Cy Twombly was an American painter, born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928, who spent most of his life in Italy and died in Rome in 2011.
He covered canvases with looping chalk lines, scrawled names and fragments of Greek and Roman myth, work critics once dismissed as scribbling. In 2015 one of his blackboard paintings sold for 70.5 million dollars. A visitor to a French museum kissed another, and was prosecuted.
Critics laughed at his scrawls, a visitor kissed one in a museum, and collectors paid 70.5 million dollars for another. The line behind all three took him years to make look careless.
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It began in the dark. Drafted into the US Army in 1953, Twombly served as a cryptographer, a code-breaker paid to read marks that looked meaningless. On weekend leaves in Augusta, Georgia, he sat in a hotel room, switched off the lights and drew anyway, so that his hand could not follow what his eyes had learned.
He could draw perfectly well. He had studied in Boston, Virginia and New York, and he could lay down a clean line whenever he chose. A clean line, though, looked like everyone else's. When people called his own line childish, his answer was short. "My line is childlike but not childish," he said.
What he scribbled with that line surprised people even more. The names came from Homer, Sappho and Virgil: Achilles, Apollo, Priam, written, crossed out and misspelled across paintings that museums later built whole rooms to hold.
What You'll Discover
Why he left New York behind.
What critics called his scrawls.
Whose names he scrawled on canvas.
What he painted on a Louvre ceiling.
Why a kiss ended in court.
What one canvas sold for.