112604_cy_twombly, a photo by jeremystynes on Flickr.
Philadelphia
July 5th, 2011
4:38 pm
I find it amazing people can criticise an artist on the day of his passing (just to hear themselves speak). All of you are a sorry bunch. This is not about liking his work or not liking his work. This is about a life well lived and for one purpose only; To make art and to somehow, once every hundred paintings, transcend the human experience on a 2 dimensional plane. Try it sometime - it's a lot harder than it looks. He is one of the few artists that have accomplished this...Mark Rothko is another... The rest of us are just ants on the ant pile...
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25.
garymporter
dallas
July 5th, 2011
4:28 pm
Nowhere is the lack of art education in our school systems more exposed than in the callow comments above.
"In drawing and drawing / you his pains are / delectable his flames / are like water."
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16.
N. M. Smith
Austin, texas
July 5th, 2011
4:01 pm
As do many people, I have always thought Cy was making fun of the art world. His work is dreadful.
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4.
Al
state college
July 5th, 2011
3:49 pm
Nothing denotes America's decadence and decline more luminously than Mr. Twombly's "art".
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32.
Aloysius
Boston
July 5th, 2011
4:42 pm
Foe Pete's sake, the man just died--can you naysayers save your cynicism and negativity for later? I mean, I don't like baseball but I don't feel the need to waste my time (or fan's time) making flippant twits on how boring I find the game.
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19.
JR
San Diego
July 5th, 2011
4:05 pm
Sorry, but this man is a perfect example of why modern art and Expressionism in particular are so often ridiculed.
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36.
Andrea Grenadier
Alexandria, VA
July 5th, 2011
4:49 pm
The "critics" who know nothing of art and have posted their snarky comments above show that art in the schools is sorely needed in what's left of our civilization.
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31.
Kahn
Los Angeles, CA
July 5th, 2011
4:39 pm
Stand
(face to face)
with a Cy Twombly piece.
(you'll stand a chance)
of understanding
the act of painting.
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10.
milnerj
North Carolina
July 5th, 2011
3:53 pm
We have sadly lost the greatest painter of our day.
"My feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes" Rilke.
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5.
Joseph
Chicago, IL
July 5th, 2011
3:49 pm
His gorgeous show to open the Modern Wing here in Chicago, is still one of the best shows I've ever seen. And true, his works do not work as effectively in reproduction, you must experience them in person, slowly.
His installation in Philadelphia is also one of my favorite spaces--I'm often the only person in the room when I view the works.
http://www.josephthebutler.blogspot.com
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2.
Andrew J.
New York City, NY
July 5th, 2011
3:49 pm
For his contributions to both painting and modern art, he will never be forgotten. To know him and his work was to love him.
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22.
Barry Moyer
Washington,DC
July 5th, 2011
4:27 pm
Oh my, what a painter! To hell with the critics...Twombley was a master and I'd give just about anything to be as free and rambunctious at my own easel. Those who didn't like his work should go back and look again. It is the painter unconfined.
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6.
AR
columbus, oh
July 5th, 2011
3:49 pm
The Twombly room in the Philadelphia Museum of Art infuriates many, but we love it and we visited it over and over again when we lived in Philly in the '90's.
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27.
masayaNYC
Harlem, New York
July 5th, 2011
4:35 pm
I had the privilege of seeing a show of CT's in London in 2004. For those here who claim his work was pretentious, or, as one poster so ungenerously put it, "a scam," I can only say my appreciation for his works only came when I saw how engaged children of all ages were with the paintings on the wall. It doesn't have to say something--be narrative or conventionally naturalistic or figurative--to engage a sense of joy and wonder in a viewer. If any single artist's body of work said that more than others, it must have been Mr. Twombly's.
Express disdain at the expense of your own ability to enjoy simple, lovely things. A great hole has been formed in an often overly complicated and self-referential contemporary art world.
RIP Cy Twombly. Thank you for the pleasure your brought to this avid art-lover.
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11.
