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Cy Twombly Quotes

1928–2011 United States

Cy Twombly (April 25, 1928 - July 5, 2011) was an American painter, sculptor and photographer, creating abstract art. He belonged to the generation of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns; Twombly made the specific choice to live in Europe, Italy - after 1957.

United States
Painters
Photographers
Sculptors

Random Cy Twombly quote

10 quotes

I respond to the Greek love of metamorphosis.

I'm drawn to the primitive, the ritual and fetish elements.

When I work I work very fast, but preparing the work can take any length.

For myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary).

In painting it is the forming of the image.

I think of myself as a Romantic Symbolist.

To paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of sensation or release.By crisis by no means limited to a morbid state, but could just as easily be an ecstatic impulse.

I work in waves because I'm impatient. It has to be done. I take liberties.

I knew a poet who was totally ignorant about botany. And I said: you can't be a poet without knowing any botany or plants and things like that; it's impossible, that's the first thing you should know.

Cy Twombly, 2000', by David Sylvester (2000)

Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate — it is the sensation of its own realization. [a written art note by Twombly on a painting he created in 1957].

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Cy Twombly (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.