Cy Twombly, 83 (New York Times Obituary)
Bill Schenley
American Artist Who Scribbled a Unique Path
Photos: http://tinyurl.com/3t48yv5
http://tinyurl.com/3v5vuol
FROM: The New York Times ~
By Randy Kennedy
Cy Twombly, whose spare, childlike scribbles and poetic engagement with
antiquity left him stubbornly out of step with the movements of postwar
American art even as he became one of the era's most important painters,
died on Tuesday in Rome. He was 83.
His death was announced by the Gagosian Gallery, which represents his work.
Mr. Twombly had battled cancer for several years.
In a career that slyly subverted Abstract Expressionism, toyed briefly with
Minimalism, seemed barely to acknowledge Pop art and anticipated some of the
concerns of Conceptualism, Mr. Twombly was a divisive artist almost from the
start.
The curator Kirk Varnedoe, on the occasion of a 1994 retrospective at the
Museum of Modern Art, wrote that his work was "influential among artists,
discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad
public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well."
The critic Robert Hughes called him "the Third Man, a shadowy figure, beside
that vivid duumvirate of his friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg."
Mr. Twombly's decision to settle permanently in southern Italy in 1957 as
the art world shifted decisively in the other direction, from Europe to New
York, was only the most symbolic of his idiosyncrasies. He avoided publicity
throughout his life and mostly ignored his critics, who questioned
constantly whether his work deserved a place at the forefront of 20th
century abstraction, though he lived long enough to see it arrive there. It
didn't help that his paintings, because of their surface complexity and
whirlwinds of tiny detail - scratches, erasures, drips, penciled fragments
of Italian and classical verse amid scrawled phalluses and buttocks - lost
much of their power in reproduction.
But Mr. Twombly, a tall, rangy Virginian who once practiced drawing in the
dark to make his lines less purposeful, steadfastly followed his own program
and looked to his own muses - often literary ones, like Catullus, Rumi,
Pound and Rilke. He seemed to welcome the privacy that came with
unpopularity.
"I had my freedom and that was nice," he said in a rare interview, with
Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, before a 2008 survey of his
career at the Tate Modern.
The critical low point probably came after a widely panned 1964 exhibition
at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. The artist and writer Donald Judd,
who was hostile toward painting in general, was especially damning, calling
the show a fiasco. "There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional
pencil line," he wrote in a review.
"There isn't anything to these paintings."
But by the 1980s, with the rise of neo-Expressionism, a generation of
younger artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat found inspiration in Mr. Twombly's
skittery bathroom-graffiti scrawl. Coupled with rising interest in European
artists whose work shared unexpected ground with Twombly's, like Joseph
Beuys, the newfound attention brought him a kind of critical favor he had
never enjoyed before. And by the next decade, he was highly sought after not
only by European museums and collectors, who had discovered his work early
on, but also by those back in his homeland who had not known what to make of
him two decades before.
In 1989, the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened permanent rooms dedicated to
his monumental 10-painting cycle, "Fifty Days at Iliam," based on Alexander
Pope's translation of "The Iliad." (Mr. Twombly said that he purposely
misspelled Ilium, a Latin name for Troy, with an "a," to refer to Achilles.)
That same year, Mr. Twombly's work passed the million dollar mark at
auction. In 1995, the Menil Collection in Houston opened a new gallery
dedicated to his work, designed by Renzo Piano after a plan by Mr. Twombly
himself. Despite this growing acceptance, Mr. Varnedoe still felt it
necessary to include an essay in the Modern's newsletter at the time of the
retrospective, titled "Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on
Cy Twombly."
'It Does Not Illustrate'
In the only written statement Mr. Twombly ever made about his work, a short
essay in an Italian art journal in 1957, he tried to make clear that his
intentions were not subversive but elementally human. Each line he made, he
said, was "the actual experience" of making the line, adding: "It does not
illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization." Years later, he
described this more plainly. "It's more like I'm having an experience than
making a picture," he said. The process stood in stark contrast to the
detached, effete image that often clung to Mr. Twombly. After completing a
work, in a kind of ecstatic state, it was as if the painting existed but he
himself barely did anymore: "I usually have to go to bed for a couple of
days," he said.