M.D.Y
Kenwood, CA
July 5th, 2011
3:53 pm
"That same year, Mr. Twombly’s work passed the million-dollar mark at auction." says it all about Post-War modern art. Maybe the NY Yankees will start signing artists! Twombley's work, among others, reminds me of Gertrude Stein's comment, "There's no there there".
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29.
dlz
berkeley, california
July 5th, 2011
4:38 pm
Interesting that the most "popular" comments on this blog so far are negative. I used to share this feeling until I visited the Twombly buidling at the Menil Collection in Houston, where I was overwhelmed by the beauty and humanity of his work. Great photographer, as well, although this work is less known. RIP Mr. Twombley.
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9.
cscott
New York
July 5th, 2011
3:51 pm
A HUGE talent.....a HUGE loss................for those who responded to and appreciated the beauty of "the mark"....................
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3.
Thus Spake the Dancing Scorpion
Arizona
July 5th, 2011
3:49 pm
Eccentric and sometimes interesting; but, at the end of the day, it's hard to believe Twombly and his buddies will endure. Professional art is such a scam. An often dangerous place to put money when the asset is so easily destroyed by man or nature.
Better for those who want to make an investment to give money to the poor in the artist's name.
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28.
Tom
New York, NY
July 5th, 2011
4:38 pm
Is this for real? My two year old son must be a genius.
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13.
Josie
St. Pete/NYC
July 5th, 2011
4:00 pm
the MoMA show changed everything for me, not just with his work, but so many abstract painters. Twombly and Gerhard Richter taught me new ways to see paintings, with their completeness, their whole experiences. Twombly's paintings seem to give you their whole life cycle, their own possibilities, what was left out, what was taken out, the decisions that were made and then doubted, or confirmed.
And you can't really get that unless you see them in person. Same for me with Richter. They overwhelm you in person, take charge.
I wish there were more conversations with him to read and think about.
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8.
Patricia
Brookline, MA
July 5th, 2011
3:51 pm
Rest in Peace. Amazing talent and vision will be missed.
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CT
Berkeley
July 5th, 2011
5:22 pm
The negative comments here are perfectly understandable. The work is hard to grasp and impossible to understand. But if you are lucky enough to be in a room filled with Twomblys and they grab hold of you, well then you are very fortunate indeed.
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26.
Marc
Deerfield Beach, Florida
July 5th, 2011
4:34 pm
I walked through the Menil in Houston earlier this year and had a chance to sample Twombly's scribblings.
My immediate thoughts walking out: What does it mean? They call this Art?
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23.
marian
phila,pa.
July 5th, 2011
4:27 pm
One measure of a society is the caliber and integrity of its art. Judging by this standard based on Mr. Twombly's art as well as his ilk ( Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, etc), our society is indeed in very deep trouble.
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12.
R. J. Hogan
Wilmington, NC
July 5th, 2011
4:00 pm
I had the pleasure of meeting Cy and having lunch with him a few years ago in Lexington, Virginia. The few hours I spent chatting with him were fantastic. I found him to be humble and witty. We share the same birthday and I wrote to him in Rome this year wishing him good wishes for April 25th. I'm saddened by his death, but am happy to have had the chance to spend a summer afternoon in his company.
jm
brooklyn, ny
July 5th, 2011
5:21 pm
Always loved his stuff. One of the first painters I fell in love with upon arrival at art school from the hills of tennessee... "My kid could draw that!" indeed! that sort of freedom of expression is too often self-censored, and thus is often the most difficult art state to attain. (comment 13 made then doubted or confirmed, true, true). Of course he worked in Italy, what with the shouts and murmers of our esteemed citizenry, only self-preservation! Godspeed agent Twombly!
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35.
Ross
New York City
July 5th, 2011
4:49 pm
His "blackboard" paintings are the ones I like best, done with chalk-like lines on a black ground. Amazing paintings.
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14.
