Cy Twombly

Edwin Parker (Cy) Twombly, Jr. (born 1928 in Virginia, US) studied in Boston, and New York. He met Robert Rauschenberg at the Art Students League in New York in 1950 and later attended the influential Black Mountain College in North Carolina, which fuelled his interest in the calligraphic and automatic drawing technique of the Surrealists. Twombly combined this with the expressive gestures of Jackson Pollock to create his highly recognisable graphic style.
During the mid 1950s he shared a studio and worked closely alongside Rauschenberg in Manhattan. Twombly’s move to Italy in 1957 coincided with a shift away from Abstract Expressionism to a mature style inspired by poetry, mythology, the classics and European history and literature. Later, 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. Examples of this are his Apollo and The Artist and a series of eight drawings consisting solely of inscriptions of the word ‘VIRGIL’.
He spent June and July 1961 on the Cycladic islands, while in August of that year while staying on Mykonos, Twombly worked on an extensive cycle of drawings titled Delian Odes, three of which are included in the exhibition here. Only a few of the drawings from this series survived as some were accidentally destroyed by local children visiting his studio out of curiosity.