Cy twombly biography book

This scale continued into the early s with the cycles Coronation of Sesostris and Lepanto , exhibited at the 49th Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the Golden Lion. The final decade of his practice was marked by a focus on Bacchic themes and large-scale floral compositions inscribed with poetry. He died on July 5, in Rome. Throughout his career, Twombly pursued a highly individual vision grounded in his vast intellectual engagements and eschewed both the universalizing machismo of Abstract Expressionism and the sleekly industrial nonreferentiality of Minimalism.

Instead, he dwelled in his own idiosyncratic imaginary, always operating at an odd angle to the New York art world he left behind. The singularity of his vision was increasingly recognized in later life, and major honors followed. Though famously private, Twombly maintained strong intellectual connections throughout his life with figures ranging from poet Patricia Waters to other artists such as photographer Sally Mann.

This intellectual circle also included figures either long dead or fictional through his vast book collecting activity, with decades-long engagements with James Joyce, Rainer Maria Rilke, D. Lawrence, Alexander Pope, Homer, and Plato, among others. His recent works receive positive critical responses. From Los Angeles, Twombly travels to Mexico, visiting different archeological sites and staying in a small coast village, Yalapa, in the jungle along the Pacific coast.

Martin, spending part of January and February in the village of Grand Case. Here he makes a series of drawings, the images of which he later develops into the paintings of the Bolsena series. The following summer he rents an apartment in Palazzo del Drago on Bolsena Lake, north of Rome, where he paints the fourteen large paintings of the Bolsena series.

He lives in Anacapri from June to July where he continues working on drawings. He visits Ireland in the summer, returning to Rome were he paints the second version of Treatise on the Veil in Via Monserrato. All rights reserved. Twombly also has a show in Paris at Yvon Lambert that includes paintings and gouaches. He spends the summer in Anacapri at the Villa Orlando, working on drawings and collages.

Twombly returns to New York in November and spends the rest of the year on Captiva Island making a series of lithographs for Untitled Press. In January three large untitled paintings are shown at Leo Castelli Gallery. On his return to Rome in the spring, Twombly starts working on a very large canvas titled Anatomy of Melancholy in reference to the seventeenth-century book written by Robert Burton.

He will finish this painting twenty-two years later in in Lexington, Virginia, and give it the new title Untitled Say Goodbay, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor. He spends the summer in Capri and the winter on the Captiva Island, working on drawings. A retrospective exhibition is organized in April at the Kunsthalle of Bern, and it travels to the Lenbachhaus in Munich.

At the same time, the Kunstmuseum Basel organizes a comprehensive show of drawings of the previous twenty years. In the summer, in Castel Gardena, he completes the drawings titled 24 Short Pieces. The artist purchases a fifteenth-century house in Bassano in Teverina, north of Rome, near Bomarzo, and starts its restoration, making it his summer studio for the following years.

In March a representative group of paintings, drawings and sculptures, is shown at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Upon his return to Rome, makes a trip to Tunisia in the spring. At the end of May, returns to Rome, working on two-large scale collages titled Mars and the Artist and Apollo and the Artist. At the end of February, Twombly travels to Captiva Island, where he works on drawings.

During the summer in his studio in Bassano in Teverina, Twombly finishes a large triptych-painting titled Thyrsis. During the summer in Bassano in Teverina, the cycle of ten paintings Fifty Days at Iliam is completed. The exhibition is organized by Heiner Friedrich. Roland Barthes writes the introduction to the catalogue of the Whitney retrospective.

He spends the months of December and January on the Caribbean islands of the Iles des Saintes and Antigua working on watercolors. An exhibition of paintings is held in Cologne at the Galerie Karsten Greve. Gabriele Stocchi publishes a monograph on this series.

Cy twombly biography book

Twombly works on a series of sculptures in July and August at his Bassano studio, then travels to Greece in September. Works on drawings and sculptures in a studio that he rents in late spring in Formia on the Gulf of Gaeta. In Bassano that summer he prepares for a show of works on paper that will take place the following year at Sperone Westwater Fischer Gallery in New York.

