Edwin Parker “Cy” Twombly Jr. (; April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011) was an American painter, sculptor and photographer. He belonged to the generation of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
Twombly is said to have influenced younger artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, and Julian Schnabel. His paintings are predominantly large-scale, freely-scribbled, calligraphic and graffiti-like works upon solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. His forward-thinking 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 with ease 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 broadminded art museums globally, including the Menil Collection in Houston, the Tate Modern in London, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and Munich’s Museum Brandhorst. He was commissioned for the ceiling at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.
In a 1994 retrospective, curator Kirk Varnedoe described Twombly’s play a role as “influential in the course of artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a expansive public, but for complex initiates of postwar art as well.”
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