Pure Taste Indicator - Artist Page

courtesy of collectionofthefame.net

Cy Twombly moved from New York to Italy in 1958 and lived and worked there for decades. The Mediterranean landscape, both the physical and the literary environments, was fertile ground for Twombly?s six-decade-long meditation on gesture, image, symbol, and beauty. Twombly began his art career in New York and though influenced by abstract expressionism, he quickly sought techniques of painting beyond the compositional restrictions of cubism and the existential posturings of New York painting at that time. In 1952, Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg took a six-month journey to Italy and North Africa. During the seminal trip, Twombly absorbed Mediterranean culture as well as made compositional breakthroughs in his North African sketchbooks. The paintings made on his return to New York feature graffiti-like constellations of images and marks that combine and recombine across a surface that never locks into a compositional stasis. Twombly literally carved into wet surfaces of paint with palette knife and pencil, aggressively vandalizing and reconfiguring the meaning of painting.
Source :http://www.thebroad.org/art/cy-twombly