THE ART OF CY TWOMBLY

Together with Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Cy is regarded as the most important representative of a generation of artists who distanced themselves from Abstract Expressionism. And yet he resisted every category applied to him. 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 colours. 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.

His path to that singular vision was deliberate and deeply rooted. Upon Robert Rauschenberg's encouragement, Twombly joined him for the 1951–2 sessions at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, a liberal refuge, a site of free experimentation and exchange in a nation growing increasingly conservative during the Cold War. Among the influential teachers present at this time were Charles Olson, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and John Cage. Then, in 1957, having built a bridge of connections with Italian artists, Twombly left for Italy, where he would remain for the most part. He established a studio in Rome overlooking the Colosseum.

It was in Italy that Twombly's mature language truly crystallised. As he described his own process in his sole published statement on his work: "Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate, it is the sensation of its own realisation." Scholar Katharina Schmidt, writing in the catalogue for the 2011 Dulwich exhibition, captured the full scope of this ambition: "Cy Twombly's work can be understood as one vast engagement with cultural memory. His paintings, drawings and sculptures on mythological subjects have come to form a significant part of that memory... His special medium is writing. Starting out from purely graphic marks, he developed a kind of meta-script in which abbreviated signs, hatchings, loops, numbers and the simplest of pictographs spread throughout the picture plane in a process of incessant movement, repeatedly subverted by erasures."

He was not without his detractors. 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."

Lingering at the threshold between word and image, Twombly rendered visible those things, experience, emotion, the body's share, that lie beyond the reach of verbal articulation. To stand before a Twombly is to feel the full weight of Western civilisation as living sensation.

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) is represented in permanent collections worldwide, including the Tate Modern, London, MoMA, New York, and the Menil Collection, Houston.