Artist Birthday: Cy Twombly

Forming his aesthetic during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, Cy Twombly pioneered his own unique brand of modernism. Rather than emphasizing process, he was inspired by art history past, particularly classical antiquity, the Italian Renaissance, and non-Western. He felt that abstraction was by no means disconnected from the past, but that it had roots in older art.

Artist birthday for 25 April: Cy Twombly (1928-2011 US)

Cy Twombly was a pioneer American modernist who followed his own path despite the domination of Abstract Expressionism.

Cy Twombly, Summer, from The Four Seasons, 1993-1994, synthetic polymer, oil, house paint, pencil and crayon on canvas, 314.5 x 201 cm   The Museum of Modern Art, New York, © 2025 Artist or Estate of Artist (MOMA-P3067)

Each painting in this Four Stage Painting depicts a different season within the ongoing cycle of life, a frequent theme in the Classical, Renaissance, and Asian art that Twombly so admired. In Summer Twombly applies bright red and yellow paint suggestive of the heat of an Italian summer. The image as a whole resembles the stem, leaves, and blossom of flowers. The vertical drips and lines of paint create a sense of movement, almost as if one is witnessing the sun’s rays beaming down and melting onto the canvas. This intense warmth is contrasted by splashes of red, perhaps hinting at the summer’s passionate storms or the ripe fruits of the season. The gestural scribbles are reflective of Twombly’s experience with Surrealism’s automatic writing/painting. The drips and gestural color are also reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism.

After almost a half-century that was dominated by realism in American art – mostly Social Realism, Regionalism and American Scene Painting – Abstract Expressionism asserted to the Western world the pre-eminence of American non-objective abstract art. The marketing-friendly movement dominated American art “scene” from the late 1940s to the early 1960s.
By the beginning of the 1960s, the narcissistic, male-dominated, wannabe-heroic aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism spurred numerous movements that sought to counter its perceived domination of American art. Among those movements were Post-Painterly Abstraction, Minimalism, Pop Art, and the New Realism. The art of Cy Twombly lies somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and the movements that countered that style.

Cy Twombly was born Edwin Parker Twombly, Jr in Lexington, VA. As a young boy he worked on art kits ordered from the Sears catalog. At twelve years old he studied with a Spanish modern painter Pierre Daura (1896-1979). Twombly took formal training first at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1947-1949), where he became interested in Dada and Surrealism. Moving to New York in 1950, he was exposed to Abstract Expressionism which began to shape his aesthetic away from figuration to abstraction. Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), an individualist whose work reflected certain painterly elements of Abstract Expressionism, was a major influence on Twombly. Rauschenberg’s paintings and the monochromatic work of Abstract Expressionists were influences on Twombly’s early works.

Twombly’s interest in history, literature and other (mostly European) cultures were inspirations in his work of the 1950s, in explorations of notions of “primitive” art, ritual, and “fetish”. In the mid-1950s he modified his Surrealist technique of automatic drawing by creating biomorphic drawings at night in the dark. Calling these blind drawings, he created elongated, distorted forms and curves that became standard in his mature work.

From 1955 to 1959 he worked on and off in New York where he emerged as an important artist alongside Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns (born 1930), both of whose works displayed both Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art aesthetics. He returned to Italy in 1957, and he lived between the US and Italy the rest of his life. In Italy, his work became more tranquil and high value, with allusions to Classical culture and literature. In the 1960s, his work became larger with more vibrant color. The trend to more vibrant color extended through the 1970s and 1980s, a period when he also explored sculpture of found objects. The Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of his work in 1994.