Edwin Parker Twombly Jr., was born in Lexington, Va., on April 25, 1928, to
parents who had moved to the South from New England. His father, a talented
athlete who pitched a summer for the Chicago White Sox and went on to become
a revered college swimming coach, was nicknamed Cy, after Cy Young, the Hall
of Fame pitcher. The younger Mr. Twombly (pronounced TWAHM-blee) inherited
the name, though he was much more bookish than athletic as a child, with
stooped shoulders and a high ponderous forehead. He read avidly and,
discovering his calling early, he worked from art kits he ordered from the
Sears Roebuck catalog. As a teenager, he studied with the Spanish painter
Pierre Daura, who had left Europe after the Spanish Civil War and settled in
Lexington. Daura's wife, Louise Blair, studied cave paintings and may have
sparked Mr. Twombly's early interest in Paleolithic art.
In 1947 he attended the Boston Museum School, where German Expressionism was
the rage, but Mr. Twombly gravitated to his own interests, like Dada and
Kurt Schwitters and particularly to Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti,
two important early influences. He moved back to Lexington in 1949 and
studied art at Washington and Lee University, where his talent impressed
teachers. By 1950, he was in New York, the recipient of a scholarship to the
Art Students League. Later in his life, he cited visiting Willem de Kooning's
studio and seeing an Arshile Gorky retrospective at the Whitney Museum of
American Art as important moments in his young painting life. But he also
came to New York at the heyday of the New York School and was exposed to the
work of almost all its giants in the city's galleries. He turned down an
offer for a solo show of his paintings at the Art Students League in 1950,
saying that he felt it was too early for him.
He met Rauschenberg, a fellow student at the league, during his second
semester, and Rauschenberg later persuaded Mr. Twombly to enroll at Black
Mountain College in North Carolina, which had become a crucible for the
American avant-garde, with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Ray Johnson,
Dorothea Rockburne and John Chamberlain among its faculty and students. Mr.
Twombly, who studied with Ben Shahn, stayed at the college only briefly and
was a bit of an outsider even then. As he told Mr. Serota: "I was always
doing my own thing. I always wondered why there are books with photographs
of all the artists of that period and I was only in one! I thought: 'Where
was I?' "
In the summer of 1952, after receiving a grant from the Virginia Museum of
Fine Arts, Mr. Twombly traveled to Europe for the first time and met up with
Rauschenberg.
The two wandered through Italy, North Africa and Spain, an experience that
later yielded some of the first paintings to be considered a part of Mr.
Twombly's mature work. "Tiznit," made with white enamel house paint and
pencil and crayon, with gouges and scratches in the surface, was named for a
town in Morocco that he had visited, and the painting's primitivist shapes
were inspired by tribal pieces he saw at the ethnographic museum in Rome, as
well as by artists like Dubuffet, de Kooning and Franz Kline.
The painting, along with another based on tribal motifs, was exhibited in
1953 at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery on West 58th Street along with
monochromatic paintings by Rauschenberg. The show was generally savaged.
(Early this year, the Museum of Modern Art acquired "Tiznit," along with
another early work, which Mr. Twombly had kept in his personal collection.)
Mr. Twombly was drafted and spent more than a year in the Army, where he was
assigned to cryptography work in Washington. On weekends and leaves, he
continued to paint and draw, sometimes at night with the lights out to try
to lose techniques he had learned in art classes and to express himself more
instinctively.
After receiving a medical discharge and teaching for a time in Virginia, Mr.
Twombly returned to New York and worked in a studio on William Street, near
both Rauschenberg and Johns, who helped choose titles for his paintings
during this period.
