Cy Twombly valuation
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.
What a work by Cy Twombly is worth
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 is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 25 April 1928, Lexington
- Died
- 5 July 2011, Rome
- Movements
- Abstract Expressionism, Postmodernism
More on Wikipedia.
The photographs and the prints
Twombly photographed throughout his life, mostly with a Polaroid camera, and had the pictures enlarged as dry prints, which gives them a soft, grainy surface; they were issued in limited editions. Shortly before his death in 2011 he chose more than a hundred previously unpublished Polaroids for a book from his German publisher Schirmer/Mosel. Heiner Bastian's catalogue raisonné of the printed graphic work, updated in 2017 to cover the prints up to his death, is the reference for the prints.
Many of the major paintings are in museums; the Menil Collection in Houston opened a building devoted to his work in 1995, and in 2010 he painted the ceiling of the Salle des Bronzes at the Louvre. What owners more often hold is a photograph or a print, and both are editions, so the edition number, the catalogue entry and the paperwork from the gallery or the Foundation are what place one.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
