Natural History Part I: Mushrooms, 1974

Cy Twombly   Master Artists

Edwin Parker Twombly Jr aka Cy Twombly, an internationally famous American artist. He was born on April 25th, 1928, in Lexington, Virginia, and passed away on July 5th, 2011, in Rome. 

Twombly was a painter, draftsman, sculptor, and American photographer. He was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennial in 2001. He studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and then traveled to Europe and North Africa, before settling down in Italy. He belongs to the generation formed by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Brice Marden, who renewed American art after the generation of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman.

Cy Twombly developed his work between abstraction and figuration; he never gave one aspect more attention than the other. The diversity and scope of his work are paradoxical, yet rich in intellectual artistic research.

Twombly's work from the late 1950s is characterized by graffiti, paper scratches, letters, words, and numbers. His 1960s drawings are highlighted with intensive colored pencils, pastels, graffiti, and numbers. During the 1970s before the artist moved onto larger formats, Twombly focused on collage series' which depicted similar patterns, often devoted to Greek-Latin mythology.

His mediums like painting, pencil, and pastel increased in the early 1990s and reached its peak with a series of drawings in 2001. Through these works, Twombly was able to break traditional barriers between painting and drawing, creating unprecedented art.