Cy Twombly
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. (/saɪ ˈtwɒmbli/; April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011)[1] was an American painter, sculptor and photographer.
For his father, see Cy Twombly (baseball).
Cy Twombly
Painting, sculpture, calligraphy
Nicola Del Roscio (1964–2011)
1
Twombly influenced artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat.[2][3] 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.[4]
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."[5]
Life and career[edit]
Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia, on April 25, 1928. Twombly's father, also nicknamed "Cy", pitched for the Chicago White Sox.[6] 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.[7] 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.[8][9] 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.[10]
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[11] 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.[12]
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".[13]
In 1964, Twombly met Nicola Del Roscio of Gaeta, who became his longtime companion.[12][14] Twombly bought a house and rented a studio in Gaeta in the early 1990s.[12] Twombly and Tatiana, who died in 2010, never divorced and remained friends.[12]
In July 2011, after suffering from cancer for several years, Twombly died in Rome after a brief hospitalization.[15] A plaque in Santa Maria in Vallicella commemorates him.[16]
Collections[edit]
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.[24]
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).[40] In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, made a large acquisition of nine works worth about $75 million.[21] The Bacchus series and five bronze sculptures were given by Twombly's estate to Tate Modern in 2014.[41]
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.[42] The Institute also holds prints, drawings, and paintings by the artist in its permanent collection.[43]
Recognition[edit]
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". 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.[44]
Art market[edit]
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.[51] 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).[52] 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.[53]
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).[54]
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."[55]
Phaedrus incident[edit]
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.[56][57][58] 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.[59]