Modern & Contemporary Artists Codexery

Cy Twombly

American painter, sculptor, and photographer known for large-scale, scribbled, calligraphic works.

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Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly · CC BY 3.0

The elder Twombly, who also went by "Cy," played baseball for the Chicago White Sox, and both father and son received their nickname from the famous pitcher Cy Young.[1]

Gallera Notizie (Luciano Pistoi) Accardi Castellani Paolini Pistoletto Twombly
Gallera Notizie (Luciano Pistoi) Accardi Castellani Paolini Pistoletto Twombly. Image: Potassio23 · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons

Life and work

He studied at the Art Students League of New York on a tuition scholarship from 1950 to 1951, where he met Robert Rauschenberg.[2] Rauschenberg encouraged him to attend Black Mountain College, and Motherwell arranged Twombly's first solo exhibition in 1951 at the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery.[2][3] After serving in the U.S. Army as a cryptographer, he moved to Rome in 1957 and married Italian artist Tatiana Franchetti in 1959.[3][4] He produced a cycle of works based on myths from 1962, including six paintings of Leda and the Swan between 1960 and 1963.[5]

Cy Twombly, Paintings in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA
Cy Twombly, Paintings in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA. Image: GualdimG · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Lexington, Virginia was Twombly's birthplace; at twelve years old he commenced private art instruction under the Catalan master Pierre Daura.[6][1] Twombly's signature method involved gestural drawing where thin white lines, appearing scratched onto a dark canvas, were created, often with bitumen.[7] In 1994, curator Kirk Varnedoe characterized Twombly's art 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."[8] Cancer claimed Twombly's life in Rome during July 2011; a commemorative plaque exists for him in Santa Maria in Vallicella.[9]

Cy Twombly commemorative plaque
Cy Twombly commemorative plaque. Image: Rabanus Flavus · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons

What the cited sources add

Pundyk also states that Twombly purposefully disrupted his environment by moving several times each year to generate new work.[10] Kirk Varnedoe's essay explains that Twombly inherited part of Surrealism's courtship of the unconscious through Jackson Pollock's free-form "writing" with paint.[11] The BBC report notes that Twombly's Bacchus series was painted with a brush affixed to the end of a pole.[12] Varnedoe observes that Twombly turned the heavy-muscled drama of his elders' style into a manner whose loose organization and combination of compulsiveness and hesitation seemed "child-like".[11]

Untitled, 2001, Bronze, Cy Twombly, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA
Untitled, 2001, Bronze, Cy Twombly, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA. Image: GualdimG · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Twombly poster
Twombly poster. Image: Cy Twombly · CC BY 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Cy-Twombly
Cy-Twombly. Image: museum in progress , Cy Twombly · CC BY-SA 3.0 de · Wikimedia Commons

References

  1. Wikipedia, "Cy Twombly" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Alastair Sooke (February 9, 2009), Cy Twombly: late flowering for Mr Scribbles The Telegraph (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  2. Wikipedia, "Cy Twombly" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Jones, "The trashcan laureate", The Guardian, May 15, 2008; Katz, "Lovers and Divers: Interpictoral Dialog in the Work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg", queerculturalcentre.org (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  3. Wikipedia, "Cy Twombly" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Varnedoe, "Cy Twombly: A Retrospective", The Museum of Modern Art, 1994, p. 20–23 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  4. Wikipedia, "Cy Twombly" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Jonathan Jones (April 10, 2004), The last American hurrah The Guardian. (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  5. Wikipedia, "Cy Twombly" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Cy Twombly, Leda and the Swan (1963), Sale 2355 Christie's New York, Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale, November 10, 2010. (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  6. Wikipedia, "Cy Twombly" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Cy Twombly Gallery Menil Collection. (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  7. Wikipedia, "Cy Twombly" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Molesworth, "Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957", Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2015, p. 740; Collischan, "Made in the U.S.A.: Modern/Contemporary Art in America", iUniverse, 2010, p. 560; Carol Vogel (March 11, 2011), MoMA to Acquire Cy Twombly Works The New York Times. (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  8. Wikipedia, "Cy Twombly" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Kennedy, Randy, "Cy Twombly, Idiosyncratic Painter, Dies at 83", The New York Times, July 5, 2011; Travis Jeppesen (2015) Cy Twombly July 12, 2024 at Artforum (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  9. Wikipedia, "Cy Twombly" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "US artist Cy Twombly dies in Rome: French gallery"; Commemorative plaque in Santa Maria in Vallicella (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  10. Sherwood Pundyk, "Cy Twombly: Sculpture", The Brooklyn Rail, September 2011. facts only, no text reused. brooklynrail.org
  11. Kirk Varnedoe, "Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly", MoMa No.18, Autumn–Winter 1994, p. 18–23. facts only, no text reused. web.archive.org
  12. "Tate gallery gifted Cy Twombly works worth £50m – BBC News", BBC, June 12, 2014. facts only, no text reused. bbc.com

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Cy Twombly (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.

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Test yourself

Three questions drawn from this entry’s sources. Pick an answer to check it.

1. In which place was Cy Twombly born?

Correct.

Not quite. The answer is Lexington, Virginia, U.S..

2. In what year did Cy Twombly die?

Correct.

Not quite. The answer is 2011.

From the source: “In July 2011, after suffering from cancer for several years, Twombly died in Rome after a brief hospitalization.”

3. In what year was Cy Twombly born?

Correct.

Not quite. The answer is 1928.

From the source: “Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia, on April 25, 1928.”

Answers checked against the source article

Sources

Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.

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