Frieze 91 is delighted to invite you for a private tour of the Cy Twombly Foundation.
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. (; April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011) was an American painter, sculptor and photographer. He belonged to the generation of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
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".
Twombly's works are in the permanent collections of modern art museums globally, including the Menil Collection in Houston, the Tate Modern in London, New York's Museum of Modern Art and Munich's Museum Brandhorst. He was commissioned for a ceiling at the Musée du Louvre in Paris. In a 1994 retrospective, curator Kirk Varnedoe described Twombly's work as "influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well."
The Cy Twombly Foundation is a private non-profit foundation established in 2005. Our mission is to foster the study and preservation of the work and legacy of Cy Twombly. We are engaged in a comprehensive project to research and publish catalogues raisonnés that illustrate and detail the artist's work, and are committed to supporting other scholarship on the artist and exhibitions of his work around the world. We also support philanthropic initiatives and organizations that embody the spirit of the artist's work and charitable endeavors. For institutions that encourage a deeper and broader appreciation of the artist, we have made special gifts of his work to their permanent collections.