Cy Twombly: a Retrospective

In this volume, an extended essay by Kirk Varnedoe, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, examines the artist’s background and early education in Lexington, Virginia, and charts his study at the Boston Museum School, the Art Students League of New York, and the renowned, progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Twombly’s early contacts with both the modern European tradition and New York School painting are examined, and the emergence of his own distinct style in the mid-1950s is presented with a new clarity. The complex question of Twombly’s interactions with European art is discussed, as is Twombly’s distinctive conflation of the high European tradition of painters and poets – from Homer to Poussin to Cavafy – with the irrepressible impulses of graffiti and children’s drawings. Epic and intimate by turns, deeply personal and spontaneous yet insistently linked to broad and venerable culture codes, Twombly’s art has long demanded the more complete nunaced study that this volume – with the artist’s generous personal cooperation – now provides.