SFMOMA, Floor 4 · Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists.

The Twombly room sits just past Elizabeth Murray and Joan Mitchell, and after their color it can look, at first, like the room where someone forgot to finish. Pencil scratches on gray. White loops on a dark field the size of a wall. A wooden panel with a few strokes of paint. Twombly made marks that sit between drawing, writing, and painting, and the four works here span forty-five years, from his early years in Rome to a series named for a port on the Arabian Sea.

Virginia, Black Mountain, North Africa (1928–1957)

Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. was born in Lexington, Virginia, on April 25, 1928. His father, also called Cy, had pitched for the Chicago White Sox. At twelve he began private lessons with the Catalan painter Pierre Daura.

His training moved around: the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1948–49), Washington and Lee University in Lexington (1949–50), the Art Students League in New York (1950–51), and then Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where in 1951–52 he studied with Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. Kline's black-and-white gestures and Motherwell's interest in the automatic, unplanned mark both went into what Twombly did next.

In 1952 a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts paid for travel to North Africa, Spain, Italy, and France, partly with Robert Rauschenberg. In 1954 he served in the Army as a cryptographer in Washington, D.C. Scholars have often connected that work, codes and symbols that look like writing but are hard to read, with what came after.

In 1957 he moved to Rome. There he met Tatiana Franchetti, and they married at New York City Hall in 1959. They had a son, Alessandro, and never divorced. Twombly would live in Italy for most of the rest of his life.

The Room

Second Voyage to Italy (Second Version) (1962). Crayon, graphite, and oil on linen, about five by six and a half feet. The year is written by hand on the canvas. This is Twombly in his first full flush in Rome: patches of thin oil, pencil marks, numbers and smears, the surface of a wall or a notebook where people have scribbled over time. The title is a journey, and the painting reads like a travel journal written by someone who was too excited to write in lines.

In 1962 New York was all Pop and coming Minimalism. Twombly was in Rome looking at walls, ruins, and classical poetry. Many critics in New York didn't know what to make of him. He was in some ways a European painter born in Virginia.

Untitled (1968). Oil-based house paint, crayon, and graphite on canvas, about six by seven feet. The ground is a pale gray-beige, and the marks are in graphite and crayon. In the late 1960s Twombly made what are now called the gray paintings, often described as "blackboard" paintings (1967–71). Here the gray is light and the lines are loose, like notes on a chalkboard partly wiped clean.

Untitled (1971). Oil-based house paint and crayon on canvas, ten feet by sixteen: the biggest work in the room and one of the biggest on the floor. White crayon loops travel across a dark gray field in rows. It looks like handwriting practice, the same looping stroke repeated across a page, except that the page is the size of a wall and the letters never become a word. Like Agnes Martin's grids in another room, these loops are about steadiness and repetition, but where Martin holds still, Twombly's line keeps moving.

The 1968 and 1971 paintings belong together. In the first, the marks are scattered and tentative. In the second, they run in long lines, like a body moving in rhythm.

Between the Paintings (1971–2005)

Twombly stayed in Italy, and in the early 1990s he bought a house and rented a studio in Gaeta, on the coast between Rome and Naples. His later work moved toward big color and classical subjects; SFMOMA also owns Untitled (Bacchus 1st Version IV) from 2004.

Note I, from the series III Notes from Salalah (2005–2007). Acrylic on wood. Salalah is a port in southern Oman, on the Arabian Sea. In 2007 Twombly showed Three Notes from Salalah at Gagosian in Rome. This panel, made in his late seventies, has a few strong strokes on a wooden surface, nothing more. After forty years of covering canvases with marks, the late Twombly could say a lot with very little.

What the Room Shows

Put the four together and you have a life in handwriting. In 1962 he scribbled everywhere, like graffiti on a Roman wall. In 1968 and 1971 he turned the scribble into a rhythm. In 2007 he let a few strokes stand alone. Twombly once said he would have liked to be Poussin, "if I'd had a choice, in another time." He was drawn to the classical world, but painted it the way a modern hand moves: fast, unfinished, personal.

In 2010 his ceiling for the Salle des Bronzes at the Louvre was unveiled. Tatiana Franchetti died the same year. Twombly died in Rome on July 5, 2011, at eighty-three. 🌁

Timeline — Cy Twombly

• April 25, 1928 — Born in Lexington, Virginia.

• c. 1940 — Begins lessons with Pierre Daura.

• 1948–1949 — School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

• 1949–1950 — Washington and Lee University.

• 1950–1951 — Art Students League, New York.

• 1951–1952 — Black Mountain College; studies with Kline and Motherwell.

• 1952 — Travels to North Africa and Europe, partly with Rauschenberg.

• 1954 — Army cryptographer in Washington, D.C.

• 1957 — Moves to Rome; meets Tatiana Franchetti.

• 1959 — Marries Franchetti.

• 1962 — Second Voyage to Italy (Second Version).

• 1967–1971 — The gray paintings.

• 1968 — Untitled.

• 1971 — Untitled, ten by sixteen feet.

• Early 1990s — House and studio in Gaeta.

• 2005–2007 — III Notes from Salalah.

• 2007 — Three Notes from Salalah at Gagosian, Rome.

• 2010 — Louvre ceiling unveiled; Tatiana Franchetti dies.

• July 5, 2011 — Dies in Rome.