In September he starts work on Hero and Leandro, a painting in four parts. The first museum show of his sculptures, consisting of twenty-three works from to , opens at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld. A catalogue is published with an essay by Marianne Stockebrand. He travels to the Greek island of Samos in September and returns to Rome where he paints the three large Bacchus works.

He spends time in New York and Lexington, where he works on a series of gouache drawings called Notes from Silverwood. Shows paintings and four new scultpures at Documenta 7 in Kassel from June to September. Travels to Key West, where he works on drawings such as Pseudo Protea. Returns to Rome via New York in late March. Works in Gaeta during the spring.

During the winter in Key West, he completes a set of drawings called Proteus. He remains in Gaeta and continues to work on sculpture. In the summer months he works in Bassano on three-part painting Hero and Leander. In Septemeber the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden presents a large retrospective exhibition of paintings and drawings. Organized by Katharina Schmidt, it focuses on mythological themes in his work.

In October a show of his sculptures opens in Rome at the Galleria Sperone. In the summer Twombly works in Bassano, where he works on a second version of Hero and Leandro to Christopher Marlowe. The large series titled Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair is also painted there. It is a five-part painting based on fragments of poems by Rilke, Rumi and Giacomo Leopardi.

The rest of the year is spent in Gaeta, using the house of a friend to work on sculptures. At the same time he purchases a house on a hillside, overlooking the harbour of Gaeta. He restores and expands the house and uses it as a studio in the following years. Twombly spends the spring and winter months in his new house in Gaeta. He lives in Gaeta during the fall and winter, supervising the restoration of the house and the creation of a garden of lemon trees, conceived as a collection of garden rooms.

Twombly works on sculptures in the summer in Bassano, in particular on a commissioned sculpture of Victory for a square in Paris, a project that was never realized. The artist spends the fall and winter in Gaeta and works on sculpture. Twombly works in the spring in Gaeta on two large paintings on paper called Venere Sopra Gaeta, which are shown in Naples at the Galleria Lucio Amelio.

One of these now exists as two fragments. He works on sculptures in Gaeta and in Rome and on a cycle of nine green paintings conceived to be displayed together in one room. The cycle is later shown at the 43nd Venice Biennale. In September the Menil Collection in Houston inaugurates a large exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculptures. In October the large work of ten paintings Fifty Days at Iliam is acquired and installed in a special room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Twombly spends the month of October in the Seychelles. In December, Gagosian Gallery in New York assembles a show featuring eight of the fourteen Untitled Bolsena paintings from , exhibiting them together for the first time. He spends the spring in Gaeta working on drawings. Two series of drawings were shown with the drawings and a selection of sculptures in Zurich at the Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG that summer.

Twombly travels in March to Zurich, Paris and Madrid. In both places, he works on sculpture in spring and autumn. He starts to work in July in Bassano on the two sets of the Quattro Stagioni. Spends the beginning of the year on Jupiter Island, Florida, where he works on sixteen sculptures. He returns for the summer to Gaeta to complete a three-panel painting using the motif of sea and boats, which will become a recurrent subject for his work.

Spends the beginning of the year on Jupiter Island. In the spring, nostalgic for his hometown of Lexington, he takes a house in Lexington, where he will spend the spring and the fall regularly over the next years. And it's a building thing. Whereas the painting is more fusing—fusing of ideas, fusing of feelings, fusing projected on atmosphere.

In the mids, in paintings such as Untitled , Twombly began to evoke landscape through colour favouring brown, green and light blue , written inscriptions and collage elements. Cy Twombly's work can be understood as one vast engagement with cultural memory. His paintings, drawings and sculptures on mythological subjects have come to form a significant part of that memory.

Usually drawing on the most familiar gods and heroes, he restricts himself to just a few, relatively well-known episodes, as narrated by poet-historians, given visible shape by artists and repeatedly reinterpreted in the literature and visual art of later centuries His special medium is writing. Starting out from purely graphic marks, he developed a kind of meta-script in which abbreviated signs, hatchings, loops, numbers and the simplest of pictographs spread throughout the picture plane in a process of incessant movement, repeatedly subverted by erasures.

Eventually, this metamorphosed into script itself. However, in a article Kirk Varnedoe thought it necessary to defend Twombly's seemingly random marks and splashes of paint against the criticism that "This is just scribbles — my kid could do it". One could say that any child could make a drawing like Twombly only in the sense that any fool with a hammer could fragment sculptures as Rodin did, or any house painter could spatter paint as well as Pollock.

