Cy Twombly

Biography

To draw a single continuous line across a huge grey canvas, Cy Twombly would sit on a friend’s shoulders while the friend walked back and forth along the picture. That is how the “grey paintings” of 1967–1971 came about: on a grey ground, loops and flourishes like chalk on a school blackboard. There are no words in them, though it all looks very much like writing.

The handwriting had been formed long before. In part, it is thought, the army taught it to him.

Edwin Parker Twombly Jr. was born on 25 April 1928 in Lexington, Virginia. His father, a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, was also known as “Cy”; both were nicknamed after the famous baseball player Cy Young. At twelve the boy began private lessons with the Catalan modernist Pierre Daura. Then came the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Washington and Lee University in his home town of Lexington and, on a scholarship, the Art Students League in New York, where he met Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg persuaded him to go to Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There, in 1951–1952, Twombly studied with Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Ben Shahn, met John Cage and came under the strong influence of the poet Charles Olson, the college’s rector. In 1951 Motherwell arranged his first solo exhibition, at Samuel Kootz’s gallery in New York. His work of the time showed Kline’s black-and-white gestural expressionism and the imagery of Paul Klee.

A grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts allowed him in 1952 to travel with Rauschenberg through North Africa, Spain, Italy and France. He then served in the army as a cryptographer in Washington, and in 1955–1956 taught in Virginia, going to New York in the summers to paint. There he shared a studio with Rauschenberg and moved in the same circle as Jasper Johns. Figuration left his work. Thin white lines on a dark canvas looked as if they had been scratched in; he applied bitumen quickly and roughly, and the surface of the picture turned coarse, as if scarred.

In 1957 Twombly moved to Rome and made it his city. In 1959 he married the Italian artist Tatiana Franchetti, sister of his patron Baron Giorgio Franchetti; they bought a palazzo on Via di Monserrato. That same year he gave up sculpture, returning to it only in 1976. In the sixties the names of mythological heroes appeared on his canvases. From 1962 he painted a cycle based on myths, “Leda and the Swan”, “The Birth of Venus”; Leda alone he painted six times between 1960 and 1963. In 1964 he was invited to the Venice Biennale, and the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York showed the nine-part “Discourses on Commodus” (1963). Donald Judd wrote in a review that there was nothing to these paintings beyond a few drips and splatters. They are now in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. I think that review is worth remembering: it shows how hard it was to accept this painting even for people of the same generation.

His first retrospective was mounted by the Milwaukee Art Center in 1968. By the mid-1970s landscape had entered his canvases, conveyed through colour (brown, green, light blue), inscriptions and collage. In 1978 he painted the ten-part cycle “Fifty Days at Iliam”, based on the “Iliad” in Alexander Pope’s translation, with which, according to his long-time assistant Nicola Del Roscio, he was almost obsessed. Since 1989 the cycle has occupied rooms of its own at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Literature and myth remained his material to the end, up to the monumental “Four Seasons”, completed in 1994; in 1995 he gave one version of it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From the late 1960s to the late 1970s he worked a great deal in printmaking, trying almost every traditional technique. He also took photographs, Polaroids among them: tulips, trees, ancient busts.

A separate Cy Twombly Pavilion at the Menil Collection in Houston, designed by Renzo Piano, opened in 1995. In 1987 Twombly received the Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen, in 1996 the Japanese Praemium Imperiale, in 2001 the Golden Lion of the 49th Venice Biennale, and in 2010 he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. In that same year, 2010, his permanent painting “Ceiling” was unveiled in the Salle des Bronzes of the Louvre. He was the third artist the Louvre had invited to work in this way, after Georges Braque in the 1950s and François Morellet in that same year, 2010.

On 29 June 2011 the exhibition “Twombly and Poussin” opened at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. It was built on his admission that, given the choice, he would have liked to be Poussin. Less than a week later, on 5 July 2011, Cy Twombly died in Rome. A plaque in the Roman church of Santa Maria in Vallicella commemorates him.