CY
TWOMBLY
Born: April 25, 1928, Lexington, VAD
Died: July 5, 2011 (age 83 years), Rome, Italy
Period: Abstract expressionism
Influenced by: Ancient classical antiquity, literature, poetry.
Cy Twombly was a North American artist who spent much of his career in Italy.
Italy became central to his artistic life, revealing another language through sculpture. One little known and one deeply connected to ancient Rome, classical architecture, mythology, and the passage of time.
Twombly revisited this visual language in later sculptures, including a 1983 Roman work featuring three thicker cylindrical elements bound together with wire. These recurring forms show his sustained interest in returning to an idea and changing its physical expression.
These two sculptures revealed how Cy Twombly returned to the same visual idea across decades, changing its proportions, materials, and construction while preserving its essential form.
For Twombly, repetition was not simply reproduction, but an opportunity to revisit a familiar form and discover something new. His sculptures demonstrated how the smallest differences in proportion and material could transform the character of an object.
There is a particular beauty in Twombly's ability to give ordinary materials the presence of something ancient. His sculptures invite us to reconsider what makes an object enduring—not necessarily its material value, but its proportions, physical character, and relationship to history.
The Roma Sconce
by Orphan Work
Twombly had explored related arrangements before his 1976 columns, noted here.
His Untitled, Rome of 1959, created just after he moved to Italy, features an assemblage of slender upright elements supported on a modest tiered base resembling an architectural monument. The assembled materials retain an improvised quality despite the form's deliberate arrangement.
