Cy Twombly
Cy Twombly (Lexington, Virginia, 1928 – Rome, Italy, 2011) married the gestural freedom of Abstract Expressionism to a private, sustained dialogue with classical antiquity, building paintings out of layered acts of writing and erasure rather than spontaneous doodling: words and fragments of text surface, are crossed out, half-legible, scribbled over, so that the surface reads like a palimpsest of thought caught mid-revision.
Twombly trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Art Students League, where a fellow student, Robert Rauschenberg, urged him toward Black Mountain College. There he studied under Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline, absorbing Abstract Expressionism just as he began pushing past it toward calligraphic marks that read as much like ancient graffiti as painting, a vocabulary sharpened by a subsequent stint as an Army cryptographer, work that trained his eye on codes, ciphers, and the gap between mark and meaning.
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Essay · Joan Robledo-Palop · March 15, 2026
Philip Johnson, David Whitney, and Postwar American Art
The Architecture of Collecting
This essay inaugurates The Architecture of Collecting, a series on the spaces, patrons, relationships, and intermediaries through which twentieth-century art entered cultural memory. At Philip Johnson and David Whitney’s Glass House, collecting became a form of cultural construction: a web of objects, rooms, artists, friendships, institutions, and future histories, shaped by architecture and by the conditions through which art is seen, remembered, donated, dispersed, and ultimately canonized.
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