Cy Twombly
Scribbled, smeared and wrote across huge canvases, and moved to Italy to do it.
Cy Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928, studied at Black Mountain College alongside Rauschenberg, and served in the army as a cryptologist — a fact his admirers have made much of. He moved to Italy in 1957 and stayed, which removed him from the New York conversation at exactly the moment it mattered most, and the work was misunderstood for years as childish scrawl. The paintings combine pencil scribble, smeared oil paint, numbers, and the names of gods and poets, in cycles addressed to classical antiquity. He died in Rome in 2011.
Provenance and the catalogue raisonne prepared by Heiner Bastian are the reference points, and the Cy Twombly Foundation holds the archive. The surfaces are the practical issue: pencil, wax crayon and thin oil on grounds that are frequently unprimed, unfixed and left largely bare, which cannot be cleaned, which show every handling mark, and on which retouching is effectively impossible to disguise. Sculptures — assembled found objects coated in white plaster and paint — are unique and delicate. Prints and photographs exist in small editions.
If you own a work by Cy Twombly
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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