Two years ago, one of Cy Twombly’s most monumental and spectacular paintings commanded everyone’s attention at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London. This image, occupying a panoramic stretch of wall in the largest gallery, contained three enormous roses. At first it looked like a celebration of the flowers’ sumptuous allure. But then their fragility became apparent. They seemed to be erupting, so that streams of paint descended to the base of the picture. And this melancholy mood was reinforced by the ominous words inscribed next to them in Twombly’s wavering, elusive script. He quoted a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, describing flowers as “wet as one who weeps”. Yet Twombly countered this sadness by including Rilke’s description of the flowers’ ability to “lean against the dawn”.
This complexity of mood typified Twombly’s work, and it grew more profound with age. His death marks the loss not simply of an outstanding American artist, but one of the most impressive painters anywhere in the world. He was a true original, out on his own and impossible to pin down. At the same time, though, he remained rooted in the culture of his own era and fascinated by the art of the past as well. “Influence is not a dirty word,” he once declared. “I’m influenced by everything I see — a painting but also a rush of sky. The more character you have, the more influence you can take on.”
Because Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928, his origins might appear straightforwardly of the Deep South. His mother had, after all, given birth to him in a hospital occupying the site of Stonewall Jackson’s old house, and Twombly once joked that “you can’t get much more southern than that”. Yet his parents had both come down to Virginia from Maine. And Twombly was taught in Lexington by a Spanish artist, Pierre Daura, who had lived in Paris for many years. Hence, no doubt, Twombly’s youthful decision to paint a copy of Picasso’s portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter. Both Paris and Picasso dominated every ambitious young American artist’s attention when Twombly was growing up.
Although he was named at birth Edwin Parker Twombly Jr, everybody called him by his father’s nickname. He was known in Lexington as “Cy Junior” or “Little Cy”, but never harboured any thoughts of emulating his father’s skill as a professional baseball player and athletics instructor. Twombly was preoccupied with art, and went on to study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before attending the Art Students League in New York. It was an unprecedentedly exciting moment for an aspirant young painter in America. Now, quite suddenly, the Abstract Expressionist generation, including Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, were revolutionising postwar Western art. Paris’s long supremacy was being challenged at last, ensuring that immense international attention focused on the US avant-garde. Twombly was caught up in the enthusiasm and, while befriending contemporaries such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, never lost his deep respect for the Abstract Expressionists.
In 1951, at the age of 24, he was invited to spend the summer at Black Mountain College, the celebrated centre for radical American painters in North Carolina. The invitation came from Rauschenberg, who had studied with Twombly at the Art Students League. Their friendship deepened, and Twombly was undoubtedly stimulated by meeting painters such as Kline and Robert Motherwell at Black Mountain. Even more important, though, was the trip undertaken by Rauschenberg and Twombly in 1952. Travelling through France, Spain, Morocco and Italy, they experienced at first hand a wealth of imagery ranging from so-called primitive art in Africa to the work of the French painter Jean Dubuffet.
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Soon after returning to New York, Twombly shared an exhibition with Rauschenberg at the Stable Gallery in 1953. Few visitors responded to Twombly’s monochrome abstractions, drawn so surprisingly with pencil and conté crayon directly on a ground of wet paint. He was dismissed by critics as an “infantilist”, and in 1954 Twombly was conscripted into the US Army where he trained as a cartographer. At the same time he freed himself up even further as an artist by exploring the possibilities of drawing in the dark. For a long time, viewers were shocked by his fascination with the dirt, clangour, energy and graffiti so evident to him in New York. His 1955 Freewheeler, covered in spidery lines, is reminiscent of multi-layered scrawlings on a city wall, faded and yet still retaining a wild and unpredictable vitality. Twombly acknowledged, with wry humour, that his exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York “went over about as well as a turd in a punch bowl”.
This opposition may well have contributed to his decision, in 1957, to leave his native country behind. He spent the summer on the island of Procida, near Naples, and met Dylan Thomas’s widow, Caitlin. Deciding to settle in Rome, he befriended two members of the wealthy Franchetti family: Giorgio, who became Twombly’s first major collector, and Giorgio’s sister Tatiana (known as Tatia). In 1959 she married Twombly in New York, and then became the mother of their son, Cyrus Alessandro. But in the early 1960s Twombly reaffirmed his enduring commitment to Rome, purchasing a 17th-century palazzo on the Via di Monserrato. Nourished by discovering rich connections between the art of the past and his own innovative concerns, he experienced a powerful sense of release.
The uninhibited mark-making with pencil and crayon continued, yet it was increasingly joyful rather than choked with agitation. He worked more and more on the grand scale, and became dionysiac in a major painting called Triumph of Galatea. Its overall mood is ecstatic, and Twombly’s love of swirls and loops is far more extrovert than before. Even so, it would be a mistake to imagine that Twombly had lost his fascination with the darker side of life. Another major work, Leda and the Swan, assails the spectator with its violent suggestions of erotic desire threatening to spiral out of control.
By 1987, when Twombly was given a retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, his reputation had soared. Together with a show staged by Anthony d’Offay at the same time, the Whitechapel survey convinced many British visitors that he deserved to be regarded as a major talent. Now approaching 60, Twombly had succeeded in developing a unique vision from a complex array of interests. Settling in the town of Gaeta, between Naples and Rome, he grew more and more obsessed by classical culture. Yet he would never have described himself as a classicist. “I think of myself as a Romantic symbolist,” he said. “My painting is not fixed. It is in flux: I respond to the Greek love of metamorphosis. The Greeks had a very strong love of nature and a religion based on the change of seasons.”
Twombly continued to develop and change during the 1990s, making sculpture as well as painting and receiving the accolade of a major retrospective show in 1994 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Cy Twombly Gallery, designed by Renzo Piano, became a permanent part of the Menil Collection in Houston, and he received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 2001 Venice Biennale. A year earlier, Twombly also revealed his particular admiration for a British artist when he participated in an exhibition at the National Gallery in London. Invited to respond to works in the collection, he chose Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire and displayed alongside it three studies filled with fragile, elegiac emotion. Then, in 2004, his intensely individual contribution to the history of painterly abstraction was honoured at the Serpentine Gallery in London by an exhibition called Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper. Four years later, Tate Modern staged a widely hailed retrospective survey of Twombly’s work curated by Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate.
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Although Twombly had been struggling with cancer for several years before his death, he never lost his appetite for experimentation and new challenges. Working ever more freely with his calligraphic mark-making — scribbles, splotches, rubbings and scratches — he explained that the whole complex and open-ended process felt more like “having an experience than making a picture”. Twombly was delighted last year when he became the first artist since Georges Braque in the 1950s to paint a ceiling in the Louvre. French art had always meant a great deal to him, and he also became closely involved in every stage of planning a new show called Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters, now open at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. He once said “I would have liked to have been Poussin, if I’d had a choice, in another time.” But Twombly died in his beloved Rome, the city where he had spent so much of his career after discovering the inspiration provided by the light, the landscape and, above all, the mythology of the Mediterranean world.
Cy Twombly, artist, was born on April 25, 1928. He died on July 5, 2011, aged 83