Andrea Grenadier
Alexandria, VA
July 5th, 2011
4:00 pm
Often imitated, Twombly was a true original whose work answered only to what he required of his art. His was an intellect that combined literature with art, and the words almost became music on his canvases. To stand before one of his huge paintings, like his works in the Corcoran in Washington, is an extraordinary experience. So much so, that when his great work "Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor" was displayed in France, a woman disrobed, and stood before it nude (before a guard told her to put her clothes back on).
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76.
kay johnson
colorado
July 5th, 2011
6:27 pm
To # 57: Contrary to your silly comment about The "Emporer", one of the most fun afternoons I had was spent looking at art in NYC long ago and came upon a roomful of kids with roomful of Twombly paintings about The Seasons. A young docent had the kids going and it was the most imaginative bunch of ideas about these paintings, The kids were full of spunk and inquisitiveness- something you seem to have shed.
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55.
Lucy
NY
July 5th, 2011
5:35 pm
Nothing infuriates me more than hearing people quip, "my kid could do this" or "I can paint better". No sir, in commenting thus it is painfully evident that neither you nor your offspring is capable of even understanding modern art let alone producing it. I could happily go on in this vein, but instead I'll recommend the excellent article by Kirk Varnedoe referred to by the author of this post: "Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly".
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37.
beckyshaw
Los Angeles
July 5th, 2011
4:50 pm
I am very saddened by this. As you can see by the comments that he was a controversial artists. Love him or hate him, he did have an impact on the art world.
I personally love his work. I recently wrote a biography about him, complete with a gallery of his work. I invite you all to visit.
http://abstractartist.org/cy-twombly/
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15.
lowell1029
NY
July 5th, 2011
4:00 pm
An adventurer who practiced the fine art of resting phenomena in basic space.....
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53.
CJ Nye
NYC
July 5th, 2011
5:22 pm
Love at first sight for me; must have been MoMA, the permanent collection galleries before the renovation... just moseying along & these frantic scribbled nests, ecstatic, sweet, like cupcakes, drew me in. We danced, this painting & I, as the others faded momentarily into inconsequence.
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49.
Three hands clapping
Denver, CO
July 5th, 2011
5:22 pm
Twombly painted aplombly.
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47.
Artemis
Portland
July 5th, 2011
5:22 pm
It's nice that some people are so unafraid to display their complete and total ignorance on this forum. You're free to neither like nor understand his work, but why do you also feel the need to comment?
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33.
ras
Chicago
July 5th, 2011
4:49 pm
Twombly, Basquiat et al.----a giant scam accepted by the credulous, typically those who use these ephemera to fill a void in their lives
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56.
rwgat
austin
July 5th, 2011
5:35 pm
I love it that Twombley moves people to denounce him as decadent, a mockery of art, a mess, all of that - it shows a certain power to resist being loved, after one is respected. That his art works passed the million dollar mark is meaningless, but that his obituary is graced with catcalls truly honors his work.
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N. Eichler
Berkeley, Calif.
July 5th, 2011
5:22 pm
Too bad writers of some of the above comments are not able to appreciate the beauty and color of Mr. Twombly's paintings. They're missing something extraordinary.
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44.
brudy
Cambridge, Ma.
July 5th, 2011
5:21 pm
The ignorant comments of some people above show the true decadence and illiteracy of America. Our country seems to care only about sports, while arts education dwindles. How sad. It's ok to not like his work, but to comment out of ignorance shows your lack of intelligence and understanding. Don't comment on things you do not understand.
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38.
rplowman
Madison, WI
July 5th, 2011
4:50 pm
Truly one of the most influential artist of the 20th century. Who else could draw with a pencil on a ten foot canvas and make it work?
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TS-B
Ohio
July 5th, 2011
3:49 pm
RIP, Mr. Twombly. No one said art had to be easy.
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74.
DRanonyme
Philadelphia
July 5th, 2011
6:27 pm
Mr. Twombly's painting could be obscure to a fault, difficult to fathom and embrace, but his integrity was never in doubt, and he may be the last of that generation of "heroic" American painters for whom the experience of the creative act was paramount. His impulses were in conflict with the postmodern obsession with the superficial nature of things, and I hope that his example survives and inspires young artists long after his passing.
