Appreciation – Cy Twombly: the outsider

With the passing of Cy Twombly — who has died of cancer aged 83 — a beacon light of rare civilisation has gone out in the Western world.

With the passing of Cy Twombly — who has died of cancer aged 83 — a beacon light of rare civilisation has gone out in the Western world. An elusive artist, with a highly developed faculty of challenge and response, he developed a pattern of investigation into the visual which was part philosophical inquiry and part sensual celebration.

Despite close association with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, recognition came late. He remained something of an outsider: an esoteric American artist who settled in Italy in 1957 and grew obsessed with Classical antiquity. He cultivated various literary muses — Catullus, Pound, Rilke, Pessoa, Virgil, Archilochus — and made gloriously expressive abstractions from their inspiration. Best known for employing calligraphy and script in his paintings, Twombly is no more ‘Cy the Scribbler’ than Pollock was ‘Jack the Dripper’, though the non-art press love nicknames to make them feel at home with anything that threatens to be profound.

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Twombly called himself a Romantic symbolist showing things in flux. Other artists see him differently, as the following extracts demonstrate. The sculptor Nigel Hall (born 1943) finds landscape and music in Twombly’s work. ‘The paintings seem comparable to desert or arid wastelands which on first encounter appear unrewarding when contrasted with more lush or scenic landscapes. However, they reveal themselves slowly. What at first seems impoverished or ill-formed has by its very paucity an eloquence. The sculptures take a more concentrated form with the stillness and silence evocative of whitened ruins. They seem the visual equivalent to the spare and tentative explorations of Miles Davis’s music of the late 1950s and early ’60s.