In none of these cases would it be true. In each case the art lies not so much in the finesse of the individual mark, but in the orchestration of a previously uncodified set of personal "rules" about where to act and where not, how far to go and when to stop, in such a way as the cumulative courtship of seeming chaos defines an original, hybrid kind of order, which in turn illuminates a complex sense of human experience not voiced or left marginal in previous art.

Together with Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns , Twombly is regarded as the most important representative of a generation of artists who distanced themselves from abstract expressionism. Although Twombly is most known for his paintings, he was also an accomplished printmaker. After having an art piece being shown at Stable Gallery from to , Twombly moved to Leo Castelli Gallery and later exhibited with Gagosian Gallery.

Gagosian Gallery opened a new gallery in Rome, Twombly's hometown, on December 15, , with the inaugural exhibition, of Twombly's work, Three Notes from Salalah. In , at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, an exhibition of Twombly's photographs offered a selection of large blurry color images of tulips, trees and ancient busts, based on the artist's Polaroids.

In , a specially curated selection of Twombly's photographic work was exhibited in Huis Marseille , the Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; the exhibition was opened by Sally Mann. The show was built on a quote by Twombly stating that "I would've liked to have been Poussin , if I'd had a choice, in another time" and is the first time that his work was put in an exhibition with Poussin.

The eight untitled paintings are closely related to the Camino Real group that inaugurated Gagosian Paris in In , the Milwaukee Art Museum mounted the first retrospective of his art. At the Tate Modern retrospective, a text read:. This was his first solo retrospective in fifteen years, and provides an overview of his work from the s to now. At the heart of the exhibition is Twombly's work exploring the cycles associated with seasons, nature and the passing of time.

The exhibition also explores how Twombly is influenced by antiquity, myth and the Mediterranean, for example the violent red swirls in the Bacchus paintings which bring to mind the drunken god of wine. The exhibition provides a unique opportunity to see the full range of Twombly's long and influential career from a fresh perspective. In , the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened permanent rooms dedicated to his monumental painting cycle, Fifty Days at Iliam , based on Alexander Pope 's translation of The Iliad.

The Cy Twombly Pavilion of the Menil Collection in Houston, which was designed by Renzo Piano and opened in , houses more than thirty of Twombly's paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, dating from to The Museum Brandhorst in Munich holds works including the Lepanto series. The newly opened Broad Collection in Los Angeles holds 22 works.

The exhibition featured examples of Twombly's sculptures made between and , composed primarily of rough elements of wood coated in plaster and white paint. Twombly was a recipient of numerous awards. Most notably, he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale in Twombly was invited to exhibit his work at the Venice Biennale in , in and in when he was awarded the Golden Lion at the 49th Venice Biennale.

Twombly's will, written under U. The foundation now controls much of Twombly's work. In , the Cy Twombly Foundation and the Louvre settled a dispute over an unauthorized renovation of Twombly's The Ceiling , the site-specific mural created for the Salle des Bronzes , and announced that the foundation had dropped the lawsuit in exchange for a plan to restore the gallery to the artist's original design.

Per Artnet News, "Covered with his trademark looping white scribbles on a slate-gray background, the work recalls his experience as a cryptologist at the Pentagon. In , an exhibition of Twombly's paintings, Blooming, a Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things , and other works on paper from gallerist Yvon Lambert 's collection, was displayed from June to September at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Avignon.

The panel, an all-white canvas, was smudged by Sam's red lipstick and she was tried in a court in Avignon for "voluntary degradation of a work of art". Sam defended her gesture to the court: " J'ai fait juste un bisou. I kissed it without thinking; I thought the artist would understand It was an artistic act provoked by the power of art". Contents move to sidebar hide.

Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikidata item. American painter, sculptor and photographer — For his father, see Cy Twombly baseball. Lexington, Virginia , U. Rome , Italy. Tatiana Franchetti. Life and career [ edit ]. Work [ edit ].

Painting [ edit ]. Works in edition [ edit ]. Exhibitions [ edit ]. Retrospectives [ edit ].