Cy Twombly, the 83 year-old conceptually diverse artist, died in Rome today. He was an American painter living in Italy, known for his graffitti-like paintings and his genre-shattering abstractions that drew from poetry and mythology.
“In the only written statement that Mr. Twombly ever made about his work, a short essay in an Italian art journal in 1957, he tried to make clear that his intentions were not subversive but elementally human. Each line he made, he said, was ‘the actual experience’ of making the line, adding: ‘It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.’ […]. ‘It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.’”
