Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. (; April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011) was an American painter, sculptor and photographer. Twombly influenced 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. 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." Writing in Artforum, Travis Jeppesen went further, declaring Twombly to be "the greatest American painter of the twentieth century, and the greatest painter after Picasso, period."
Wikidata
Q159566
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Introduction
Twombly studied from 1948 to 1951 at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA, at the Museum School in Boston, and at the Art Students League in New York, where he met Robert Rauschenberg, who suggested that Twombly attend Black Mountain College, 1951-1952. In 1957 he relocated to Italy, where he would remain for the rest of his life, making Rome his primary residence. He is most well known for his large paintings populated with scribbled marks, calligraphic or graffiti-like words, letters, numbers, and references to Classical culture. He also produced prints, sculpture, and photographic works.
Nationalities
American, Italian
Gender
Male
Roles
Artist, Lecturer, Painter, Photographer, Sculptor
Names
Cy Twombly, Edwin Parker Twombly, Jr. Edwin Parker Twombly
Ulan
500032301
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

47 works online

Exhibitions

Publications

  • MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art Flexibound, 408 pages
  • MoMA Now: Highlights from The Museum of Modern Art—Ninetieth Anniversary Edition Hardcover, 424 pages
  • Cy Twombly Exhibition catalogue, Paperback, pages
Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].