Cy Twombly, Cause of Death, Autopsy Report

Cy Twombly, Cause of Death, Autopsy Report

Cy Twombly was an American painter, sculptor, and photographer. He belonged to the generation of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Age

Cy was born on April 25, 1928. He was 83 years old when he died on July 5, 2011.

Education

At age 12, Twombly began to take private art lessons with the Catalan modern master Pierre Daura. After graduating from Lexington High School in 1946, Twombly attended Darlington School in Rome, Georgia, and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1948–49), and at Washington and Lee University (1949–50) in Lexington, Virginia.

On a tuition scholarship from 1950 to 1951, he studied at the Art Students League of New York, where he met Robert Rauschenberg.

Rauschenberg encouraged him to attend Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina. At Black Mountain in 1951 and 1952, he studied with Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Ben Shahn, and met John Cage. The poet and rector of the College, Charles Olson, had a great influence on him.

Career

Twombly is said to have influenced younger artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, and Julian Schnabel. His best-known works are typically large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic and graffiti-like works on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors.

His later paintings and works on paper shifted toward “romantic symbolism”, and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms, and words.

Twombly often quoted poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke, and John Keats, as well as classical myths and allegories, in his works. Examples of this are his Apollo and The Artist and a series of eight drawings consisting solely of inscriptions of the word “VIRGIL”.

Cause of Death

In July 2011, after suffering from cancer for several years, Twombly died in Rome after a brief hospitalization.

Personal Life

In 1957, Twombly moved to Rome, where he met the Italian artist Tatiana Franchetti – sister of his patron Baron Giorgio Franchetti.

They had a son, Cyrus Alessandro Twombly (born 1959), who is also a painter and lives in Rome.

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