Cy Twombly Quotes

I love my sculptures, and I was lucky I had them for 50 years because no one would look at them and I really liked having them around.

And we who have always thought of happiness climbing, would feel the emotion that almost startles when happiness falls.

I hate roses. Don't you? It's all right if you can hide them in a cutting garden, but I think a rose garden is the height of ick.

The past is a springboard for me….Ancient things are new things. Everything lives in the moment; that’s the only time it can live, but its influence can go on forever.

We cannot guess what incident or influence arranged our lives or ambitions in the way that it did, or whether in fact it was something deeper. And most mysterious of all is why artists become artists, and why they become the artists they are.

The problem and pleasure of writing about any artist is that the life and the art always overlap, are always in conversation. No neat divide. No way to write about one without the other. Life and art are never separate conversations. It’s easy to read—and overread—the biographical in Twombly’s art. He practically dares you.

And yet, to describe Twombly’s abstract paintings, or to look at reproductions, tiny postage stamps a poor proxy for his floor-to-ceiling canvases, is to miss why they capture the imagination. “A Twombly looks,” writes one critic, “the way thinking sometimes feels.”8 And that is Twombly’s gift, the bewildering slipstream between thinking and feeling—a gift I’ve spent years trying to understand.

My daughter was making, that day in Chicago, an entirely unconscious but quite basic assumption about people and the work they do. She was assuming that the glory she saw in the work reflected a glory in its maker, that the painting was the painter as the poem is the poet, that every choice one made alone—every word chosen or rejected, every brush stroke laid or not laid down—betrayed one’s character. Style is character.

I’m held by nothing, I hold on to nothing, I belong to nothing. / All sensations seize me, and none endure.

the hero’s art is not about imagination, we see here, but perseverance in the face of endless tedium.

as if each painting is an hour of the day,

At first he looked out of touch, then he looked inevitable, and then he looked great.

His passions and enthusiasms extended to paintings of all kinds, as well as to history, mythology, music, and much else, and he did not care if others did not share them. He was learned in a non-scholarly way. For him, culture was a living thing, not a box full of treasures to be plundered.

But Yau overstates the case. Culture for Twombly was both a “living thing” and “a box of treasures to be plundered.” These are not mutually exclusive, especially for Twombly.

I would've liked to have been Poussin, if I'd had a choice, in another time.

copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s destroyed masterpiece peaking through at the edges.

His work is as much a form of behavior as a product of craft.

irrational, involuntary, accidental, free, random,

Black Mountain College: Sprouted Seed, edited by Mervin Lane, and Black Mountain Book by Fielding Dawson; for a more in-depth history of the ethos, freedom, and collaborative spirit of the college, see Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art,

Agnes Martin to Robert Ryman,

Part of the knack of looking at his paintings, as with swimming, is just to relax,” writes Martin Gayford. At which point, “Twombly’s art, far from being dauntingly avant-garde, is very easy to enjoy.

I’m asking them to empty themselves,” the photographer said of his process of giving his subjects so many instructions for how to position their body that they “become unaware, almost, of being photographed.”2

the feeling of deskilling that Twombly had spent a lifetime seeking and perfecting.4

Eros weaver of myth, Eros sweet and bitter, Eros bringer of pain.

The Image cannot / be dis possessed of a / PRIMORdial / freshness / which IDEAS / CAN NEVER CLAIM.”1

The paintings of Fifty Days live together permanently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I need to talk to her,” Joan Didion’s young daughter said after seeing Georgia O’Keeffe’s Sky Above Clouds at the Art Institute of Chicago.

And, of course, the flowers: irises, lilies, bellflowers, peonies, chrysanthemums, tulips, tea roses, dried roses, black roses, palm leaves, calla lilies, hibiscus, dried garlic, plastic and paper and fabric.

The quagliarola must have started.” Quagliarola, a word in no standard Italian dictionary, is the local term for the yearly migration of quail from North Africa to the Italian coast. This

In time, he made the name his own, signing it again and again, his handwriting so distinctive, and essential, to his process as a painter.

the yellow of fresh egg yolks, and the warm purple of a healing bruise, fire reds and candy pastels of blue and pink and white rising up only to descend into a chaotic central mass, like a hornet hive, before trailing off in dark marks at the far left of the canvas. Black lines, like primitive boats with crosshatched oars, open into a shimmering sea of white.

He wrote to Daura of his desire to paint all summer in Virginia, a place where he thrived as an artist—without school and with the freedom to paint from morning to late at night as he wished, copying from the masters when he ran out of his own ideas.

To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.