
| birth_name = Edwin Parker Twombly, Jr. | birth_name = Edwin Parker Twombly Jr.
| birth_date = {{Birth date|1928|4|25|mf=yes}} | birth_date = {{birth date|1928|4|25}}
| birth_place = ], United States | birth_place = ], U.S.
| death_date = {{death date and age|2011|7|05|1928|4|25|mf=yes|}} | death_date = {{death date and age|2011|7|5|1928|4|25}}
| death_place = Rome, Italy | death_place = ], ]
| awards = ]<br/>]
| nationality = ]
| field = Painting, sculpture, ] | field = Painting, sculpture, ]
| training = ]<br>]<br>]<br>] | training = {{ubl|[[School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston|
School of the Museum of Fine Arts]]|]|]|]}}
| spouse = {{marriage|Tatiana Franchetti|1959|2010|end=died}}
| movement =
| works = | partner = Nicola Del Roscio (1964–2011)
| patrons = | children = 1
| influenced by =
| influenced =
| awards = ]
}} }}
'''Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr.''' ({{IPAc-en||s|aɪ|_|ˈ|t|w|ɒ|m|b|l|i}}; April 25, 1928{{spaced ndash}}July 5, 2011<ref>The Sunday Times Magazine, The Sunday Times, December 18, 2011, page 64</ref>) was an American painter, sculptor and photographer. He belonged to the generation of ] and ] but made the specific choice to live in Europe (Italy) after 1957.


'''Edwin Parker''' "'''Cy'''" '''Twombly Jr.''' ({{IPAc-en||s|aɪ|_|ˈ|t|w|ɒ|m|b|l|i}}; April 25, 1928{{spaced ndash}}July 5, 2011)<ref>The Sunday Times Magazine, The Sunday Times, December 18, 2011, page 64</ref> was an American ], ] and ].
His paintings of large-scale, freely scribbled, ] and ] works on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors are in the permanent collections of most of the museums of modern art around the world, including the ] in Houston, the ] in London or the New York's ]. He was also commissioned for the ceiling of a room of the ] in Paris.


Twombly influenced artists such as ], ], ] and ].<ref>Matt Schudel (July 6, 2011), {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170518034054/https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/cy-twombly-influential-va-born-abstract-artist-dies-at-83/2011/07/05/gHQAmHwmzH_story.html |date=May 18, 2017 }} ''The Washington Post''.</ref><ref>Leonhard Emmerling, ''Basquiat'', Cologne, Taschen, 2003</ref> His best-known works are typically large-scale, freely-scribbled, ] and ] 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 ], ] and ], 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".
Many of 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 the poets as ], ], ]..., 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 ] 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.”<ref name="Varnedoe quoted in Kennedy">{{cite web | url=http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/cy-twombly-idiosyncratic-painter-dies-at-83/?hp | title=Cy Twombly, Idiosyncratic Painter, Dies at 83 |work=New York Times | date=July 5, 2011 | accessdate=July 6, 2011 | author=Kennedy, Randy}}</ref> After acquiring Twombly's ''Three Studies from the Temeraire'' (1998–99), the Director of the ] said, "Sometimes people need a little bit of help in recognising a great work of art that might be a bit unfamiliar."<ref name="Capon quoted in Morgan">{{cite web | url=http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/with-his-feet-on-classical-ground-20110706-1h2d2.html | title=With his feet on classical ground |work=The Sydney Morning Herald | date=July 7, 2011 | accessdate=July 7, 2011 | author=Morgan, Joyce | page=14}}</ref> Twombly is said to have influenced younger artists such as ], ], ], and ].<ref>Matt Schudel (July 6, 2011), ''Washington Post''.</ref>

Twombly's works are in the permanent collections of modern art museums globally, including the ] in Houston, the ] in London, New York's ] and Munich's ]. He was commissioned for a ceiling at the ] in Paris.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://hypebeast.com/2010/3/cieling-cy-twombly-musee-du-louvre|title=The Cieling by Cy Twombly at Musée du Louvre|website=HYPEBEAST|date=March 25, 2010|access-date=March 1, 2019|archive-date=March 1, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190301135951/https://hypebeast.com/2010/3/cieling-cy-twombly-musee-du-louvre|url-status=live}}</ref>

In a 1994 retrospective, curator ] 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."<ref name="Varnedoe quoted in Kennedy">{{cite web | url=http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/cy-twombly-idiosyncratic-painter-dies-at-83/?hp | title=Cy Twombly, Idiosyncratic Painter, Dies at 83 | work=The New York Times | date=July 5, 2011 | access-date=July 6, 2011 | author=Kennedy, Randy | archive-date=July 8, 2011 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110708075832/http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/cy-twombly-idiosyncratic-painter-dies-at-83/?hp | url-status=live }}</ref> Writing in ], ] went further, declaring Twombly to be "the greatest American painter of the twentieth century, and the greatest painter after Picasso, period."<ref>Travis Jeppesen (2015) July 12, 2024 at ''Artforum''</ref>


==Life and career== ==Life and career==
Twombly was born in ] on April 25, 1928. ], also nicknamed "Cy", pitched for the ].<ref>Alastair Sooke (February 9, 2009), ''The Telegraph''</ref> They were both nicknamed after the baseball great ] who pitched for, among others, the ], ], ], and ]. Twombly was born in ], on April 25, 1928. ], also nicknamed "Cy", ] for the ].<ref>Alastair Sooke (February 9, 2009), {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170518110255/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/4527414/Cy-Twombly-late-flowering-for-Mr-Scribbles.html |date=May 18, 2017 }} ''The Telegraph''</ref> They were both nicknamed after the baseball great ], who pitched for, among others, the ], ], ], and ].

At age 12, Twombly began to take private art lessons with the Catalan modern master ].<ref> {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090207123333/http://menil.org/collection/CyTwomblyInDepth.php |date=February 7, 2009 }} ].</ref> After graduating from Lexington High School in 1946, Twombly attended ] in ], and studied at the ] (1948–49), and at ] (1949–50) in Lexington, Virginia. On a tuition scholarship from 1950 to 1951, he studied at the ], where he met ], with whom he was briefly romantically involved.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/may/15/art|title=The trashcan laureate|first=Jonathan|last=Jones|work=The Guardian|location=UK|date=May 15, 2008|access-date=July 6, 2011|archive-date=May 24, 2024|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240524182131/https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/may/15/art|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=Katz |first=Jonathan |title=Lovers and Divers: Interpictoral Dialog in the Work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg |url=http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/KatzPages/KatzLoversPt2.html |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091223101325/http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/KatzPages/KatzLoversPt2.html |archive-date=December 23, 2009 |website=queerculturalcentre.org}}</ref> Rauschenberg encouraged him to attend ] near ]. At Black Mountain in 1951 and 1952 he studied with ], ] and ], and met ]. The poet and rector of the College, ], had a great influence on him.


Motherwell arranged Twombly's first solo exhibition, which was organized by the ] Gallery in New York in 1951. At this time his work was influenced by Kline's black-and-white gestural ], as well as ]'s imagery. In 1952, Twombly received a grant from the ] which enabled him to travel to North Africa, Spain, Italy, and France. He spent this journey in Africa and Europe with ]. In 1954, he served in the U.S. Army as a ] in Washington, D.C., and would frequently travel to New York during periods of leave. From 1955 through 1956, he taught at the ] in ], currently known as Southern Virginia University; during the summer vacations, Twombly would travel to New York to paint in his Williams Street apartment.<ref>{{cite book|last = Varnedoe|first = Kirk|title = Cy Twombly: A Retrospective|publisher = The Museum of Modern Art|date = 1994|location = New York|pages = 20–23}}</ref>
At age 12, Twombly began to take private art lessons with the Catalan modern master ].<ref> ].</ref> After graduating from Lexington High School in 1946, Twombly attended ] in ], and studied at the ] (1948–49), and at ] (1949–50) in Lexington, Virginia. On a tuition scholarship from 1950 to 1951, he studied at the ], where he met ], who encouraged him to attend ] near ]. At Black Mountain in 1951 and 1952 he studied with ], ] and ], and met ]. The poet and rector of the College ] had a great influence on him.


