Get the kiss

This is what Degas aspired to be. Born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia, Cy twombly who inherited his name from his baseball player father, was about to become one of the most controversial and major artist of the 20th century in America. Cy Twombly is clearly an artist who works in a very intense way on a group of work equally working, in the early years of his career, in both painting and sculpture.

The starting point in his youth went in 1947 when he entered at the School of the Museum of fine Arts of Boston and painted works he describes as “abstract seascapes”, these are his early works. Under the influence of his parents he then spent a year at Washington and Lee's newly created art program before moving to the new capital of modernism.

While his interests were slightly pointed in Dada, Surrealism and the art of Kurt Shwitters he moves to New York in 1950 to study at the Art student League, where he is exposed to a wide range of contemporary American and European works. At this time he is confronted with shows of American keys artists such as Jackson Pollock. At the League he made a very determinative encounter with Robert Rauschenberg also a student at this time, linked with him by generation ties, friendship and a close artistic influence.
Briefly, he first came to prominence at this time when his graffiti work appeared to subvert abstract expressionism.
Studying at the Mountain College in North California from 1951 to 1952 and travelling to Italy and North Africa with his fellow Rauschenberg, on the return to New York the artists were called to a joint exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1953.
These early works were generally in black and white. In a work such as zyig (1951) for instance, Twombly worked on the idea of the primitive, notions of ritual whose inspiration was took from his travel in North Africa. Obviously these are works where we can feel the hand of the painter. Something which was generally developing in the American world at this time threw works such as Jackson Pollock or Robert Motherwell described by Clement Greenberg as the American type painting.
As Twombly was still young at this time, his challenge was to find a way to go beyond these masters.
In the first works created after his return to New York, Querzazat and Tiznit (1953), he maintained the black and white uniform of Abstract Expressionism but he added something more. Indeed, the scratching suggest that impatience with the status quo which was setting in. He also changed a generally dark palette for one more suffused with brilliant white and began to striate the surface influenced by his discovery of archaeological sites in both Africa and Italy. This influence of ancient ruins began one characteristic of his work by painting these phallics vernacular architectural structures and forms found in nature.
The gathering of primitive, classical, ethnographic and archaeology is also apparent in sculptures from this time: Untitled of 1953 also transmits the memory of Morocco and Italy.
“For myself the past is a source for all art is vitally contemporary (…) I'm drawn to the primitive, the ritual and fetish elements”.

From 1953 to 1954 Twombly was drafted into the army where he served as a cryptographer. In this event we can see that his personal life feed his work as he modified the Surrealist technique of automatic drawing and writing, creating composition in the dark after lights out. These were blind drawings resulting in elongated forms and curves which became one of his signatures in his later works.
Following this idea of blind painting, in 1955 he was proposed a third solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York and then gave a new direction in his work. Hence, he rent a room in a hotel and starts drawing the lights out in order to loose his academic training, distort his graphic skills and began to reach his own more personal expression in the work.
It is clear that while he was exposed to the vitality and energy of Abstract Expressionism, Twombly was able to unite American and European tendencies. And, the graffiti-like scratches and frenetic lines that developed his work from the mid 1950s simultaneously referred to and also subverted the then-dominant painting mode of Abstract expressionism.

In 1957 we enter in the mature period of the work. Exhibited at the Stable Gallery for the third and last time, he presented one of his major work Panorama which he painted in Rauschenberg's Fulton Street studio, the only surviving painting of a group of six or eight works. As a matter of fact, Twombly often destroyed his works, highlighting the ephemeral characteristic of a work of art.
At this time he returned to Italy to live there with wife and child, there he started to read Stephane Mallarme's poems who symbolic whiteness will be a major inspiration.

According to his work, Twombly was an artist very conscious of his hands and what they could create. He didn't made any huge compositions or sculptures, the paintings were very much about a certain graphic style linked with the movement of the paint across the canvas. Thus there is a huge physical importance in his work.
In the work Poems to the sea created by 1959, once again we can feel the influence of Surrealism's automatic writing where the marks put together while the artist is actually sort of blind, create something, a whole together which is something in itself rather than the representation of something.

There is a cycle theme in Twombly's work, in addition to tribal and archaeological reference, were paintings such as Hero and Leandro created in 1981 – 1984 which became much more liquid. In these allusions to the water, the group has some alternatives with the work of Turner. Through his concerns with water he also made sculptures around 1980 equally very much related to the sea and to boats. These works emphasise ideas that he had found expression not as much in painting but rather in poetry with poets like Mallarmé or Keats that he frequently read. Twombly was clearly constructing (an abstraction and) a frequent allusion to the conditions of the natural world (sea, sky, landscape and floating water).
These ideas reached its climax in his later works such as Untitled VII (Bacchus) painted in 2005 where we find a relative allusion to the sensual pleasure of life threw the reference of the god of wine and a certain freedom drunkenness also inspired by ancient history.

Cy twombly clearly made a breaking on conventions to find something completely new, with all these works he choose the metaphor more than the description. Twombly's work seems to capture a fragment of a felling compelling us to use all our senses to complete the experience. Following the words of Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Modern, expression and experience are the beauty and the poetry of his vision.