Cy Twombly (1928-2011)

“Twombly’s work, and our response to it, involves acts of faith in this modern experiment to renew a basic magic of art, immemorial,  endlessly uncertain, and always open to discovery. For all the complex linguistic structure of his aesthetic and the rich web of his references, what his achievement may ultimately depend upon most heavily is the power he has drawn from within himself and from so many enabling traditions, to isolate in a particularly raw and unsettled fashion that primal electricity of communication, in his apparently simplest acts of naming, marking, and painting.”
 
Kirk Varnedoe, Cy Twombly A Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994, p. 51.