AbstractsHistory

Within current scholarship Cy Twombly is examined in terms of the American abstract expressionist movement he derives from, and not within the European context under which his most groundbreaking works were created. This thesis situates Twombly within the fragmented Europe he experienced upon moving to Rome in 1957, and the Post World War II problem-set he was forced to confront. In 1961 Twombly created his most pivotal series of paintings entitled Ferragosto. Based on the transformed Pagan to Roman Catholic holiday, Twombly dismantles the history of painting within this five-part series. Twombly attacks the conception of 'time' and therefore embeds the Ferragosto series within history, the evolutionary quality of these canvases acts as evidence of this attack. Often equated to Jackson Pollock vis-à-vis his gesture, Twombly confronts the monochrome and the dichotomy between absence and excess that surfaces in the paintings of his European contemporaries Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana.