Cy Twombly, 1928 - 2011

Cy Twombly:  1928-2011
David Lees / Time Life Pictures

Portrait of Twombly, April 1, 1958
The artist Cy Twombly sought to summon a spirit of the classical past in a visual language that was both resolutely of the here and now and so "primitive" — scribbles, loops, scratches and the doodles of graffiti — that it seemed to stand outside of time altogether. In a way he was born into nostalgia for a vanished past, in Lexington, Virginia, amid the faded glories of the old South. Later he studied in Boston at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

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