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 ] in 1959<ref>Jonathan Jones (April 10, 2004), {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240524182131/https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2004/apr/10/1 |date=May 24, 2024 }} ''The Guardian''.</ref> and then bought a palazzo on the Via di Monserrato in Rome. In addition, they had a 17th-century palace in ], near Viterbo. In 2023, the palace was restored and reopened to the public as an artists' residence and an exhibition center. The first artist being hosted is American painter ].<ref name="tmag" >{{citation | last=Stowe | first=Stacey | title=The Centuries-Old Italian House Where Cy Twombly Thrived | newspaper=] | date=26 March 2015 | issn=0362-4331 | url=https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/t-magazine/nicola-del-roscio-cy-twombly-gaeta-cultivating-genius.html | language=en-US | access-date=10 July 2024 | page=}}</ref><ref name="RobertNava">{{cite web |last= Dalla Chiesa | first = Giovanna | title=Fondazione Iris apre a Bassano in Teverina: dialogo con Caio Twombly exibart.com | website=exibart.com | date=19 August 2023 | url=https://www.exibart.com/arte-contemporanea/a-bassano-in-teverina-apre-fondazione-iris-nel-palazzo-dove-cy-twombly-ha-dipinto-dal-1975-al-2008-dialogo-con-caio-twombly/ | language=Italian | access-date=10 July 2024}}</ref>
Arranged by Motherwell, Twombly's first solo exhibition was organized by the ] Gallery in New York in 1951. At this time his work was influenced by Kline's black-and-white gestural ], as well as ]'s imagery. In 1952, Twombly received a grant from the ] which enabled him to travel to North Africa, Spain, Italy, and France. He spent this journey in Africa and Europe with ]. In 1954, he served in the U.S. Army as a ] in Washington, D.C. and would frequently travel to New York during periods of leave. From 1955 through 1956, he taught at the ] in ], currently known as Southern Virginia University; during the summer vacations, Twombly would travel to New York to paint in his Williams Street apartment.<ref>{{cite book|last = Varnedoe|first = Kirk|title = Cy Twombly: A Retrospective|publisher = The Museum of Modern Art|date = 1994|location = New York|pages = 20–23}}</ref>


Around 1961, through their mutual relationship with the artist ], Twombly met the American artist ] 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".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Raeburn |first=Michael |title=Joseph Glasco: The Fifteenth American |publisher=Cacklegoose Press |year=2015 |isbn=9781611688542 |location=London |pages=191 |language=English}}</ref>
In 1957, Twombly moved to Rome, where he met the Italian artist Baroness Tatiana Franchetti – sister of his patron Baron Giorgio Franchetti. They were married at City Hall in New York in 1959<ref>Jonathan Jones (April 10, 2004), ''The Guardian''.</ref> and then bought a palazzo on the Via di Monserrato in Rome. In addition, they had a 17th-century villa in ], north of Rome.<ref name=tmag>Stacey Stowe (March 26, 2015), '']''.</ref> They had a son, Cyrus Alessandro Twombly (born 1959), who is also a painter and lives in Rome.


In 1964, Twombly met Nicola Del Roscio of ], who became his longtime companion.<ref name=tmag/><ref>{{cite news|title= CY TWOMBLY, 1928-2011 |url=http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/arts/cy-twombly-american-artist-is-dead-at-83.html?pagewanted=all|agency=New York Times|accessdate=2013-03-14}}</ref> Twombly bought a house and rented a studio in Gaeta in the early 1990s.<ref name=tmag/> Twombly and Tatiana, who died in 2010, never divorced and remained friends.<ref name=tmag/> In 1964, Twombly met Nicola Del Roscio of ], who became his longtime companion.<ref name="tmag" /><ref>{{cite news | title=CY TWOMBLY, 1928-2011 | url=https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/arts/cy-twombly-american-artist-is-dead-at-83.html?pagewanted=all | work=The New York Times | date=July 6, 2011 | access-date=March 14, 2013 | last1=Kennedy | first1=Randy | archive-date=January 31, 2013 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130131234734/http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/arts/cy-twombly-american-artist-is-dead-at-83.html?pagewanted=all | url-status=live }}</ref> Twombly bought a house and rented a studio in Gaeta in the early 1990s.<ref name="tmag" /> Twombly and Tatiana, who died in 2010, never divorced and remained friends.<ref name="tmag" />


In 2011, Twombly died in Rome after being hospitalized for several days; he had had cancer for many years.<ref name=afp_died>{{cite news|title=US artist Cy Twombly dies in Rome: French gallery|url=http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iPveHcv9hN9zFBBZP9yZJai_0_Qw?docId=CNG.eca0b99829d410a9a9b56c3e05884cf1.451|agency=Agence France-Presse |accessdate=July 5, 2011}}</ref> A plaque in ] commemorates him.<ref>]</ref> In July 2011, after suffering from cancer for several years, Twombly died in Rome after a brief hospitalization.<ref name=afp_died>{{cite news|title=US artist Cy Twombly dies in Rome: French gallery|url=https://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iPveHcv9hN9zFBBZP9yZJai_0_Qw?docId=CNG.eca0b99829d410a9a9b56c3e05884cf1.451|agency=Agence France-Presse|access-date=July 5, 2011|archive-date=September 2, 2011|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110902095259/http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iPveHcv9hN9zFBBZP9yZJai_0_Qw?docId=CNG.eca0b99829d410a9a9b56c3e05884cf1.451|url-status=dead}}</ref> A plaque in ] commemorates him.<ref>]</ref>


==Work== ==Work==
===Painting===
After his return in 1953, Twombly served in the U.S. army as a ], an activity that left a distinct mark on his artistic style.<ref>Cy Twombly Biography http://www.cytwombly.info/twombly_biography.htm</ref> From 1955 to 1959, he worked in New York, where he became a prominent figure among a group of artists including ] – with whom he had a relationship<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/may/15/art|title=The trashcan laureate|first=Jonathan|last=Jones|work=The Guardian |location=UK|date=May 15, 2008|accessdate=July 6, 2011}}</ref> and was sharing a studio<ref>Holland Cotter (February 4, 2005), ''New York Times''.</ref> – and ]. Exposure to the emerging ] purged ] aspects from his work, encouraging a simplified form of ]. He became fascinated with ], using the painterly language of the early 1950s to invoke ], reversing the normal evolution of the ]. 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 sculpting again until 1976.<ref name="MoMA to Acquire Cy Twombly Works">Carol Vogel (March 11, 2011), ''New York Times''.</ref>
]
After his return in 1953, Twombly served in the ] as a ], an activity that left a distinct mark on his artistic style.<ref>Cy Twombly Biography {{cite web |url=http://www.cytwombly.info/twombly_biography.htm |title=Cy Twombly Biography |access-date=January 27, 2014 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101028231340/http://www.cytwombly.info/twombly_biography.htm |archive-date=October 28, 2010 }}</ref> From 1955 to 1959, he worked in New York, where he became a prominent figure among a group of artists including ], with whom he was sharing a studio,<ref>Holland Cotter (February 4, 2005), {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130515221007/http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/04/arts/design/04cott.html |date=May 15, 2013 }} ''The New York Times''.</ref> and ]. Exposure to the emerging ] purged ] aspects from his work, encouraging a simplified form of ]. He became fascinated with ], using the painterly language of the early 1950s to invoke ], 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 ] 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.<ref>{{cite book | last1 = Molesworth | first1 = H.A.| last2 = Erickson | first2 = R. | title = Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957| location = United Kingdom | publisher = ] | pages = 740 | date = 2015 | isbn = 9780300211917}}</ref><ref>{{cite book | last1 = Collischan | first1 = J. | title = Made in the U.S.A.: Modern/Contemporary Art in America | location = United States | publisher = ] | pages = 560 | date = 2010 | isbn = 9781440198540}}</ref> He stopped making sculptures in 1959 and did not take up sculpting again until 1976.<ref name="MoMA to Acquire Cy Twombly Works">Carol Vogel (March 11, 2011), {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160305104126/http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05EEDF173EF932A25750C0A9679D8B63&pagewanted=all |date=March 5, 2016 }} ''The New York Times''.</ref>


Twombly often inscribed on paintings the names of mythological figures during the 1960s.<ref>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.</ref> Twombly's move to ] in Southern Italy in 1957 gave him closer contact with classical sources. From 1962 he produced a cycle of works based on myths including ] 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 ]/Jupiter in the form of a Swan six times, once in 1960, twice in 1962 and three times in 1963.<ref> Christie's New York, Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale, November 10, 2010.</ref> Twombly often inscribed on paintings the names of mythological figures during the 1960s.<ref>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.</ref> Twombly's move to ] in Southern Italy in 1957 gave him closer contact with classical sources. From 1962 he produced a cycle of works based on myths including ] 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 ]/Jupiter in the form of a Swan six times, once in 1960, twice in 1962 and three times in 1963.<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110120223734/http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5371707 |date=January 20, 2011 }} Christie's New York, Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale, November 10, 2010.</ref>
] in 2022]]


