Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, August 15, 2023: Cy Twombly, an American painter, sculptor and photographer (#1879)

Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. (1928 – 2011) was an American painter, sculptor and photographer.

Twombly is said to have influenced younger artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat. His best-known works are typically large-scale, freely-scribbled, calligraphic and graffiti-like works on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. His later paintings and works on paper shifted toward "romantic symbolism", and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words. Twombly often quoted poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke and John Keats, as well as classical myths and allegories, in his works. Examples of this are his Apollo and The Artist and a series of eight drawings consisting solely of inscriptions of the word "VIRGIL".

Twombly's works are in the permanent collections of modern art museums globally, including the Menil Collection in Houston, the Tate Modern in London, New York's Museum of Modern Art and Munich's Museum Brandhorst. He was commissioned for a ceiling at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

Cy Twombly ranks among the most prominent US painters to emerge in the 1950s, a period of radical experimentation in American and European art. Combining gestural strokes of paint, broad areas of empty space, and words scribbled in a nearly illegible hand, Twombly’s work can be enigmatic, even perplexing. Making sense of it requires an appreciation of his attitudes toward history, place, and cultural memory.

Twombly’s art explores through the lens of ancient Greek and Roman culture, a consistent source of inspiration throughout his career. Twombly avoided centers of modern art like New York, moving to Italy in 1959. There he engaged creatively with the enduring legacy of antiquity, infusing his work with provocative allusions to mythology, poetry, and archaeology. By exploring the classical past, Twombly followed a long tradition in American and European art. His great contribution lay in linking his understanding of ancient art and literature to late-twentieth-century modernist practice, translating historically remote references into a bracingly contemporary artistic idiom.

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