Cy Twombly

Twombly's paintings look like someone scribbled on a very expensive canvas. That is roughly what happened. Loops, scratches, drips, smears of white paint over pencil marks, fragments of words and numbers. They look like the back of an envelope or a bathroom wall. They cost millions. The gap between what they look like and what they cost is part of the point. He grew up in Lexington, Virginia, and studied at Black Mountain College alongside Robert Rauschenberg, under the influence of Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. He then did something unusual for an American artist of his generation: he moved to Rome in 1957 and stayed for the rest of his life. Italy gave him his subject. The classical world, its mythology, its poetry, its ruins, filtered through a handwriting that looked entirely contemporary. The paintings have titles from Homer, Virgil, and Keats. Fifty Days at Iliam is a ten-part cycle based on the Iliad. The Bacchus paintings are violent slashes of red on white. The late rose paintings, the Peony Blossom series, are loose blooms of red and pink dripping down the canvas. He said he painted 'to find out what it is I am doing,' which is either evasive or exactly right. He died in Rome in 2011, at eighty-three. His work divides people more cleanly than almost any other modern painter. Those who love it find in the marks a physical record of thought happening in real time. Those who do not see scribbles.