Legendary C.Y. Twombly leaves us a legacy to ponder upon.

Legendary C.Y. Twombly’s legacy leaves us more than paintings; he was also a sculptor, photographer, and painter. Edwin Parker Cy Twombly Jr. belonged to the same generation as artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He was named after his father, Cy, a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. Both father and son were given the nickname ‘Cy Young’ in honor of the legendary pitcher who played for teams like the Indians, Cardinals, and Braves. 

Twombly’s Education

Twombly’s private art classes started when he was twelve years old with Catalan modernist master Pierre Daura. Following his graduation from Lexington High School in 1946, Twombly enrolled in the Darlington School in Rome, Georgia, Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He attended the Art Students League of New York from 1950 to 1951 on a tuition grant, where he met Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg persuaded him to enroll in Black Mountain College, North Carolina. He studied under Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Ben Shahn at Black Mountain for two years, when he met John Cage. Charles Olson, a poet, and the College’s rector, greatly influenced Twombly. 

Although he was Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg’s contemporaries, his work quickly strayed from the objectives of American postwar abstraction. 

Twombly began taking pictures of his daily life while still a student. He captured the lush surroundings of Virginia and the Italian beaches, as well as the intricate details of historic structures and sculptures, studio interiors, and still life of items and flowers. He began enlarging his Polaroid photographs on matte paper in the early 1990s using specialist copiers, creating subtle distortions that resemble the timeless aspects of his paintings and sculptures. 

Cy Twombly’s Brand

Twombly and his art have influenced younger artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, and Julian Schnabel. His most well-known paintings often include large-scale, scribbled calligraphic and graffiti-like designs on uniform backgrounds that are primarily gray, tan, or off-white. His latter works on paper and paints went toward “romantic symbolism,” and their titles may be seen through words and shapes. 

While the prevalent trends of the day, such as Pop art, aimed to reject historical narratives altogether, Twombly focused on ancient, classical, and contemporary poetic traditions. He relocated to Italy in the late 1950s, creating vivid, diagrammatic pieces like Ode to Psyche (1960), which include sensual undertones and clever jokes while keeping an abstract charge. 

Legendary C.Y. Twombly’s legacy is his work; he may be seen as a single, extensive interaction with cultural memory. His mythological-themed paintings, drawings, and sculptures have become crucial in preserving that memory. He typically draws inspiration from the most well-known gods and heroes, and he limits himself to a few notable occurrences described by poet-historians, given visual form by painters, and constantly reworked in later literature and visual art. Writing is his preferred medium. He created a type of meta-script by starting with merely graphic symbols and moving shortened signs, hatching, loops, numerals, and the most basic pictographs continuously over the image plane while continually erasing them. This eventually evolved into the script itself. 

Twombly’s singular brand of abstraction was also steeped in sexuality and filled with physical metaphors. He frequently quoted poets like Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke, and John Keats, as well as numerous classical stories and allegories in his work. There is a primary interest in language, writing, and mark-making at the core of Twombly’s artwork. The Blackboard paintings, made between 1967 and 1971, are a good example. They extend the impact of the gesture by using huge, brisk, colorless scrawls against a gray background. 

The bright, vivid hues of these pieces were soon replaced by the more somber grays and blues of the “blackboard” paintings, whose terse, white scrawls and loops evoke the powdered effects of chalk on a blackboard. Places, landscapes, and natural forms started to take center stage in Twombly’s drawings, collages, photos, and watercolors as he continued to create in several locales throughout the ensuing decades, including Rome, Lexington, and his final home in Gaeta, Italy. 

The lyrical and the logical were not limited to Twombly. Collage, which caught his attention for a moment in 1959 before starting to emerge more frequently in 1971, links Twombly to the Dadaists and their offspring like Rauschenberg and Johns. His work incorporates visual elements from ordinary life, such as trip postcards, art reproductions, scientific representations, and even personal sketches, to explore the possibility of both form and purpose. 

The first retrospective of Twombly’s work was presented in 1968 at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and a second was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1979. Later, retrospectives of the artist were held in Zurich, Paris, New York, and London. The first show devoted to Twombly’s sculpture debuted in 2001 at the Menil Collection in Houston, the Kunst Museum in Basel, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. 

Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art New York are just a few museums that include several of Twombly’s pieces in their permanent collections. In 2010, Twombly received The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Menil Collection, Houston, The Broad, and Los Angeles contract to paint the ceiling of a space of the Parisian Museum known as the Louvre. 

The Cy Twombly Gallery was inaugurated in Houston in 1995, across from the Menil Collection. The Menil, Día Foundation, and Twombly himself worked together to create the gallery, which now houses several significant pieces created between 1953 and 2004. The painting Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair (1985), which shows flower shapes in rich reds, pinks, and purples and contains quotes from Rumi, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Giacomo Leopardi, is among the collection. In 2010, Twombly was chosen to create a painted ceiling for the Salle des Bronzes that would be permanently installed at the Louvre. 

Cy Twombly, a controversial American artist whose deceptively simple scrawls, smudges, and sculptural shapes made him one of the most significant artistic figures of the past 50 years, the legendary C.Y. His last exhibition was in 2022 at the Gagosian Gallery in Bevelyhill Twombly Legacy left us with wanting more, he died July 5, 2011, in Rome from cancer. He was 83 years old. 

“Graffiti is usually a protest – ink on walls – or has a reason for being naughty or aggressive.” Cy Twombly