Cy Twombly, whose spare, childlike scribbles and poetic engagement with antiquity left him stubbornly out of step with the movements of postwar American art even as he became one of the era's most important painters, died on Tuesday in Rome. He was 83. Mr. Twombly with his painting "1994 Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor)," in 2005.
Mr. Twombly's career slyly subverted Abstract Expressionism, toyed briefly with Minimalism, seemed barely to acknowledge Pop art and anticipated some of the concerns of Conceptualism. At left, his 1953 piece "Tiznit."
"Untitled (Funerary Box for a Lime Green Python)" from 1954. The critic Robert Hughes called Mr. Twombly "the Third Man, a shadowy figure, beside that vivid duumvirate of his friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg."
"Nini's Painting" from 1971. Mr. Twombly, a tall, rangy Virginian who once practiced drawing in the dark to make his lines less purposeful, steadfastly followed his own program and looked to his own muses — often literary ones, like Catullus, Rumi, Pound and Rilke. He seemed to welcome the privacy that came with unpopularity.
"Untitled" from 2005. In the only written statement 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." Years later, he described this more plainly. "It's more like I'm having an experience than making a picture," he said.
"Untitled" from 2007. After completing a work, in a kind of ecstatic state, it was as if the painting existed but Mr. Twombly himself barely did anymore: "I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days," he said.
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