Cy Twombly will probably be best remembered for blurring the line between drawing and painting. His paintings have achieved auction prices well into the millions. He was one of the first American artists to interest himself in graffiti. Many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s are reminiscent of a school blackboard, filled with scrawled gestures, as if Twombly was covering them with hundreds of years of graffiti. Twombly had at this point discarded painting figurative, representational subject-matter, citing the line or smudge–each mark with its own history. He studied with other pioneers of the postwar American avant-garde at Black Mountain College, including Rauschenberg, Johns, Cage, Cunningham, Shaun, Chamberlain and others. Twombly’s work is at the same time both representive of the classical, and the post modern. He is intimately interested in the classical gesture, the Roman period, the painterly. He is, at times, as much a ‘painter’ as David or Renoir, but at the same time he is fascinated with the minimal, the excluded and most importantly: the scrawled. Many of his paintings and works on paper moved into “romantic symbolism”, and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words. Twombly often quoted the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as many classical myths and allegories in his works. In the late nineteen fifties Twombly moved to Rome and has lived and worked somewhat quietly there until his death on July 5, 2011.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. Published on the occasion of the September 25, 1994 exhibition. 180 pages with 187 illustrations. A nice copy, bright and clean.

Bookseller Inventory # 20125

SOLD

Cy Twombly: A Retrospective
Varnedoe, Kirk

ISBN: 0870706209
Publisher: Museum of Modern Art, New York
Publication Date: 1994
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Sold ·