On Tuesday night, the artist Cy Twombly died at the age of 83 in Rome where he had lived since the late 1950s. He had been suffering from cancer. To some the loss might mean little. It was too easy to dismiss this American-born artist as a mere scribbler. It was too easy to mock his canvases with their loopy texts and coloured skeins as some unfathomable cross between a scientist’s notepad and a sink-estate wall.
And yet, the more that you look at his seemingly impenetrable doodles, the more inexorable the pull upon the intellect — and the imagination — becomes. Twombly’s works have what feels like a wilfully obscure power that elevated their creator to a lofty perch in contemporary art. His fan base included both the Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota, who in 2008 curated a landmark survey Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons and the impulsive stalker who, the previous year, had planted a lipstick kiss on one of Twombly’s canvases — an act of vandalism that she claimed was an expression of love.
Twombly, christened Edward (he was nicknamed Cy by his father after the baseball star Cy Young), grew up in Lexington, and studied first in Boston and then in New York. He developed his idiosyncratic artistic language against the backdrop of such Abstract Expressionists as Pollock and De Kooning. And yet, where their improvisatory energy led to big, bold, eye-smacking canvases, Twombly picked a more subtle path.
He first became known for his mad pencil scrawls, which, even as they alluded back to the graffiti that had inspired such early Modernists as Picasso, also spoke of an artistic fusion between drawing and painting. This was the blend that Twombly was to go on to develop, moving freely between canvas and paper, so that his drawings are as highly prized and relevant as his painted pieces.
Twombly’s life fed into his work. After working as a cryptographer for the US Army he began calligraphic experiments with Surrealist techniques of automatic writing. His first encounter with the ancient world (on a 1957 trip to Italy with Robert Rauschenberg) was captured by inscriptions scratched like half-lost memories on to surfaces pale and worn as old marble. Scribbled calculations that flow across the creamy spaces of his Bolsena paintings directly reflect a fascination with the Apollo 11 flight.
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But seldom were links made directly apparent. Twombly had an essentially poetic imagination which gathered inspiration from anywhere from Classical stories to American contemporaries. Homer or the Marquis de Sade could catch his imagination. The spectator stands confused before a haze of references. It would take even the most determined academic decades to annotate all the works.
A restless intellect who refused to settle for a simple commercial success, Twombly constantly experimented, exploring new fields of expression in styles which extended from minimalist expanses of the 1970s through lushly impressionistic canvases or almost baroque works to sculpted abstractions made of found objects, clay and plaster which often resembled ancient artefacts. His ideas moved in great cycles — though think spirals, not circles. Thoughts that curve outwards would slowly come back again, but never to exactly the same point.
Yet, looking back on his oeuvre as a whole, it speaks of a search for an artistic language that could reconcile the brash new surfaces of American Abstract Expressionism with the layered traditions of European art history. Twombly rediscovered the relevance of drawing in a world that had erased the graphic line. He found a role for the old gods amid a modernity that had forgotten all about myth.
But in the end, it’s left up to the spectator. Graffiti scribbler or contemporary master? Both are an option. That was part of his point. You can think everything and nothing of Twombly — and both at the same time.