Twombly's 1964 exhibition of the nine-panel ''Discourses on Commodus'' (1963) at the ] in New York was panned by artist and writer ] 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.<ref name="nytimes.com">Randy Kennedy (July 5, 2011), ''New York Times''.</ref> Twombly's 1964 exhibition of the nine-panel ''Discourses on Commodus'' (1963) at the ] in New York was panned by artist and writer ] 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."<ref name="nytimes.com">Randy Kennedy (July 5, 2011), {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170102051217/http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/arts/cy-twombly-american-artist-is-dead-at-83.html |date=January 2, 2017 }} ''The New York Times''.</ref> They are currently exhibited at the Guggenheim Bilbao.<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160516105339/http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es/en/works/nine-discourses-on-commodus/ |date=May 16, 2016 }} (1963) ]</ref>


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.<ref> MoMA Collection</ref> In the summer and early autumn of 1969, Twombly made a series of fourteen paintings while staying at ], 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". 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 ]. 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.<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150625091900/http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=80088 |date=June 25, 2015 }} (1970) ] Collection</ref>
] in 2022]]


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.<ref name=tate>. ], London.</ref> In an interview with critic ], on the occasion of the large exhibition of his sculpture at ] in 2000, Twombly revealed that, for him, the demands of making sculpture were distinctly different from those required of painting. 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.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Sherwood Pundyk|first=Anne|title=Cy Twombly: Sculpture|journal=The Brooklyn Rail|date=September 2011|url=http://brooklynrail.org/2011/09/artseen/cy-twombly-sculpture}}</ref> 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 ], on the occasion of the large exhibition of his sculpture at ] in 2000, Twombly revealed that, for him, the demands of making sculpture were distinctly different from those required of painting. " 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."<ref>{{cite journal|last=Sherwood Pundyk|first=Anne|title=Cy Twombly: Sculpture|journal=The Brooklyn Rail|date=September 2011|url=http://brooklynrail.org/2011/09/artseen/cy-twombly-sculpture|access-date=March 13, 2012|archive-date=March 14, 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120314205719/http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/09/artseen/cy-twombly-sculpture|url-status=live}}</ref>


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.<ref> MoMA Collection.</ref> In 1978 he worked on the monumental historical ensemble ''Fifty Days at Iliam'', a ten-part cycle inspired by ]'s ]; 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 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.<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161002105353/http://www.moma.org/collection/works/143329?locale=en |date=October 2, 2016 }} (1976) ] Collection.</ref> In 1978 he worked on the monumental historical ensemble ''Fifty Days at Iliam'', a ten-part cycle inspired by ]'s '']''; 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 2022]]


In an essay in the catalogue to the 2011 Dulwich exhibition (see below), Katharina Schmidt summarizes the scope and technique of Twombly's ''œuvre'': 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."<ref>Katherina Schmidt, "Immortal and Eternally Young. Figures from classical mythology in the work of Nicolas Poussin and Cy Twombly", in ] (ed) ''Twombly and Poussin – Arcadian Painters''. London: Dulwich Picture Gallery/Paul Holberton Publishing, 2011.</ref> <blockquote>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&nbsp;... 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.<ref>Katherina Schmidt, "Immortal and Eternally Young. Figures from classical mythology in the work of Nicolas Poussin and Cy Twombly", in ] (ed) ''Twombly and Poussin – Arcadian Painters''. London: Dulwich Picture Gallery/Paul Holberton Publishing, 2011.</ref></blockquote>


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". However, in a 1994 article ] 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 ] did, or any house painter could spatter paint as well as ]. 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."<ref> ''MoMa'' No.18, Autumn-Winter 1994, pp.18–23.</ref> <blockquote>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 ] did, or any house painter could spatter paint as well as ]. 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.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.cytwombly.info/twombly_writings14.htm |title=Your Kid Could ''Not'' Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly |author=Kirk Varnedoe |work=MoMa No.18 |date=Autumn–Winter 1994 |pages=18–23 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131202231807/http://www.cytwombly.info/twombly_writings14.htm |archive-date=December 2, 2013 |author-link=Kirk Varnedoe }}</ref></blockquote>


Together with Rauschenberg and ], Twombly is regarded as the most important representative of a generation of artists who distanced themselves from ].<ref> Museum Brandhorst, Munich.</ref> ]Together with Rauschenberg and ], Twombly is regarded as the most important representative of a generation of artists who distanced themselves from ].<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140714223413/http://www.museum-brandhorst.de/en/collection-brandhorst/cy-twombly.html |date=July 14, 2014 }} Museum Brandhorst, Munich.</ref>

===Works in edition===

Although Twombly is most known for his paintings, he was also an accomplished printmaker.<ref name="bastian">{{Cite web|title= Cy Twombly – The Printed Graphic Work Catalogue Raisonné|url= https://www.bastian-gallery.com/en/publications/cy-twombly-the-printed-graphic-work-catalogue-raisonne/|last=Bastian|first=Heiner|date=2017|website= bastian-gallery.com |language=en-US|access-date=July 22, 2024}}</ref><ref name="nyt">{{Cite web|title=Cy Twombly: Redefined by his Drawings|url= https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/arts/design/cy-twombly-review-gagosian-gallery.html|date=Apr 11, 2018|website= ] |language=en-US|access-date=July 22, 2024}}</ref> Twombly explored the particular characteristics and processes of each print medium when making his works in edition.<ref name="art21">{{Cite web|title=Ink / Twombly's Poetics in Print|url=http://magazine.art21.org/2011/08/12/ink-twombly’s-poetics-in-print/#.X0Bl5C2z2YU|last=Nigro|first=Carol A.|date=Aug 12, 2011|website= magazine.art21.org |language=en-US|access-date=July 22, 2024}}</ref><ref name="tate2">{{Cite web|title=Cy Twombly's Humanist Upbringing|url=https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/10/cy-twombly-humanist-upbringing|last=Kirk Hanley|first=Sarah|date=Autumn 2008|website= tate.org.uk |language=en-US|access-date=July 22, 2024}}</ref> Twombly's printmaking activity occurred primarily from the late 1960s to the late 1970s.<ref name="art21">{{Cite web|title=Ink / Twombly's Poetics in Print|url=http://magazine.art21.org/2011/08/12/ink-twombly’s-poetics-in-print/#.X0Bl5C2z2YU|last=Nigro|first=Carol A.|date=Aug 12, 2011|website= magazine.art21.org |language=en-US|access-date=July 22, 2024}}</ref><ref name="bastian">{{Cite web|title= Cy Twombly – The Printed Graphic Work Catalogue Raisonné|url= https://www.bastian-gallery.com/en/publications/cy-twombly-the-printed-graphic-work-catalogue-raisonne/|last=Bastian|first=Heiner|date=2017|website= bastian-gallery.com |language=en-US|access-date=July 22, 2024}}</ref> During this period, Twombly worked in nearly all traditional printmaking techniques, including line etching, mezzotint, aquatint, lithography, screenprinting and collotype.<ref name="art21">{{Cite web|title=Ink / Twombly's Poetics in Print|url=http://magazine.art21.org/2011/08/12/ink-twombly’s-poetics-in-print/#.X0Bl5C2z2YU|last=Nigro|first=Carol A.|date=Aug 12, 2011|website= magazine.art21.org |language=en-US|access-date=July 22, 2024}}</ref><ref name="nyt">{{Cite web|title=Cy Twombly: Redefined by his Drawings|url= https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/arts/design/cy-twombly-review-gagosian-gallery.html|date=Apr 11, 2018|website= ] |language=en-US|access-date=July 22, 2024}}</ref> Many of his editions were issued as portfolios.<ref name="tate2">{{Cite web|title=Cy Twombly's Humanist Upbringing|url=https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/10/cy-twombly-humanist-upbringing|last=Kirk Hanley|first=Sarah|date=Autumn 2008|website= tate.org.uk |language=en-US|access-date=July 22, 2024}}</ref>


==Exhibitions== ==Exhibitions==
After having shown at ] from 1953 to 1957, Twombly moved to ] and later exhibited with ]. ] opened a new gallery in Rome, Twombly's hometown, on the December 15, 2007 with their inaugural exhibition being his "Three Notes from Salalah".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/december-15-2007--cy-twombly|title=Cy Twombly - December 15, 2007 - March 15, 2008 - Gagosian Gallery|publisher=}}</ref>


After having an art piece being shown at ] from 1953 to 1957, Twombly moved to ] and later exhibited with ]. ] opened a new gallery in Rome, Twombly's hometown, on December 15, 2007, with the inaugural exhibition, of Twombly's work, ''Three Notes from Salalah''.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/december-15-2007--cy-twombly|title=Cy Twombly – December 15, 2007 – March 15, 2008 – Gagosian Gallery|date=April 12, 2018|access-date=December 28, 2011|archive-date=June 7, 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120607025842/http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/december-15-2007--cy-twombly|url-status=live}}</ref>
In 1993, at ] 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 ], the Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; the exhibition was opened by ]. For the season 2010/2011 in the ] Cy Twombly designed the large scale picture (176 sqm) "Bacchus" as part of the exhibition series "Safety Curtain", conceived by ].<ref name="Safety Curtain by Cy Twombly">, ], Vienna.</ref> In 2011, the ], mounted a retrospective of Twombly's photographs from 1951 to 2010. It later was passed over to the "Museum für Gegenwartskunst" at ]<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.mgk-siegen.de|title=Startseite - Museum für Gegenwartkunst Siegen|publisher=}}</ref> and the ], Brussels.

