Floor 4: Cy Twombly: East entrance from Warhol
Overview
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“My line is childlike but not childish. It is very difficult to fake. . . . To get that quality you need to project yourself into the child’s line. It has to be felt.”
—Twombly, 1994
Cy Twombly
Born 1928, Lexington, Virginia; died 2011, Rome
In 1953, while serving in the US Army’s cryptography department—the division responsible for creating and breaking codes—Cy Twombly practiced drawing in total darkness. His aim was to unlearn the skills and habits he had developed as an art student. These exercises shaped his subsequent direction, as he translated the heroic, gestural brushwork of Abstract Expressionism into a language of nervous scribbles and scrawls that blur the boundaries between drawing, writing, and painting. After making Italy his permanent home in 1957, Twombly often painted in deliberately crude lines and smears to evoke the culture, history, and landscape of the Mediterranean, merging the earthy and the elevated.
Objects
4 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
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2005–7
Acrylic paint on wood in wood artist’s frame
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2008
This work is part of III Notes from Salalah, a series in which Twombly’s signature blurring of the boundaries between painting and handwriting is magnified on an enormous scale. The watery cascade of lettering could represent segments of his blackboard paintings, now cropped and enlarged into a messy and majestic composition. The series title refers to the coastal oasis of Salalah in the Middle Eastern nation of Oman. This region is noted for its lush landscape, heavy mists, and seasonal waterfalls—features that result from its monsoon rains and set it in striking contrast with the surrounding desert.
Visual Description
A very large acrylic painting on wood (8 × 12 ft) spans far wider than it is tall, with pale gray-white lettering looping across a deep green field. The background is built from layered, rectangular brushstrokes and washes of dark forest green, emerald, and near-black, creating a mottled surface with visible vertical and horizontal strokes. The lettering stretches nearly the full width: looping cursive is on the left, while larger, elongated script runs across the center and right. The paint forming the letters is thick and wet-looking, with numerous drips falling straight down from each stroke—some drips long and threadlike, others pooling into heavier streams—especially beneath the final letters. Finer, hairline rivulets and splatters appear intermittently beneath the lettering. Subtle seams or panel divisions are faintly visible within the green field.
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1962
Crayon, graphite, and oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1997
Twombly created this work several years after moving to Rome, following his second trip there. The title, scrawled at the top left, calls to mind not only the artist’s own journey but also that of a classical Greek hero, while the vertical lines on the far right suggest an ancient column. As in much of Twombly’s work, references to the higher ground of intellect and culture are combined with a tumultuous spray of marks—graffiti-like scribbles and clots and smears of paint—that point to the more bodily, uninhibited elements of human existence.
Visual Description
A linen painting (about 5 × 6.5 ft) contains a light beige ground with scattered, sketched marks in graphite, crayon, and thin oil paint. Across the surface, there are clusters of looping pencil circles, zigzags, and half-erased contours. To the left, a dark maroon-brown smear with a rounded top releases several vertical drips downward. Near left-center, pale blue and gray strokes build a tall vertical column of marks, interrupted by red linear accents and angular outlines. Around the middle, pencil marks and pastel smudges create faint shapes, including a small dark oval smudge. In the upper left corner, a lightly drawn rectangular area with dense scribbling sits near the edge, while the upper center holds a faint, warm-toned patch of yellow and red strokes. On the right half, graphite loops gather into a large mass with small red dots and short lines embedded within it; below, reddish-brown arcing strokes sweep diagonally, layered over gray and black scribbles and a band of darker marks near the lower right. The overall piece is an expanse of negative space punctuated by overlapping lines, smears, and drips.
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1968
Oil-based house paint, crayon, and graphite on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1991
Visual Description
A large, horizontally oriented canvas (about 5.5 × 7 ft) presents an all-over abstract field of repeated looping marks in graphite and crayon on a pale gray-beige ground. The surface is filled with rows of elongated oval scribbles running left to right in horizontal bands from the top edge to the bottom. Near the upper third, the loops are tighter and darker, with more overlapping lines; several bands appear slightly lighter and more open, letting the ground show through between strokes. In the middle area, the ovals widen and stretch, and some lines shift from darker graphite to faint bluish-gray crayon. Toward the lower third, the marks are larger and more loosely drawn, with broader arcs and increased transparency where the pressure seems lighter. Throughout, there are occasional stray diagonal scratches and smudges.
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1971
Oil-based house paint and crayon on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, fractional purchase through gift
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2000
In the mid-1960s, Twombly began a series of restrained gray paintings that are often referred to as “blackboards” due to their visual resemblance to the familiar smudged chalkboards found in schoolrooms. Here, bundles of spirals stack up like waves rolling toward a beach. Like earlier and later paintings in which Twombly used words and images to refer to historical places and moments, this abstract composition suggests a narrative that is both grand and unstable.
Visual Description
A large horizontal canvas, about 10 × 16 ft, is painted in dark, charcoal-gray, oil-based house paint and covered edge-to-edge with white crayon marks. The composition is a mesh of looping, zigzagging, and cursive-like scribbles that spreads across the entire surface. The crayon lines vary in pressure and thickness, sometimes faint and thin, sometimes bright and thick, overlapping in multiple layers so that older marks appear partially buried beneath newer ones. The overall direction of the marks tends to sweep diagonally and horizontally. Subtle tonal variations in the gray paint—slightly lighter patches and faded areas—show through the web of white lines, adding depth and rendering a chalkboard-like surface. A narrow, lighter border frames the painted field.