Cy Twombly, the Inscrutable (but haunting) Scrawler, Dies UPDATED

Detail from installation of "Fifty Days at Iliam," 1978, Philadelphia Museum of Art

In his fine (but preliminary) obituary for Cy Twombly, who died Tuesday at 83, the NY Times' Randy Kennedy wrote:

He [Twombly]...mostly ignored his critics, who questioned constantly whether his work deserved a place at the forefront of 20th-century abstraction, though he lived long enough to see it arrive there [emphasis added].

[UPDATE: The Times has now published Kennedy's full-length Twombly obit, here.]

Indeed, Twombly was an artist whose difficult-to-appreciate but ultimately absorbing meditations in two-dimensional, scrawled mark-making and three-dimensional rough-hewn, found-object compositions have been accorded large, immersive (and, in some cases, permanent) installations by several U.S. institutions. (And who can ever forget the woman who kissed the Twombly?)

High-profile museum installations include: the Renzo Piano-designed Cy Twombly Gallery (a dedicated building operated by the Menil Collection, Houston); the Philadelphia Museum's large space permanently devoted to the monumental, 10-part Fifty Days at Iliam, 1978; the generous space for his work at the inaugural installation of Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the large special exhibition of what I previously called (in the Wall Street Journal) a "rhapsodic, revelatory survey of recent work..., including his monumental, lushly colored flower paintings"---a highlight of the 2009 opening of the new Renzo Piano-designed Modern Wing of the Art Institutute of Chicago.


Twombly, "Untitled," 2005, in the lobby of Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, at the new building's 2009 opening (which featured a special exhibition of his recent works)

In 2008, the Tate Modern, London, mounted a fullblown Twombly retrospective, curated by its director, Nicholas Serota. It traveled to Bilbao and Rome, his home town (but not to his native U.S.).

Twombly was a favorite of the Museum of Modern Art's late chief curator of painting and sculpture, Kirk Varnedoe. So it was particularly fitting that MoMA announced in March its acquisition of two paintings and seven sculptures, ranging in date from 1954 to 2005, which came from Twombly's own collection. On display since May 20 (to Oct. 3), the Twombly show has now become a memorial exhibition (as is Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, to Sept. 25).