]In 1993, at ] 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 ], the Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; the exhibition was opened by ]. For the season 2010/2011 in the ] Cy Twombly designed the large scale picture (176 sqm) ''Bacchus'' as part of the exhibition series ''Safety Curtain'', conceived by ].<ref name="Safety Curtain by Cy Twombly"> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120515004506/http://www.mip.at/creations/eiserner-vorhang-2010-2011 |date=May 15, 2012 }}, ], Vienna.</ref> 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 ]<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.mgksiegen.de/de/|title=MGKSiegen - Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen|website=www.mgksiegen.de|access-date=May 24, 2024|archive-date=May 23, 2024|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240523224117/https://www.mgksiegen.de/de/|url-status=live}}</ref> and the ], Brussels.


Twombly's work went on display as part of "Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters" at the ] 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 ], if I’d had a choice, in another time” and is the first time that his work was put in an exhibition with Poussin.<ref name="Hamilton quote">{{cite news | url=http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/twombly-and-poussin-every-picture-tells-a-story-2306950.html | title=Twombly and Poussin: Every picture tells a story |work=The Independent |location=UK | date=July 5, 2011 | accessdate=July 6, 2011 | author=Hamilton, Adrian}}</ref> Opening in conjunction with the museum's Modern Wing, Twombly's solo exhibition —''Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works 2000–2007''— was on display at the ] in 2009. "The Last Paintings", Twombly's most recent solo exhibition, began in Los Angeles in early 2012. Following the Hong Kong exhibition, it will travel to Gagosian Gallery locations in London and New York throughout 2012. The eight untitled paintings are closely related to the Camino Real group that inaugurated Gagosian Paris in 2010. Twombly's work went on display as part of ''Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters'' at the ] 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 ], if I'd had a choice, in another time" and is the first time that his work was put in an exhibition with Poussin.<ref name="Hamilton quote">{{cite news |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/twombly-and-poussin-every-picture-tells-a-story-2306950.html |title=Twombly and Poussin: Every picture tells a story |work=The Independent |location=UK |date=July 5, 2011 |access-date=July 6, 2011 |author=Hamilton, Adrian |archive-date=July 7, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110707211146/http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/twombly-and-poussin-every-picture-tells-a-story-2306950.html |url-status=live }}</ref> Opening in conjunction with the museum's Modern Wing, Twombly's solo exhibition—''Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works 2000–2007''—was on display at the ] in 2009. ''The Last Paintings'', Twombly's most recent solo exhibition, began in Los Angeles in early 2012. Following the Hong Kong exhibition, it traveled to Gagosian Gallery locations in London and New York throughout 2012. The eight untitled paintings are closely related to the Camino Real group that inaugurated Gagosian Paris in 2010.


===Retrospectives=== ===Retrospectives===
In 1968, the ] mounted the first retrospective of his art. Twombly had his next retrospective at the ] in 1979, curated by ]. The artist was later honored by retrospectives at the ] in 1987 (curated by ]), the ], Paris, in 1988, and the ], New York, in 1994, with additional venues in ], Los Angeles, and Berlin.<ref> {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120212155205/http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/bio/?artist_name=Cy+Twombly |date=February 12, 2012 }} Guggenheim Collection.</ref> In 2001, the ], the ], and the ] presented the first exhibition devoted entirely to Twombly's sculpture, assembling sixty-six works created from 1946 to 1998.<ref> {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110927220423/http://www.nga.gov/press/exh/164/index.shtm |date=September 27, 2011 }} ], Washington, D.C.</ref> The European retrospective ''Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons'' opened at the ], London, in June 2008, with subsequent versions at the ] and the ] in Rome in 2009. At the Tate Modern retrospective, a text read:


<blockquote>This was his first solo retrospective in fifteen years, and provides an overview of his work from the 1950s to now.&nbsp;... 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.<ref name=tate> {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080828101320/http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/cytwombly/explore.shtm |date=August 28, 2008 }} (June 19 – September 14, 2008). ], London.</ref></blockquote>
In 1968, the ] mounted the first retrospective of his art. Twombly had his next retrospective at the ] in 1979, curated by ]. The artist has later been honored by retrospectives at the ] in 1987 (curated by ]), the ], Paris, in 1988, and the ], New York, in 1994, with additional venues in ], Los Angeles, and Berlin.<ref> Guggenheim Collection.</ref> In 2001, the ], the ], and the ] presented the first exhibition devoted entirely to Twombly's sculpture, assembling sixty-six works created from 1946 to 1998.<ref> ], Washington, D.C.</ref> The European retrospective "Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons" opened at the ], London, in June 2008, with subsequent versions at the ] and the ] in Rome in 2009. At the Tate Modern retrospective, a text read:


Some of his work was also shown in an exhibition named ''] ] Twombly: Later Paintings'' which ran from June 22 to October 28, 2012, at ].<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/turner-monet-twombly-later-paintings|title=Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings &#124; Tate Liverpool + RIBA North|website=Tate|access-date=May 24, 2024|archive-date=December 18, 2023|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231218094824/https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/turner-monet-twombly-later-paintings|url-status=live}}</ref>
:"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.<ref name=tate /> "

Some of his work was also shown in an exhibition named '] ] Twombly: Later Paintings' which ran from 22 June to 28 October 2012 at ].<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/turner-monet-twombly-later-paintings|title=Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings - Tate|publisher=}}</ref>


==Collections== ==Collections==
In 1989, the ] opened permanent rooms dedicated to his monumental 10-painting cycle, ''Fifty Days at Iliam'' (1978), based on ]’s translation of “The Iliad.<ref name="nytimes.com"/> In 1989, the ] opened permanent rooms dedicated to his monumental 10-painting cycle, ''Fifty Days at Iliam'' (1978), based on ]'s translation of ''The Iliad''.<ref name="nytimes.com"/>


The ] of the ] in Houston, which was designed by ] 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 ], the ] in Munich and The Dallas Museum of Art, Texas. The ] of the ] in Houston, which was designed by ] and opened in 1995, houses more than thirty of Twombly's paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, dating from 1953 to 1994. The holds 170 works including the Lepanto series. The newly opened holds 22 works.


