Painting Of Sculptures

High quality on a large scale

CY Twombly, whose large-scale paintings featured scribbles and graffiti, was inspired by a deep love of European and classical culture.

"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."

Twombly was known for his abstract works combining painting and drawing techniques, repetitive lines, scribbles and the use of words and graffiti.

He is often linked to Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whom he met as a student in New York in the early 1950s.

"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," Tate Modern director Nicholas Serota once said.

Twombly was asked to paint a ceiling of the Louvre in Paris last year, the first artist given that honour since Georges Braque in the 50s. He chose something simple: a deep blue background punctuated with floating disks and emblazoned with the names of sculptors from ancient Greece, apt for a gallery of bronzes.

Twombly's work fetched millions at auction: an untitled painting set an auction record for the artist at a 2002 Sotheby's sale, fetching E5.6 million.

Before that, a 1990 Christie's auction set a record for Twombly, with his 1971 untitled blackboard painting going for $US5.5m.

His canvases also ignited the passions of his followers. In 2007, a woman was arrested in France for kissing an all-white canvas he painted, worth about $US2m. Restorers had trouble getting the lipstick off it and she was ordered to pay hundreds of dollars to the owner and the gallery, and $US1.50 to the artist.

Born Edwin Parker Twombly in 1928, the artist got his nickname from his father, a baseball player who had been called Cy after another famous slugger, "Cyclone" Young.

Between 1942 and 1946, he studied modern European art under Pierre Daura, a Spanish artist who was living in his home town, Lexington, according to a catalogue for a 2009 Twombly exhibition in Rome organised by Tate Modern and Rome's National Museum of Modern Art.

In 1950, he won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York, where he was exposed to the works of Rothko, Pollock and others. There he met Robert Rauschenburg, a few years his senior.

Recent Paintings and Sculptures by Takashi Murakami at Gagosian in ...

LONDON.- Gagosian Gallery presents recent paintings and sculptures by Takashi Murakami.

In his distinctive "Superflat" style, which employs highly refined, traditional Japanese painting techniques and formats to depict a charged mix of historical subject matter, Pop, animé and otaku content within a flattened representational picture-plane, Murakami moves freely within an ever-expanding field of aesthetic issues and cultural inspirations. Parallel to his distinctive toonish formulations of utopian and dystopian themes, he has recollected and revitalized religious and secular narratives of transcendence and enlightenment favoured by non-conformist Japanese artists from the Early Modern era, commonly considered to be counterpart to the Western Romantic tradition. By situating himself within their legacy of bold and lively individualism in a manner that is entirely his own, he revealed himself to be an artist in dialogue with history and very much of his time.

Murakami’s latest group of paintings explores his complex ambivalence to the legacy of cosmopolitan painter Kuroda Seiki, who brought yōga or Western-style painting to Meiji- period Japan. Kuroda broadly promoted the genre of history painting, as well as the validity of the nude figure as a subject for art. Taking Kuroda’s famous triptych, Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment (c.1900), Murakami consciously reclaims it in a new iteration by applying traditional nihonga techniques like gold- and silver-leafing, as well as recasting the realistically rendered nude figures in contemporary manga style. When it was first shown, Kuroda’s work caused great controversy because of its content, however, as Murakami reminds in paintings such as Shunga: Gibbons (2010) and Shunga: Bow Wow (2010), Japan had embraced explicit erotic content in art as early as the twelfth century. By the Edo period, the long-established genre of shunga sought to express a varied world of contemporary sexual possibilities, often referred to as the creation of a “pornotopia,” an idealised, eroticised and fantastical world parallel to contemporary urban life. In Murakami’s contemporary shunga, graphic depictions of exaggerated and engorged male and female genitals are set against delirious backgrounds of image and pattern.

Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1880-1940

Painting and sculptures

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