Painting in the dark

Celebrated Lexington-born painter Cy Twombly, whose large-scale paintings featuring scribbles, graffiti and references to ancient empires fetched millions at auction, died in Rome Tuesday at 83.

"A great American painter who deeply loved old Europe has just left us," French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand said in a statement. "His work was deeply marked by his passion for Greek and Roman antiquity, and its mythology, which for him was a source of bottomless inspiration."

"Whether it's making sculpture or working across canvas or making small drawings with quite elaborate and detailed elements in them, you have this very strong sense of the physical presence of these paintings and sculptures, and you have the sense of an artist at work," the Tate's director Nicholas Serota said in an in-house interview ahead of a 2008 show of his work.

Yet others have been more skeptical about Twombly's skill. Washington Post art critic Peter Richards wrote in 1994 that Twombly's paintings sent "mixed messages"-- everything from Latin, Hindi and French inscriptions to foul language and obscene symbols. Richards described some "vaporous, offhand, wispy beauty" in Twombly's works, but that was overshadowed by repetitiveness and the modern artist's "willful, privileged disregard for structural rigidities and hierarchies of order."

In 1954, Twombly was drafted and trained as a cryptographer in the U.S. Army. While serving, he would draw in the dark, following a Surrealist technique. His blind art symbolized his struggle to pin down a concrete philosophy.

"It is a lot more interesting to think about than it is to see," Richards wrote, but concluded, "The big ideas [implied] are not really there."

Twombly was asked to paint a ceiling of the Louvre museum in Paris in 2010, the first artist given the honor since Georges Braque in the 1950s. His unusually-colored work was inspired by the colors he found in a Chinese print as well the blue of early Italian Renaissance artist Giotto, who used paint made from lapis lazuli.

"I was just thinking of the blue with the disks on it, it's totally abstract.... It's that simple," Twombly told The Associated Press at the time.

Simple or not, his work fetched millions at auction: An untitled Twombly painting set an auction record for the artist at a 2002 Sotheby's sale, fetching 5.6 million euros. Before that, a 1990 Christie's auction set a record for Twombly, with his 1971 untitled blackboard painting going for $5.5 million.

In 2007, a woman was arrested in France for kissing an all-white canvas he painted, worth about $2 million. Restorers had trouble getting the lipstick off, and she was ordered to pay hundreds of dollars to the owner and the gallery -- and $1.50 to the artist himself.

In 1954, he left the United States for Rome because the U.S. was becoming too "proletariat," as he told Vogue. In 1959, he married Luisa Tatiana Franchetti and they had a son, Alessandro Cyrus.

In 1980, he opened his first major sculpture show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The exhibit was still able to ignite the old controversy about whether what he made was really art and whether what he possessed was really talent.

To some it looked like the debris in a carpenter's shop with planks and crudely nailed boxes slathered with white paint and plaster. For others, it was an eloquent reminder of the ancient Mediterranean.

Mezil, the Avignon gallery director, said that his work only got better with time. Twombly's June show there was "the most beautiful exhibit before his death," he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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