In 1995, ''The Four Seasons'' entered the permanent collection of the ] as a gift from the artist. A recent (1998–1999) Twombly work, ''Three Studies from the Temeraire'', a ], was purchased by the ] for ]4.5&nbsp;million in 2004. In 2010, Twombly’s permanent site-specific painting, ''Ceiling'' was unveiled in the Salle des Bronzes at the ]; he is only the third artist to have been invited to do so. The other two were ] in the 1950s and ] in 2010.<ref>Nicole Winfield (July 6, 2011), ''Philly Press''.</ref> In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, made a large acquisition of nine works worth about $75&nbsp;million.<ref name="MoMA to Acquire Cy Twombly Works"/> The ''Bacchus'' series and five bronze sculptures were gifted by Twombly's estate to Tate Modern in 2014.<ref name="bbc tate">{{cite web |url=http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-27814557 |title=Tate gallery gifted Cy Twombly works worth £50m - BBC News |newspaper=BBC |date= June 12, 2014 |accessdate=April 6, 2015}}</ref> In 1995, ''The Four Seasons'' entered the permanent collection of the ] as a gift from the artist. A recent (1998–1999) Twombly work, ''Three Studies from the Temeraire'', a ], was purchased by the ] for ]4.5&nbsp;million in 2004. In 2010, Twombly's permanent ] painting, ''Ceiling'' was unveiled in the ''Salle des Bronzes'' at the ]. He was only the third artist to be invited to contribute in such a way (the other two were ] in the 1950s and ] in 2010).<ref>Nicole Winfield (July 6, 2011), {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160303203614/http://articles.philly.com/2011-07-06/news/29743223_1_abstract-expressionism-louvre-museum-painter |date=March 3, 2016 }} ''Philly Press''.</ref> In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, made a large acquisition of nine works worth about $75&nbsp;million.<ref name="MoMA to Acquire Cy Twombly Works" /> The ''Bacchus'' series and five bronze sculptures were given by Twombly's estate to Tate Modern in 2014.<ref name="bbc tate">{{cite web |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-27814557 |title=Tate gallery gifted Cy Twombly works worth £50m BBC News |newspaper=BBC |date=June 12, 2014 |access-date=April 6, 2015 |archive-date=May 20, 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150520010550/http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-27814557 |url-status=live }}</ref>


The ] hosts an ongoing exhibition, "Cy Twombly: Sculpture Selections, 1948–1995". The exhibition features examples of Twombly’s sculptures made between 1948 and 1995, composed primarily of rough elements of wood coated in plaster and white paint.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.artic.edu/exhibition/cy-twombly-sculpture-selections-1948-1995|title=Cy Twombly: Sculpture Selections, 1948–1995|publisher=}}</ref> The Institute also holds ], ], and ] by the artist in its permanent collection.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/artist/Twombly%2C+Cy|title=Twombly, Cy|publisher=}}</ref> The ] hosted a two-year exhibition, "Cy Twombly: Sculpture Selections, 1948–1995". The exhibition featured examples of Twombly's sculptures made between 1948 and 1995, composed primarily of rough elements of wood coated in plaster and white paint.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.artic.edu/exhibition/cy-twombly-sculpture-selections-1948-1995|title=Cy Twombly: Sculpture Selections, 1948–1995|date=December 12, 2012|access-date=January 30, 2014|archive-date=February 1, 2014|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140201204834/http://www.artic.edu/exhibition/cy-twombly-sculpture-selections-1948-1995|url-status=live}}</ref> The Institute also holds ], ], and ] by the artist in its permanent collection.<ref>{{cite news|url=http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/artist/Twombly%2C+Cy|title=Twombly, Cy|newspaper=The Art Institute of Chicago|access-date=January 30, 2014|archive-date=February 1, 2014|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140201204822/http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/artist/Twombly%2C+Cy|url-status=live}}</ref>


==Recognition== ==Recognition==
Twombly was a recipient of numerous awards, in 1984 he was awarded the “Internationaler Preis für bildende Kunst des Landes Baden-Württemberg” and in 1987 the “Rubens-Peis der Stadt Siegen,” but most notably awarded the ] in 1996. Twombly was a recipient of numerous awards. In 1984 he was awarded the "Internationaler Preis für bildende Kunst des Landes Baden-Württemberg" and in 1987 the {{Interlanguage link multi|"Rubenspreis der Stadt Siegen"|de|3=Rubenspreis}}. Most notably, he was awarded the ] in 1996.


Twombly was invited to exhibit his work at the ] in 1964, 1989 and 2001 when he was awarded the Golden Lion at the 49th ]. In 2010, he was made Chevalier of the ] by the French government. During fall 2010, ] produced a film on Twombly, titled "Edwin Parker".<ref>Tacita Dean (July 6, 2011, ''The Guardian''</ref> Twombly was invited to exhibit his work at the ] in 1964, in 1989 and in 2001 when he was awarded the Golden Lion at the ]. In 2010 he was made Chevalier of the ] by the French government. During fall 2010 ] produced a film on Twombly, entitled ''Edwin Parker''.<ref>{{cite news |first=Tacita |last=Dean |author-link=Tacita Dean |date=July 6, 2011 |url=https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jul/06/cy-twombly-close-encounter-tacita-dean |title=Cy Twombly: a close encounter |newspaper=] |access-date=December 11, 2016 |archive-date=May 24, 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240524182132/https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jul/06/cy-twombly-close-encounter-tacita-dean |url-status=live }}</ref>


==Cy Twombly Foundation== ==Cy Twombly Foundation==
]
Twombly's will, written under U.S. law, allocated the bulk of the artist's art and cash to the Cy Twombly Foundation. The foundation now controls much of Twombly's work. It has reported $70 million in assets in 2011, and $1.5 billion in the following two years.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://nccsdataweb.urban.org/orgs/profile/202572529 |publisher= ] |title= NCCS Organization Profile&nbsp;– Cy Twombly Foundation |accessdate=2015-03-29}}</ref><ref name=990pf>{{cite web |url=https://www.citizenaudit.org/202572529/ |title=CY TWOMBLY FOUNDATION :: CitizenAudit.org |accessdate=March 31, 2015}}</ref> In 2012 it purchased a 25-foot-wide Beaux Arts mansion on 19 E 82nd St, ] Manhattan, planning to open an education center and a small museum.<ref>Josh Barbanel (May 30, 2012), '']''.</ref><ref name="buy beaux">{{cite web |url=http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/31/cy-twombly-foundation-to-open-museum-and-education-center-in-new-york/ |title=Cy Twombly Foundation to Open Museum and Education Center in New York |newspaper=ArtsBeat / The New York Times |date=2012-05-31 |author= Carol Vogel |accessdate=March 29, 2015}}</ref> There is an additional foundation office on the Gaeta property.<ref name=tmag/> The four board members were divided in a lawsuit, settled in March 2014.<ref name="nyt settle">{{cite news |url=http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/settlement-reached-in-cy-twombly-foundation-lawsuit/ |title=Settlement Reached in Cy Twombly Foundation Lawsuit |newspaper=ArtsBeat / The New York Times |date= 2014-03-14 |author= Randy Kennedy |accessdate=March 31, 2015}}</ref>
Twombly's will, written under U.S. law, allocated the bulk of the artist's art and cash to the Cy Twombly Foundation. The foundation now controls much of Twombly's work. It has reported $70 million in assets in 2011, and $1.5 billion in the following two years.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://nccsdataweb.urban.org/orgs/profile/202572529 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20150406130832/http://nccsdataweb.urban.org/orgs/profile/202572529 |url-status=dead |archive-date=April 6, 2015 |publisher=] |title=NCCS Organization Profile&nbsp;– Cy Twombly Foundation |access-date=March 29, 2015 }}</ref><ref name=990pf>{{cite web |url=https://www.citizenaudit.org/202572529/ |title=CY TWOMBLY FOUNDATION :: CitizenAudit.org |access-date=March 31, 2015 |archive-date=May 24, 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240524182208/https://www.citizenaudit.org/accounts/signup/ |url-status=live }}</ref> In 2012 it purchased a 25-foot-wide Beaux Arts mansion on 19 E 82nd St, ] Manhattan, planning to open an education center and a small museum.<ref>Josh Barbanel (May 30, 2012), {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181215123602/https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303640104577436783095671126 |date=December 15, 2018 }} '']''.</ref><ref name="buy beaux">{{cite web |url=http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/31/cy-twombly-foundation-to-open-museum-and-education-center-in-new-york/ |title=Cy Twombly Foundation to Open Museum and Education Center in New York |newspaper=ArtsBeat / The New York Times |date=May 31, 2012 |author=Carol Vogel |access-date=March 29, 2015 |archive-date=April 2, 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150402235209/http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/31/cy-twombly-foundation-to-open-museum-and-education-center-in-new-york/ |url-status=live }}</ref> There is an additional foundation office on the Gaeta property.<ref name=tmag/> The four board members were divided in a lawsuit, settled in March 2014.<ref name="nyt settle">{{cite news |url=http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/settlement-reached-in-cy-twombly-foundation-lawsuit/ |title=Settlement Reached in Cy Twombly Foundation Lawsuit |newspaper=ArtsBeat / The New York Times |date=March 14, 2014 |author=Randy Kennedy |access-date=March 31, 2015 |archive-date=April 3, 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150403012038/http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/settlement-reached-in-cy-twombly-foundation-lawsuit/ |url-status=live }}</ref>

