Cy Twombly: Folksinger’s Muse

We were saddened to learn of the death today of Cy Twombly, the postwar American artist known for his free-form, childlike paintings. Twombly’s scribbles and scrawled text didn’t quite fit in with the work of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries; he was known as a bit of an iconoclast and often baffled critics.

But for his admirers, Twombly’s paintings carry an incredible amount of power and emotion in their rawness. A couple years ago on the show, the singer-songwriter Tift Merritt shared the touching story of how a Twombly painting saved her from her writer’s block. Needing an escape from life on the road, Merritt retreated to Paris, where one day she took a trip to the Centre Pompidou. There a giant canvas by Twombly “stopped me dead in my tracks,” she explains. “It was passionate, it was sensual, it was angry, it was distilled with such intensity…” and it inspired her to approach her own work in an entirely new way.