Cy Twombly died.

Cy Twombly died. Great painter. Friend and fellow artist with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

Good obit at New Yorker Posted by Peter Schjeldahl: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/07/cy-twombly-1928-2011.html

Another at the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/arts/cy-twombly-american-artist-is-dead-at-83.html

And also at the NYT an assessment by Roberta Smith at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/arts/design/cy-twombly-an-art-who-emphasized-mark-making.html

Brief slide show at: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/07/06/arts/cy-twombly-art.html

Nice site for Twombly: http://www.cytwombly.info/index.html

I like his work. I know it only a little. Often heard his name, but have not really thought deeply about him. What I know I like. I like his attitude. His silence. His playfulness. His distance from the scene. He liked the work of Arshile Gorky. I've always liked Gorky.

From the NYT article:

"In the summer of 1952, after receiving a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Mr. Twombly traveled to Europe for the first time and met up with Rauschenberg. The two wandered through Italy, North Africa and Spain, an experience that later yielded some of the first paintings to be considered a part of Mr. Twombly’s mature work. “Tiznit,” made with white enamel house paint and pencil and crayon, with gouges and scratches in the surface, was named for a town in Morocco that he had visited, and the painting’s primitivist shapes were inspired by tribal pieces he saw at the ethnographic museum in Rome, as well as by artists like Dubuffet, de Kooning and Franz Kline."