In 2021, the Cy Twombly Foundation and the ] settled a dispute over an unauthorized renovation of Twombly's ''The Ceiling'', the site-specific mural created for the ''Salle des Bronzes'', and announced that the foundation had dropped the lawsuit in exchange for a plan to restore the gallery to the artist's original design.<ref>Tessa Solomon (December 10, 2021), {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231209150938/https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/louvre-to-reverse-renovation-of-gallery-adorned-with-cy-twombly-mural-ending-legal-dispute-1234613060/ |date=December 9, 2023 }}&nbsp;'']''.</ref>


==Art market== ==Art market==
In 1990, a ] 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 ]'s in New York.<ref>Carol Vogel (May 11, 2011), ''New York Times''.</ref> In 1990, a ] 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 ]'s in New York.<ref>Carol Vogel (May 11, 2011), {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180108120522/http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/arts/design/tense-bidding-for-a-warhol-self-portrait-at-christies.html |date=January 8, 2018 }} ''The New York Times''.</ref> A new record was made in May 2012 for the 1970 painting ''Untitled (New York)'' at ], selling for $17.4 million (€13.4 million).<ref>Contemporary Art Evening Auction at {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150924143840/http://www.sothebys.com/en/catalogues/ecatalogue.html/2012/contemporary-art-evening-n08853#/r=/en/ecat.fhtml.N08853.html+r.m=/en/ecat.lot.N08853.html/29/ |date=September 24, 2015 }}.</ref> In November 2013 a record price of $21.7 million for ''Poems to the Sea'' (1959), an abstract, 24-part multimedium work on paper, was achieved at Sotheby's Contemporary Art Sale.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/sothebys-rings-up-3806-million-at-contemporary-art-sale-sets-warhol-auction-record/|title=Sotheby's Rings Up $380.6 Million at Contemporary Art Sale, Sets Warhol Auction Record – News – Art in America|date=November 14, 2013|access-date=March 22, 2017|archive-date=March 23, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170323055411/http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/sothebys-rings-up-3806-million-at-contemporary-art-sale-sets-warhol-auction-record/|url-status=live}}</ref>
A new record was made in May 2012 for the 1970 painting "Untitled (New York)" at ], selling for $17.4 million (€13.4 million).<ref>Contemporary Art Evening Auction at .</ref> In November 2013 a record price of $21.7 million for Poems to the Sea (1959), an abstract, 24-part multimedium work on paper, was achieved at Sotheby's Contemporary Art Sale.<ref></ref>


A new price record was set at Christie's Contemporary Art Sale on November 12, 2014, an untitled 1970 painting from his ‘Blackboard’ series fetched far beyond the $35 million to $55 million estimate, selling at $69.6 million (£44.3m).<ref>{{cite web|url=http://online.wsj.com/articles/christies-makes-auction-history-with-853-million-sale-of-contemporary-art-1415853549|title=Christie’s Makes History With $853 Million Sale of Contemporary Art|author=Kelly Crow|date=November 13, 2014|work=WSJ}}</ref> A new price record was set at Christie's Contemporary Art Sale on November 12, 2014, an untitled 1970 painting from his ''Blackboard'' series with "lasso-like scribbles" fetched far beyond the $35 million to $55 million estimate, selling at $69.6 million (£44.3m).<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/christies-makes-auction-history-with-853-million-sale-of-contemporary-art-1415853549|title=Christie's Makes History With $853 Million Sale of Contemporary Art|author=Kelly Crow|date=November 13, 2014|work=WSJ|access-date=March 13, 2017|archive-date=July 10, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170710035233/https://www.wsj.com/articles/christies-makes-auction-history-with-853-million-sale-of-contemporary-art-1415853549|url-status=live}}</ref>


In November 2015, ''New York City'' (1968) set another new price record for Twombly at $70.5 million. Per Artnet News, "Covered with his trademark looping white scribbles on a slate-gray background, the work recalls his experience as a cryptologist at the Pentagon."<ref>{{cite web|url=https://news.artnet.com/market/sothebys-295-million-sale-70-million-twombly-361568|title=Record $70 Million Twombly Canvas Leads Sotheby's Solid $295 Million Contemporary Sale|work=ArtNet News|date=November 11, 2015|access-date=April 3, 2017|archive-date=July 3, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170703122318/https://news.artnet.com/market/sothebys-295-million-sale-70-million-twombly-361568|url-status=live}}</ref>
==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 ] of sculpture by Nicola Del Roscio in 1997.


==''Phaedrus'' Incident== ==''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 ]'s collection was displayed from June to September in ] (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". In 2007, an exhibition of Twombly's paintings, ''Blooming, a Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things'', and other works on paper from gallerist ]'s collection, was displayed from June to September at the ]. 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 and she was tried in a court in ] 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"). 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&nbsp;... 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&nbsp;.... 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&nbsp;million, was on display at the ].<ref>{{cite web|url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6910377.stm|title=BBC News, Painting meets its femme fatale|publisher=}}</ref><ref></ref><ref>, ''The Scotsman'', October 10, 2007</ref> 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.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,311989,00.html|title=Woman Who Kissed Painting With Red Lipstick Gets Community Service|work=Fox News}}</ref> The prosecution described the act as a "sort of cannibalism, or parasitism", but admitted that Sam was "visibly not conscious of what she has done", asking that she be fined €4,500 and compelled to attend a citizenship class. The art work was worth an estimated $2&nbsp;million.<ref>{{cite news|url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6910377.stm|title=BBC News, Painting meets its femme fatale|date=July 21, 2007|access-date=October 7, 2007|archive-date=August 24, 2007|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070824125925/http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6910377.stm|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.lefigaro.fr/france/20071009.WWW000000331__euros_requis_pour_avoir_embrasse_une_toile.html|title=Le Figaro – Actualité en direct et informations en continu|last=lefigaro.fr|access-date=March 22, 2017|archive-date=March 23, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170323053858/http://www.lefigaro.fr/france/20071009.WWW000000331__euros_requis_pour_avoir_embrasse_une_toile.html|url-status=live}}</ref><ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081030032800/http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/One-is-art-one-is.3467588.jp |date=October 30, 2008 }}, '']'', October 10, 2007</ref> In November 2007, Sam was convicted and ordered to pay €1,000 to the painting's owner, €500 to the Avignon gallery where it was exhibited, and €1 to the painter.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.foxnews.com/story/woman-who-kissed-painting-with-red-lipstick-gets-community-service|title=Woman Who Kissed Painting With Red Lipstick Gets Community Service|date=March 25, 2015|publisher=Fox News|access-date=January 16, 2009|archive-date=March 7, 2009|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090307024433/http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,311989,00.html|url-status=live}}</ref>


==Sources== == Citations ==
* Retrieved May 7, 2015
*''Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons''. Edited by Nicholas Serota. London: ] and Distributed Art Publishers, 2008.
*'''' Dulwich Picture Gallery June 29 – September 25, 2011.

==References==
{{reflist|colwidth=30em}} {{reflist|colwidth=30em}}

== General sources ==
* Retrieved May 7, 2015
* ''Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons''. Edited by Nicholas Serota. London: ] and Distributed Art Publishers, 2008.
* '''' Dulwich Picture Gallery June 29 – September 25, 2011.

==Further reading==
* Jacobus, Mary. 2016, ''Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint''/Princeton University Press
* Tyson, John A. "Cy Twombly's Cardboard Prints: Impressions, Inversions and Decomposition", ''Print Quarterly'', Vol. XXXV No. March 1, 2018, pp.&nbsp;27–38


==External links== ==External links==
{{Wikiquote}} {{Wikiquote}}
{{Commons}}

* , on Wikiart
*
* * Comprehensive online gathering of News, Books, Timeline, Links, Bio, Images and more.
* in 032, Issue No. 19, Summer 2010.
*
*
* in 032, Issue No. 19, Summer 2010.
*
*
* ], ''Cy Twombly: Works on Paper'' and ''The Wisdom of Art'' in University of California Press, 1991.
*
* {{YouTube|30c9A57YXFs|John Squire speaking about four paintings by Cy Twombly at Tate Modern (video)}}
*], "Cy Twombly: Works on Paper" and "The Wisdom of Art" in University of California Press, 1991.
* , "" Magazine Disturbis nº 8 2010. {{ISSN|1887-2786}}.
*, Huis Marseille – Museum for Photography
* , "" Ars Longa, Cuadernos de Arte, nº25, 2016, p.&nbsp;369–382.
*{{YouTube|30c9A57YXFs|John Squire speaking about 4 paintings by Cy Twombly at Tate Modern (video)}}
* ] and ], "" ''Gagosian Quarterly'' (December 2015)


{{Authority control}} {{Authority control}}


{{Persondata <!-- Metadata: see ]. -->
| NAME =Twombly, Cy
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES =
| SHORT DESCRIPTION = American artist
| DATE OF BIRTH =April 25, 1928
| PLACE OF BIRTH = ], United States
| DATE OF DEATH = July 5, 2011
| PLACE OF DEATH = Rome, Italy}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Twombly, Cy}} {{DEFAULTSORT:Twombly, Cy}}
] ]
Line 148: Line 158:
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
]
] ]
]
]
] ]
] ]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
] ]
]
] ]
] ]
] ]
]

Latest revision as of 21:10, 4 January 2025

American painter, sculptor and photographer (1928–2011)

For his father, see Cy Twombly (baseball).
Cy Twombly
Twombly in his studio
BornEdwin Parker Twombly Jr.
(1928-04-25)April 25, 1928
Lexington, Virginia, U.S.
DiedJuly 5, 2011(2011-07-05) (aged 83)
Rome, Italy
Education
Known forPainting, sculpture, calligraphy
Spouse Tatiana Franchetti ​ ​(m. 1959; died 2010)
PartnerNicola Del Roscio (1964–2011)
Children1
AwardsPraemium Imperiale
Legion of Honor

Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. (/saɪ ˈtwɒmbli/; April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011) 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."

