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.