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73.
PF
San Francisco
July 5th, 2011
6:27 pm
I was surprised by the number of negative, sarcastic comments so far. If you can't see the greatness in Twombly's work, that's OK. More for the rest of us.
Move on. Nothing to see here.
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68.
kay johnson
colorado
July 5th, 2011
6:26 pm
To the Grumps who have to crowd the comments with your ignorance, lay off. The DeMenil collection of Cy Twombly paintings is a tonic and an oasis on a hot Texas day and the gorgeous show in Chicago a couple of years ago with the huge red peonies makes you believe in beauty in a way the "realists" with their cornpone pronouncements of certainty can never touch.
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62.
luvtoroam
chicago
July 5th, 2011
5:51 pm
In the early '80s I worked at a financial institution that had a large and beautiful Twombly on its investment banking reception floor. Each working day my spirits were lifted by that painting. It was one of the white on slate grey graffiti paintings.
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61.
nycnjnycnj
NJ
July 5th, 2011
5:46 pm
in the big sweep of art his work probably won't rank among the great masters. and yet... there was something different in it, a true departure from what had come before and during and since. i would expect that years from now, people will look back and remark that, even as his contemporaries were still bent on expressing (per 'abstract expressionism'), Twombly was focused on reducing, deconstructing, stripping away. so just for the courage to take that path, i have to salute him and offer my sincere respect.
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54.
David Reed
Chapel Hill
July 5th, 2011
5:22 pm
He made his marks....curious, curlicued and curvaceous. May peace be upon him.
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52.
jeanne
new york
July 5th, 2011
5:22 pm
if you can sit with his work keeping an open mind and heart you will "get" them.
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A Cady
Croton NY
July 5th, 2011
5:22 pm
It's telling that many who think he was a fake can't spell his name properly. Rather than Twombly representing a low in pos-twar painting, perhaps he represent the shallow knowledge of the average American who would prefer easy representational art. And his market value has nothing to with it.
He's unique, important and always will be.
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43.
anton
clayton, mo
July 5th, 2011
5:21 pm
love love love his "line". he and basquiat are my big faves. god was in in his line quality. it was love
at first sight. a true genius. his art was full of life, and color and most important to me was that
incredible line quality. thank u so much cy, for all the visual richness which was your art.
David L
New York, NY
July 5th, 2011
5:21 pm
Although I'm a HUGE admirer of post-modern painting, I never bought into Twombly's work. Never. And it's not for lack of trying. Seventeen years since his massive retrospective at the Modern and a whole lot of worsmithing between then and now issuing from powerhouses like Robert Hughes the late Kirk Varnedoe still hasn't changed the fact that today when I stand in front of a Twombly painting all I see is a mess…not even a profound mess, just a mess. His "chalkboard" paintings are wonderful, but the rest of his oeuvre is a wasteland, propped up by problematic emotional, intellectual, and art-historical premises.
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41.
thelma
NYC/Santa Fe
July 5th, 2011
5:21 pm
Those who ridicule Twombly's work and anything they do not understand, blame the art, of course! and sad to say, most of the nay-sayers are not in nyc, still the art savvy capital of the world. His sculptures are completely and universally fabulous! few have seen... although I saw them at MOMA, nyc.
No wonder he moved to Italy, away from the closed minded americans- may his soul rest in peace.
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21.
david
new york
July 5th, 2011
4:27 pm
a tremendous loss, a true artist in every sense of the word, vastly under appreciated and too often overlooked. excited to see if any new scholarship appears that can finally approach the beauty and insight of Barthes writings on CT, perhaps the only other who could begin to understand; the work of mourning.
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Roger Latzgo
Germansville, PA
July 5th, 2011
4:05 pm
To Times Readers:
I love the Iliad; I even like Pope's translation. But I am often puzzled when I encounter the Twombly rooms at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. If I do not think my daughter (she's 20 months old) could match Twombly's work, I am myself encouraged to give it a shot. Maybe that's the point.
