Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Cy Twombly
American (b.1928)
UNTITLED from Homage to Picasso (n.d.)
lithograph
29.875” x 21.875”

STYLE: ABSTRACT-EXPRESSIONISM, HOMAGE TO PICASSO

  

Cy Twombly studied at Black Mountain College (1951-52), a legendary site of avant garde arts cross-pollination in the hills of North Carolina. Robert Rauschenberg was one of his classmates. He also attended the Art Students League in New York and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In the mid fifties, Twombly became prominent in New York (along with Rauschenberg and others), and, in 1959, the artist moved to Italy permanently. Twombly is one of the most revered living artists in the world and his work has been the subject of many major retrospectives.

Twombly’s subtle and complex artwork combines elements of drawing, gestural abstract painting, and writing. He draws inspiration from poetry, classic mythology, and history, and has created an utterly unique vocabulary of signs and marks. Twombly’s print for the Homage to Picasso portfolio is typical of the artist’s delicate, calligraphic line. There is no literal connection to Picasso.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, 1/14/03
Twombly's art is fervently, tenderly, even comically romantic, elegiac, pleasurably mournful. It relishes gaudy, dangerously exposed emotional language, with words written loosely on the canvas - graffiti, but of the most literate and gentlemanly kind, steeped in the classics... Two years ago Twombly awed the Venice Biennale with Lepanto, and currently he stands with Richard Serra - whose massive steel walls couldn't at first sight be more different from Twombly's work - as one of the two most productive and indispensable senior American artists. Both artists matter now because they make monumental, historical art at a time of pervasive amnesia.
Donald Kuspit, Artforum, 3/98
Twombly's pictorial language, often a barely legible graffiti blur, loses its immediacy in the immensity of his canvases, becoming a temporal whisper. It too reduces to the language of patina, of temporal surface, just as the patina of his sculptures becomes liquid gesture. Patina not only bespeaks the movement of time, but does so in a manner as seductive as a siren song. The lush surface dares to announce the presence of death, if not without the Delphic flourish appropriate to a royal mystery. In the sculptures of flowers or stalks, it is as though Twombly has drained the life from their fragile bodies, leaving behind a perfect shell marked with the auratic patina. This concise act of mourning results in an artistic shadow - a form of immortality that is ironic insofar as it is dependent on mortality.