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July 6, 2011
CyTwombly, who recently died, came of age as an artist in the America of Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists.
Twombly's early work of the 1960s blurs the line between drawing and painting and the arabesques of Pollock's style evolved into expressive abstract canvases and then into marks of graffiti scratched onto a blackboard as some kind of pre-verbal expression.
Cy Twombly, Landscape 1951
He was part of the movement away from Abstract Expressionism--a deconstructive coda--- and he became an American expatriate in Italy after his move to Rome and its landscape of ruins in 1957.
Some of the latter work is more of an extension of abstract expressionism with its subtle rhythmic patterns and muted colours:
Cy Twombly, Hero and Leandro (for Christopher Marlowe), 1985
Italy--and the Mediterranean---was a world of crumbling ruins and memories, where it was still possible to imagine the sea stained with the blood of old battles. Often there is text scribbled into his canvases and tghe titles refer to hos paintings connections with poetry.
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