Perhaps Twombly's preference of an art career in Italy rather than New York is something like Cliff Lee choosing to pitch for the Phillies rather than for the Yankees. No DH, no AL East, no New York media.
Submitted by Roger Latzgo www.rogerlatzgo.com Germansville PA
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17.
kelly
1901
July 5th, 2011
4:01 pm
loved his scribbly gibbly gobbbly style perfect for a world waay too concerned about straight lines and white shoes.
www.kellymoore.net
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75.
R.
DAllas
July 5th, 2011
6:27 pm
Tom writes: "Is this for real? My two year old son must be a genius."
Tom, you are making the most superficial comparision of the child art your two-year old can make and what an artist can do. The child scribbles an uncontrolled mess because he lacks the ability and understanding of what he is doing. The artist makes marks with full intellect and emotion as well as an understanding of the rules of astetics, the context of his culture among many other variables as well as having a commitment to his work often over many decades. The artist also works on a scale and in meduims that make his works likely to last centuries with proper care. The artist is also communicating a message with his work.
Is your kid doing all that? I think not.
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72.
Josh Hill
New London, Conn.
July 5th, 2011
6:27 pm
Artemis #47, if I had a dollar for every time somebody claimed "you don't understand" just because somebody doesn't like their favorite lockstep modernist, I'd be Bill Gates. As it happens, I don't like vapid pretentious nonsense in art, and neither, it seems, do others. Nor, I think, do my preferences have much to do with ignorance: my musical tastes run towards the B minor Mass and the Grosse Fuge, my literary tastes range from Homer to Joyce, my artistic tastes from Praxiteles to Picasso. It is precisely because I appreciate such masters that I deplore the superficiality of the contemporary American art scene. These works have, some of them, a pleasant, superficial aesthetic -- but then so does the fly swatter I bought at Wal Mart.
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66.
Thus Spake the Dancing Scorpion
Arizona
July 5th, 2011
6:02 pm
In my opinion, art historians will remember Mr.Twombly as a minor celebrity painter who painted for money and made lots of it for himself and the gross commercial world of auction houses and agents he chose to call some of his best friends.
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60.
Laura K.
Philadelphia, PA
July 5th, 2011
5:45 pm
I just came across the Twombly rooms at the Philly Museum of Art....it was breathtaking...his is a life well lived..an artist who found such joy in the doing...RIP...there will never be another..
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57.
Ron
New York, NY
July 5th, 2011
5:35 pm
I can just picture someone taking their 10-year-old to see a Twombly exhibit. The 10-year-old shouts out, "why are these paintings in a museum when I and five other kids in my class are better painters?"
The Emporer Has No Clothes.
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45.
Josh Hill
New London, Conn.
July 5th, 2011
5:22 pm
Talk about the emperor having no clothes! This is pretentious, vapid stuff, that appeals mostly to an academic/critical establishment that has come to value pretense and vapidity. Perhaps the movement of the artistic focus from Europe to the United States wasn't such a good idea after all.
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34.
Dick Tighe
Morristown, NJ
July 5th, 2011
4:49 pm
One of a kind!
Cy Twombly, Idiosyncratic Painter, Dies at 83
By RANDY KENNEDYCy Twombly/Gagosian GalleryCy Twombly’s “Bacchanalia: Fall (5 Days in November),” from 1977, was part of a show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London that placed Twombly paintings with works by Nicolas Poussin.
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 in Rome Tuesday. He was 83.The cause was not immediately known, although Mr. Twombly had suffered from cancer. His death was announced by the Gagosian Gallery, which represents his work.
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 1964 exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York that was widely panned. The artist and writer Donald Judd, who was hostile toward painting in general, was especially damning even so, 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 Mr. Twombly’s, like that of Joseph Beuys, the new-found attention brought him a kind of critical favor he had never enjoyed. 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 had 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.”
In the only written statement that 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.” 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 and he barely did anymore: “I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days.”
A full obituary will follow.
Read Carol Vogel’s recent piece on the Poussin and Twombly show in London here. A collection of Twombly works is available here.
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