The works by American artist Cy Twombly really seem to be loved and sought after by many collectors, curators and museum directors. And in July 2007 a reported fact proved how someone can love excessively his masterpieces. Everyone will remember the scandal raised by Rindy Sam, French artist of Cambogian origins who, while visiting the  Collection Lambert Museum of Avignon, kissed a white canvas by Twombly. A love gesture, an artistic act provoked by the power of art that cost Sam the charge for having “vandalized” a masterpiece worth 2 million dollars. The infuriated owner of the painting had demanded a compensation of 35 thousand euros, but in the end the French artist got away with paying only 1,425 euros to Lambert and 500 euros to the museum where the episode occurred.
Cy Twombly is not only famous for this gossip that filled the news last summer, but can be considered an artist who, at the age of 79, is still an enigma of contemporary art. His art is mysterious, difficult to interpret and explain, it is defined by French semiologist Roland Barthes a contraposition of writing with other graphic symbols able to produce the shudder that leads to the Zen state of enlightenment. A unique creativity gathers in a single creative container many references to the history of art; the past becomes the main source of inspiration. And the past is the keystone to understand the painting of this American artist. Indeed, in 1957 Twombly moved for good to Rome  as he had deeply fallen in love with the eternal city during a journey taken five years earlier with Robert Rauschenberg. A love between a man and a city that would never end, a passion that not only changed the life of a human being, but mainly the poetics of an artist. Since his arrival in Rome, Twombly started being tormented by the history of art, by ancient literature, history, myths and archaeology, and he continued studying for his whole life. All this gave life to compositions dominated by a certain eclecticism, where Twombly tends to distil, combine and complicate influences and citations, rather than put them on the canvas one by one. His scribbled paintings (for him there is no difference between painting and drawing) develop in Abstract Gestural Expressionism, influenced also by the automatic writing of surrealists, but keeping a certain affinity with Minimalism and conceptual art. Other identifiable sources in his works are the stroke of Soutine and Soutine or the geniality of Gorky, Klee and Mirò, although Rome and its antiquities always remain among his first thoughts.
Yet, among the great US masters of the post-war period, Cy Twombly was for a long time underestimated. If nowadays everyone tries to have one of his works, given that lately his quotations have risen (in 2005 the work “Untitled” sold for 8,696,000 dollars at Sotheby’s New York setting the artist’s record), in the fifties nobody, especially the abstract expressionists, liked his canvases,. On three occasions, Jackson Pollock only asked him one derogatory question: “What do you do?”. In the two following decades, with the great exploit of Pop Art and of Minimalism, Twombly’s creativity was judged too close to abstract expressionism. His work seemed incomprehensible to  the art system and, what is worse is that it was absolutely unmarketable. Luckily the situation improved and now we can say that Cy Twombly is one of the artists who was miracled by Larry Gagosian. For instance, one of his works on paper from 1962, a medium-sized mixed technique, in 1994 was quoted at 25 thousand dollars and only thirteen years later it was sold by Phillips de Pury in New York for 629,043 dollars.
If you do not want to miss this genius of American painting we recommend the exhibition “Cy Twombly, cycles and season” organized by the Tate Modern of London to celebrate the eighty years of the author, which can be visited until 14th September 2008. The event, the first of such dimensions after the one of the Moma in New York in 1994, will bring together the artist’s most important series, from the “Ferragosto Paintings” to the “Veil Paintings” and the  “Nini’s Paintings”, painted in 1971 in honour of Ninì Pirandello, wife of Roman gallery owner Plinio De Martiis. Afterwards, the exhibition will travel to the Guggenheim of Bilbao (from 28th October to 1st February 2009), and finally go, from 25th February, to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. Furthermore, twelve huge paintings of the “Lepanto” series will be protagonists at an exhibition at the Prado of Madrid until 28th September 2008. (translated by Giorgina Arcuri)