About the Artist
Cy Twombly
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. (1928 – 2011) was an American painter, sculptor and photographer. He belonged to the generation of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Twombly's paintings are predominantly 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 Stephane Mallarme, 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 is said to have influenced younger artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, and Julian Schnabel. His works are in the permanent collections of modern art museums globally, including the Menil Collection in Houston, the Tate Modern in London and the New York's Museum of Modern Art. He was commissioned for the ceiling at the Musee du Louvre in Paris.
In a 1994 retrospective, curator Kirk Varnedoe described Twombly's work as "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."
