Goodby,Cy

Cy Twombly died today at the age of 83 from cancer. Last year Cy painted the ceiling of the Louvre, the first artist given the honor since Georges Braque in the 1950s. The work was inspired by the blue used by Giotto. The last paintings I saw of Twombly's were strange landscapes of Oman. Years ago in Venice at the Biennale,I saw the seige of Lepanto and its companion pieces.

Born in Lexington, Virginia, he settled in southern Italy in 1957 where he embraced classical themes rendered in his style of graffiti, fragments of classical verse, erasures, drips and his noted scratching. He studiously avoided publicity and virtually ignored his critics which were numerous and vicious in the first decades of his career. His started gaining younger artists' attention in the 1980s and was viewed as a seminal influence on their development.

Eventually he won all the prestigious honors--the Legion of Honor, the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale and Japan's Premimum Imperiale. In a restrospective at the Tate, he told an interviewer," I had my freedom and that was nice."

He only made one written statement about his art and that was in an obscure Italian art journal during the 1950s. He wrote,"It's more like I'm having an experience than making an experience."

The reproductions of his paintings, which are available in the many retrospectives published over the past decade,pale compared to the real thing where the canvass becomes a complex texture of his markings, painting and drawings.

French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterand made a poetic statement on Twombly's passing: "A great American painter who deeply loved old Europe has just left us. His work was deeply marked by his passion for Greek and Roman antiquity, and its mythology,which for him was a source of bottomless inspiration."

Luckily for us, he apparently left one of his best shows for last at the Lambert Collection in Avignon, France.

The New York Times already has an obituary with a promise of a longer account of his life later. And a fitting piece was written by Nicole Winfield of the Associated Press.

I'll certainly miss him. His work gave me much satisfaction and amusement. I sympathize with Donald Judd, when he was an art critic, who claimed there was no painting there when reviewing an early Twombly show. Cy was an acquired test but well worth the effort.