Mr. Twombly tried without success for several months to get a grant to go
back to Europe and in 1957, with Ward's help, he spent several months in
Italy, where he met Tatiana Franchetti, a portrait painter and member of a
storied family of Italian art patrons. They were married in 1959 at City
Hall in New York and their son, Cyrus Alessandro, was born that year. She
died in 2010. Mr. Twombly is survived by his son; two grandchildren, and by
Nicola Del Roscio, his longtime companion.
In Love With Italy
Mr. Twombly fell in love with Italy, which reminded him of the faded
grandeur of Lexington. ("Virginia is a good start for Italy," he once said.)
He rented an apartment facing the Coliseum in Rome and began to work on
larger scale paintings, which were increasingly spare, incorporating
scrawled words and doodle-like shapes on a smudged off-white background,
establishing a lifelong reputation as a high-art graffitist that generally
irked him. He told Mr. Serota that while early paintings made visual
reference to ancient graffiti, his intentions were "more lyrical" and his
inclusion of phalluses and female body parts were often just ways to evoke
male and female presences in the work. If his aspirations were toward any
period, he later said, it was an early neo-Classicism, like that of Poussin,
whom he said he would have liked to have been.
In 1958, Mr. Twombly left Ward's Stable Gallery and began to show at Leo
Castelli, which represented Rauschenberg and Johns and was establishing them
as presences in the New York art world. Mr. Twombly continued to live and
work in and around Rome, but he traveled extensively, to the Sahara, Greece,
Egypt and Turkey. In 1964 his work was included in one of the first
exhibitions to explore the ideas of Minimalism, "Black, White and Grey," at
the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, with a roster of rising stars like
Agnes Martin, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.
But the same year, Mr. Twombly's "Nine Discourses on Commodus," an ambitious
painting cycle he made after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,
based on the life and death of the Roman emperor, received scathing reviews
in a show at the Castelli gallery. In addition to Judd's condemnation, other
critics dismissed the work as nostalgically backward-looking or barely
there; one described paintings of "indecisive pinkish scrawled areas
floating across each other at the edges." According to the catalog for the
Tate Modern show, the criticism damaged Mr. Twombly's career and caused him
to paint less for several years. His aversion to the press might also have
been cemented at this point; not long after the Castelli show, Vogue
magazine ran a piece about Mr. Twombly, lavishly illustrated with pictures
by Horst P. Horst of his elegant Roman apartment. The article noted archly
that his wealth and comfort had led to "Twombly being suspected of having
fallen for 'grandeur' " and to a view among American critics that he had
"somehow betrayed the cause."
In the 1960's, he began to work for periods of time back in Lexington and in
New York, where he used the collector and curator David Whitney's loft and
then rented space on the Bowery. In 1972, he began working on one of the
largest canvases of his career, a painting inspired by Burton's "Anatomy of
Melancholy," which would take him 22 years to complete and is now installed
in the Twombly gallery at the Menil Collection.
With the opening of that gallery Mr. Twombly fully entered what might be
called the Old Master stage of a career that had taken a long time to arrive
there, though his presence is still muted in the narrative of postwar art
told by many American museum collections.
In 2010, the Louvre unveiled a ceiling painting it commissioned by Mr.
Twombly, a 3,750-square-foot work in the museum's Salle des Bronzes, next
door to a ceiling triptych created more than half a century before by
Georges Braque. The work is as calm and classical as his many of his early
paintings were stormy and scatological: a listing of Hellenic sculptors
against a deep blue background with planet-like discs. Characteristically,
Mr. Twombly said little about the work.
Just before the retrospective at the Modern opened in 1994, he submitted
reluctantly to an interview with The New York Times, sounding more agitated
by the attention the show directed his way than vindicated by the
recognition.
"I have my pace and way of living," he said, in his hillside house in Gaeta,
south of Rome, "and I'm not looking for something." Of reputation and
artistic acclaim, he added: "It's something I don't think about. If it
happens, it happens, but don't bother me with it. I couldn't care less."
Art: http://tinyurl.com/3ec7xfu
http://tinyurl.com/3c2rzwj
http://tinyurl.com/6dohxky
http://tinyurl.com/3bevj7s
http://tinyurl.com/43f5utr