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. 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. 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 1959 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 being hosted is American painter Robert Nava.

Around 1961, through their mutual relationship with the artist Afro, 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, who became his longtime companion. 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.

Work

Painting

A yellow canvas with thin gestures of black and red on its lower half.
Untitled (1957)

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. 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, 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.

Twombly often inscribed on paintings the names of mythological figures during the 1960s. 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.

Dutch Interior (1962) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022

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." They are currently exhibited at the Guggenheim 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.

Untitled (Bolsena) (1969) at the National Gallery of Art in 2022

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. " 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. 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.

Fifty Days at Iliam: Shield of Achilles (1978) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2022

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 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.

Cy Twombly, Untitled, from Hommage à Picasso, 1973, lithograph and collotype, 30 x 20 in, edition of 150

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.

Works in edition

Although Twombly is most known for his paintings, he was also an accomplished printmaker. Twombly explored the particular characteristics and processes of each print medium when making his works in edition. Twombly's printmaking activity occurred primarily from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. During this period, Twombly worked in nearly all traditional printmaking techniques, including line etching, mezzotint, aquatint, lithography, screenprinting and collotype. Many of his editions were issued as portfolios.

Exhibitions

After having an art piece being shown at Stable Gallery from 1953 to 1957, Twombly moved to Leo Castelli Gallery and later exhibited with Gagosian Gallery. Gagosian Gallery opened a new gallery in Rome, Twombly's hometown, on December 15, 2007, with the inaugural exhibition, of Twombly's work, Three Notes from Salalah.

Bacchus – Iron curtain of the Vienna State Opera

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. For the season 2010/2011 in the Vienna State Opera Cy Twombly designed the large scale picture (176 sqm) Bacchus as part of the exhibition series Safety Curtain, conceived by museum in progress. 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 and the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels.

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. Opening in conjunction with the museum's Modern Wing, Twombly's solo exhibition—Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works 2000–2007—was on display at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. The Last Paintings, Twombly's most recent solo exhibition, began in Los Angeles in early 2012. Following the Hong Kong exhibition, it traveled to Gagosian Gallery locations in London and New York throughout 2012. The eight untitled paintings are closely related to the Camino Real group that inaugurated Gagosian Paris in 2010.

Retrospectives

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 was later 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. At the Tate Modern retrospective, a text 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.

Some of his work was also shown in an exhibition named Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings which ran from June 22 to October 28, 2012, at Tate Liverpool.

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.

The Cy Twombly Pavilion 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. The Museum Brandhorst in Munich holds 170 works including the Lepanto series. The newly opened Broad Collection in Los Angeles holds 22 works.

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 was only the third artist to be invited to contribute in such a way (the other two were Georges Braque in the 1950s and François Morellet in 2010). In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, made a large acquisition of nine works worth about $75 million. The Bacchus series and five bronze sculptures were given by Twombly's estate to Tate Modern in 2014.

The Art Institute of Chicago hosted a two-year exhibition, "Cy Twombly: Sculpture Selections, 1948–1995". The exhibition featured examples of Twombly's sculptures made between 1948 and 1995, composed primarily of rough elements of wood coated in plaster and white paint. The Institute also holds prints, drawings, and paintings by the artist in its permanent collection.

Recognition

Twombly was a recipient of numerous awards. In 1984 he was awarded the "Internationaler Preis für bildende Kunst des Landes Baden-Württemberg" and in 1987 the "Rubenspreis der Stadt Siegen" [de]. Most notably, he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale in 1996.

Twombly was invited to exhibit his work at the Venice Biennale in 1964, in 1989 and in 2001 when 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, entitled Edwin Parker.

Cy Twombly Foundation

The Ceiling – site-specific painting installed in the Salle des Bronzes at the Louvre (2010)

Twombly's will, written under U.S. law, allocated the bulk of the artist's art and cash to the Cy Twombly Foundation. The foundation now controls much of Twombly's work. It has reported $70 million in assets in 2011, and $1.5 billion in the following two years. In 2012 it purchased a 25-foot-wide Beaux Arts mansion on 19 E 82nd St, Upper East Side Manhattan, planning to open an education center and a small museum. There is an additional foundation office on the Gaeta property. The four board members were divided in a lawsuit, settled in March 2014.

In 2021, the Cy Twombly Foundation and the Louvre settled a dispute over an unauthorized renovation of Twombly's The Ceiling, the site-specific mural created for the Salle des Bronzes, and announced that the foundation had dropped the lawsuit in exchange for a plan to restore the gallery to the artist's original design.

Art market

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. A new record was made in May 2012 for the 1970 painting Untitled (New York) at Sotheby's, selling for $17.4 million (€13.4 million). In November 2013 a record price of $21.7 million for Poems to the Sea (1959), an abstract, 24-part multimedium work on paper, was achieved at Sotheby's Contemporary Art Sale.

A new price record was set at Christie's Contemporary Art Sale on November 12, 2014, an untitled 1970 painting from his Blackboard series with "lasso-like scribbles" fetched far beyond the $35 million to $55 million estimate, selling at $69.6 million (£44.3m).

In November 2015, New York City (1968) set another new price record for Twombly at $70.5 million. Per Artnet News, "Covered with his trademark looping white scribbles on a slate-gray background, the work recalls his experience as a cryptologist at the Pentagon."

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 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Avignon. 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 and 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 described the act as a "sort of cannibalism, or parasitism", but admitted that Sam was "visibly not conscious of what she has done", asking that she be fined €4,500 and compelled to attend a citizenship class. The art work was worth an estimated $2 million. In November 2007, Sam was convicted and ordered to pay €1,000 to the painting's owner, €500 to the Avignon gallery where it was exhibited, and €1 to the painter.

