CY TWOMBLY, who died on Tuesday in Rome aged 83, was a controversial American artist whose deceptively simple scrawls, smudges and sculptural shapes made him one of the most significant artistic figures of the past 50 years.
Twombly, a native of Lexington, Virginia, spent most of his adult life in Italy, where he forged an original artistic path in spite of early criticism and mockery.
Along with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Twombly was considered an heir to the mantle of abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock.
Twombly painted vast canvasses marked by smears of paint, half-erased graffiti, random scratches and occasional lines of poetry that evoked a connection between the world of classical mythology and the vibrant street culture of modern life. But he was nothing if not polarising.
In 1994, the Guardianpronounced him "the last great American artist". In the same year, Washington Postart critic Paul Richard dismissed Twombly as a "self-indulgent scribbler" whose "handwriting suggests a six-year-old dyslexic's."
One of his leading proponents, Kirk Varnedoe, a former curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, wrote in a 1994 essay that “Twombly is the original ‘My kid could do this’ sculptor and painter”. In Houston, where an entire gallery is devoted to his work, a 2005 headline in the Houston Chronicle summed up the divided view of his reputation: “Is Cy Twombly one of the greats? Or the wretched embodiment of everything wrong with modern art?”
Twombly occasionally worked in collage and sculpture, but he was known mostly for his paintings and drawings. An important series of paintings from 1967 to 1970 – some measuring 10 feet high and 32 feet wide – were starkly reminiscent of a blackboard with geometric shapes, numbers and scrawls of handwriting.
He sometimes scratched the canvases with his fingernails or used pencils, palette knives or brush tips to leave lines in the paint, prompting poet Frank O’Hara to write in 1955: “A bird seems to have passed through the impasto with cream-coloured screams and bitter claw marks”.
Other paintings were linked to the classical past and named after Greek and Roman gods. Many of his early works were dismissed as doodling on canvas, but over time many critics came to praise his distinctive, quirky vision. He influenced younger artists, including Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente and Julian Schnabel, and his works often sold for millions of dollars.
As a child, Twombly was fascinated by Greek and Roman mythology and by his teens he had begun to paint. He studied at the Boston School of Fine Arts, Washington and Lee, and the Art Students League in New York, where he met Rauschenberg.
In 1951, at Rauschenberg’s suggestion, he attended the progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he studied under painters Robert Motherwell and Ben Shahn. Motherwell called him “the most accomplished young painter whose work I happen to have encountered”.
One of his final works was completed in 2010, after officials of the Louvre museum in Paris asked him to paint the ceiling of a sculpture gallery.
Twombly seldom spoke to the media. In one of his rare interviews, with Vogue magazine in 1994, he said: “I swear if I had to do this over again, I would just do the paintings and never show them. And then after I’m dead, they could talk about them all they want.” – (Washington Post - Bloomberg)