Cy Twombly | |
|---|---|
 Twombly in his studio | |
| Born | Edwin Parker Twombly Jr. April 25, 1928 Lexington, Virginia, U.S. |
| Died | July 5, 2011 (aged 83) |
| Education | |
| Known for | Painting, sculpture, calligraphy |
| Spouse |
Tatiana Franchetti
(m. 1959; died 2010) |
| Partner | Nicola Del Roscio (1964–2011) |
| Children | 1 |
| Awards | Praemium Imperiale Legion of Honor |
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. (/saɪ ˈtwɒmbli/; April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011)[1] was an American painter, sculptor and photographer.
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] 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."[6]
- ^ The Sunday Times Magazine, The Sunday Times, December 18, 2011, page 64
- ^ 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.
- ^ Leonhard Emmerling, Basquiat, Cologne, Taschen, 2003
- ^ "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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Travis Jeppesen (2015) Cy Twombly July 12, 2024 at Artforum