Citations

  1. The Sunday Times Magazine, The Sunday Times, December 18, 2011, page 64
  2. Matt Schudel (July 6, 2011), Cy Twombly, influential Va.-born abstract artist, dies at 83 Archived May 18, 2017, at the Wayback Machine The Washington Post.
  3. Leonhard Emmerling, Basquiat, Cologne, Taschen, 2003
  4. "The Cieling [sic] by Cy Twombly at Musée du Louvre". HYPEBEAST. March 25, 2010. Archived from the original on March 1, 2019. Retrieved March 1, 2019.
  5. Kennedy, Randy (July 5, 2011). "Cy Twombly, Idiosyncratic Painter, Dies at 83". The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 8, 2011. Retrieved July 6, 2011.
  6. Travis Jeppesen (2015) Cy Twombly July 12, 2024 at Artforum
  7. Alastair Sooke (February 9, 2009), Cy Twombly: late flowering for Mr Scribbles Archived May 18, 2017, at the Wayback Machine The Telegraph
  8. Cy Twombly Gallery Archived February 7, 2009, at the Wayback Machine Menil Collection.
  9. Jones, Jonathan (May 15, 2008). "The trashcan laureate". The Guardian. UK. Archived from the original on May 24, 2024. Retrieved July 6, 2011.
  10. Katz, Jonathan. "Lovers and Divers: Interpictoral Dialog in the Work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg". queerculturalcentre.org. Archived from the original on December 23, 2009.
  11. Varnedoe, Kirk (1994). Cy Twombly: A Retrospective. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. pp. 20–23.
  12. Jonathan Jones (April 10, 2004), The last American hurrah Archived May 24, 2024, at the Wayback Machine The Guardian.
  13. ^ Stowe, Stacey (March 26, 2015), "The Centuries-Old Italian House Where Cy Twombly Thrived", The New York Times, ISSN 0362-4331, retrieved July 10, 2024
  14. Dalla Chiesa, Giovanna (August 19, 2023). "Fondazione Iris apre a Bassano in Teverina: dialogo con Caio Twombly exibart.com". exibart.com (in Italian). Retrieved July 10, 2024.
  15. Raeburn, Michael (2015). Joseph Glasco: The Fifteenth American. London: Cacklegoose Press. p. 191. ISBN 9781611688542.
  16. Kennedy, Randy (July 6, 2011). "CY TWOMBLY, 1928-2011". The New York Times. Archived from the original on January 31, 2013. Retrieved March 14, 2013.
  17. "US artist Cy Twombly dies in Rome: French gallery". Agence France-Presse. Archived from the original on September 2, 2011. Retrieved July 5, 2011.
  18. Commemorative plaque in Santa Maria in Vallicella
  19. Cy Twombly Biography "Cy Twombly Biography". Archived from the original on October 28, 2010. Retrieved January 27, 2014.
  20. Holland Cotter (February 4, 2005), A Sensualist's Odd Ascetic Aesthetic Archived May 15, 2013, at the Wayback Machine The New York Times.
  21. Molesworth, H.A.; Erickson, R. (2015). Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957. United Kingdom: Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. p. 740. ISBN 9780300211917.
  22. Collischan, J. (2010). Made in the U.S.A.: Modern/Contemporary Art in America. United States: iUniverse. p. 560. ISBN 9781440198540.
  23. ^ Carol Vogel (March 11, 2011), MoMA to Acquire Cy Twombly Works Archived March 5, 2016, at the Wayback Machine The New York Times.
  24. 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.
  25. Cy Twombly, Leda and the Swan (1963), Sale 2355 Archived January 20, 2011, at the Wayback Machine Christie's New York, Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale, November 10, 2010.
  26. ^ Randy Kennedy (July 5, 2011), American Artist Who Scribbled a Unique Path Archived January 2, 2017, at the Wayback Machine The New York Times.
  27. Cy Twombly Nine Discourses on Commodus Archived May 16, 2016, at the Wayback Machine (1963) Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
  28. Cy Twombly Untitled Archived June 25, 2015, at the Wayback Machine (1970) MoMA Collection
  29. Sherwood Pundyk, Anne (September 2011). "Cy Twombly: Sculpture". The Brooklyn Rail. Archived from the original on March 14, 2012. Retrieved March 13, 2012.
  30. Cy Twombly Untitled Archived October 2, 2016, at the Wayback Machine (1976) MoMA Collection.
  31. 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.
  32. Kirk Varnedoe (Autumn–Winter 1994). "Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly". MoMa No.18. pp. 18–23. Archived from the original on December 2, 2013.
  33. Cy Twombly Archived July 14, 2014, at the Wayback Machine Museum Brandhorst, Munich.
  34. ^ Bastian, Heiner (2017). "Cy Twombly – The Printed Graphic Work Catalogue Raisonné". bastian-gallery.com. Retrieved July 22, 2024.
  35. ^ "Cy Twombly: Redefined by his Drawings". The New York Times. April 11, 2018. Retrieved July 22, 2024.
  36. ^ Nigro, Carol A. (August 12, 2011). "Ink / Twombly's Poetics in Print". magazine.art21.org. Retrieved July 22, 2024.
  37. ^ Kirk Hanley, Sarah (Autumn 2008). "Cy Twombly's Humanist Upbringing". tate.org.uk. Retrieved July 22, 2024.
  38. "Cy Twombly – December 15, 2007 – March 15, 2008 – Gagosian Gallery". April 12, 2018. Archived from the original on June 7, 2012. Retrieved December 28, 2011.
  39. "Safety Curtain 2010/2011" Archived May 15, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, museum in progress, Vienna.
  40. "MGKSiegen - Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen". www.mgksiegen.de. Archived from the original on May 23, 2024. Retrieved May 24, 2024.
  41. Hamilton, Adrian (July 5, 2011). "Twombly and Poussin: Every picture tells a story". The Independent. UK. Archived from the original on July 7, 2011. Retrieved July 6, 2011.
  42. Collection: Cy Twombly Archived February 12, 2012, at the Wayback Machine Guggenheim Collection.
  43. Cy Twombly: The Sculpture, May 6, – July 29, 2001 Archived September 27, 2011, at the Wayback Machine National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
  44. Cy Twombly Cycles and Seasons Archived August 28, 2008, at the Wayback Machine (June 19 – September 14, 2008). Tate Modern, London.
  45. "Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings | Tate Liverpool + RIBA North". Tate. Archived from the original on December 18, 2023. Retrieved May 24, 2024.
  46. Nicole Winfield (July 6, 2011), American master painter Cy Twombly Archived March 3, 2016, at the Wayback Machine Philly Press.
  47. "Tate gallery gifted Cy Twombly works worth £50m – BBC News". BBC. June 12, 2014. Archived from the original on May 20, 2015. Retrieved April 6, 2015.
  48. "Cy Twombly: Sculpture Selections, 1948–1995". December 12, 2012. Archived from the original on February 1, 2014. Retrieved January 30, 2014.
  49. "Twombly, Cy". The Art Institute of Chicago. Archived from the original on February 1, 2014. Retrieved January 30, 2014.
  50. Dean, Tacita (July 6, 2011). "Cy Twombly: a close encounter". The Guardian. Archived from the original on May 24, 2024. Retrieved December 11, 2016.
  51. "NCCS Organization Profile – Cy Twombly Foundation". National Center for Charitable Statistics. Archived from the original on April 6, 2015. Retrieved March 29, 2015.
  52. "CY TWOMBLY FOUNDATION :: CitizenAudit.org". Archived from the original on May 24, 2024. Retrieved March 31, 2015.
  53. Josh Barbanel (May 30, 2012), Twombly Gets N.Y. Home Archived December 15, 2018, at the Wayback Machine The Wall Street Journal.
  54. Carol Vogel (May 31, 2012). "Cy Twombly Foundation to Open Museum and Education Center in New York". ArtsBeat / The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 2, 2015. Retrieved March 29, 2015.
  55. Randy Kennedy (March 14, 2014). "Settlement Reached in Cy Twombly Foundation Lawsuit". ArtsBeat / The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 3, 2015. Retrieved March 31, 2015.
  56. Tessa Solomon (December 10, 2021), Louvre to Reverse Renovation of Gallery Adorned With Cy Twombly Mural, Ending Legal Dispute Archived December 9, 2023, at the Wayback Machine ARTnews.
  57. Carol Vogel (May 11, 2011), Bidding War for a Warhol Breaks Out at Christie's Archived January 8, 2018, at the Wayback Machine The New York Times.
  58. Contemporary Art Evening Auction at Sotheby's on 9 May, 2012 Archived September 24, 2015, at the Wayback Machine.
  59. "Sotheby's Rings Up $380.6 Million at Contemporary Art Sale, Sets Warhol Auction Record – News – Art in America". November 14, 2013. Archived from the original on March 23, 2017. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
  60. Kelly Crow (November 13, 2014). "Christie's Makes History With $853 Million Sale of Contemporary Art". WSJ. Archived from the original on July 10, 2017. Retrieved March 13, 2017.
  61. "Record $70 Million Twombly Canvas Leads Sotheby's Solid $295 Million Contemporary Sale". ArtNet News. November 11, 2015. Archived from the original on July 3, 2017. Retrieved April 3, 2017.
  62. "BBC News, Painting meets its femme fatale". July 21, 2007. Archived from the original on August 24, 2007. Retrieved October 7, 2007.
  63. lefigaro.fr. "Le Figaro – Actualité en direct et informations en continu". Archived from the original on March 23, 2017. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
  64. One is art, one is vandalism – but which is which? Archived October 30, 2008, at the Wayback Machine, The Scotsman, October 10, 2007
  65. "Woman Who Kissed Painting With Red Lipstick Gets Community Service". Fox News. March 25, 2015. Archived from the original on March 7, 2009. Retrieved January 16, 2009.

General sources

Further reading

  • Jacobus, Mary. 2016, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint/Princeton University Press
  • Tyson, John A. "Cy Twombly's Cardboard Prints: Impressions, Inversions and Decomposition", Print Quarterly, Vol. XXXV No. March 1, 2018, pp. 27–38

External links

Categories: