The Art Newspaper

In awe of Twombly

The Tate curator who organised the current exhibition “Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters” looks back on the artist’s life and work

By Nicholas Cullinan. Web only
Published online: 13 July 2011

"Although Cy was delightfully good company and amusing, you were always aware you were in the presence of greatness."

There really wasn’t anyone else quite like Cy Twombly, either in art or life. His paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs are like the man: inimitable and irreplaceable. He was a true original.

Born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia, Twombly’s parents discovered their son’s talent when he copied a painting by Pablo Picasso reproduced on the cover of a monograph they had given him as a gift for his 12th birthday. As a precociously gifted young man, Twombly attended art classes in Lexington and then went on to study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1947-1949); the Art Students League, New York (1950-1951); and Black Mountain College, North Carolina (1951-1952).

Twombly then spent several months in 1952 travelling with the artist Robert Rauschenberg in Europe and North Africa. Upon his return to America in 1953, he was drafted into the US Army and trained as a cryptographer. Around this time he began drawing in the dark, retracing the Surrealist technique of automatic writing. By the mid 1950s, Twombly emerged as a prominent figure among younger artists working in the wake of Abstract Expressionism that included Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

In 1957 Twombly returned to Italy to live and rented an apartment and studio overlooking the Coliseum. It’s worth remembering that this was an incredibly risky thing for a young American artist to do at the time. We might never have heard of him again if his paintings weren’t so damned good that they quietly demanded our attention.

Two years later, Twombly married Tatiana Franchetti and settled permanently in Italy. In December their son, Cyrus Alexander, was born in Rome. References to antiquity, ancient history, classical mythology, Renaissance painting and poetry became increasingly prominent in his paintings. At the same time, his palette became more vivid and the use of bare hands as instruments for mark-making gives his painting a visceral and erotic appearance.

Twombly’s second solo show opened in 1964 at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, where he presented the painting cycle Nine Discourses on Commodus inspired by the Roman emperor. In Twombly’s absence, Pop Art and Minimalism had emerged as the dominant artistic trends in New York, and his paintings inspired by European history received unanimously hostile reviews.

He changed direction in 1966 and produced the first grey paintings. With these works, often known as “blackboards”, Twombly returned to a reduced pictorial language of calligraphic marks of white wax crayon on a dark surface. These works received more positive reactions in America, where the Milwaukee Art Center mounted his first retrospective in a museum in 1968.

Back in Italy, Twombly bought a house in Bassano in Teverina, north of Rome, which acted as an important base over the next two decades. In 1976, after a gap of seventeen years, he started making sculptures again, which became increasingly central in his oeuvre. In the 1980s, Twombly began to experiment with the representation of natural themes, inspired by the rural landscape surrounding Bassano. After working for some years in a rented house in Gaeta, he bought a house there, which became his main residence in Italy.

In 2001, at the Venice Biennale, Twombly exhibited the Lepanto series and was awarded the Golden Lion. In 2010, Twombly’s permanent site-specific painting, Ceiling was unveiled in the Salle des Bronzes at the Musée du Louvre. At the same time he was made Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur by the French government. His incredibly vital and beautiful works since 2000—which I believe form one of the great bodies of late works in any artist’s career—brought much deserved acclaim which put the suspicion and distain which occasionally greeted him during the first part of his career into sharp relief.

For an artist who created truly timeless works, Cy was never an old man. His lively brown eyes reflected a mind that remained agile and creative to the last. He painted until the day before he died, making our loss all the more incalculable. Although Cy was delightfully good company and amusing, you were always aware you were in the presence of greatness. I imagined on trips to Gaeta and lunches at Miramare, his favourite restaurant by the sea, that this was how visitors to Matisse in his final years at Nice must have felt like. I was, and always shall be, in awe of him.