Cy Twombly

Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr. was born April 25, 1928 in Lexington, VA. Twombly's paintings blur the line between drawing and painting with many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s reminiscent of a school blackboard on which someone has practiced cursive "e"s. Twombly discarded painting figurative, representational subject-matter, because he believed line should be the subject matter. His later paintings have been described as "romantic symbolism" that relates to poems, literature and myths. This can be found in the heavy use of Stephane Mallarme poetry as well as an eight drawing series on the word "virgil." It is also believed that he influenced younger artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, and Julian Schnabel.

Untitled, 2005

(This is one of my favorite works by Twombly)

When he died July 5, 2011, Caleb De Jong wrote:

With the passing of Twombly we are now only left with Jasper Johns to represent the heroic time of post-war American art. Warhol died in 1987, de Kooning in 1997 and Rauschenberg in 2008 and now Twombly. These deaths point to an irrevocable loss of collective memory from the founding generation of American art. When Johns passes this generation of artists will seem as distant as the generation of Thomas Cole and the Hudson River painters.