Not Everyone Gets It: Cy Twombly and the Abstract Divide

Feature image: Untitled (Bacchus), 2005–2008 via Christie's © Cy Twombly Foundation

A couple of days ago, I posted a clip on our Instagram of Joe Rogan ranting about Cy Twombly. Rogan was aggressive and dismissive. He held up Twombly as a symbol of everything he thinks is wrong with modern art: lazy, meaningless, and overvalued. It got a lot of views, and I got many threatening direct messages, along with unfollows, and people telling me to “do better.” It also exposed something I’ve long suspected: that people either love abstract art or they love to hate it. The post was a blatant video of an influential person’s opinion, and it incited a multitude of debates in the comment section. 

But here’s the twist. In this case, the hate sparked something unexpected: defense. Suddenly, the comments were filled with people standing up for Twombly, abstraction, and emotion over realism. It revealed a curious dynamic I’ve seen play out repeatedly: when you simply post a video of Jackson Pollock at work, people scoff. But when someone as loud and influential as Rogan publicly bashes an abstract artist, it provokes a backlash. It becomes an experiment in art world perception, and Twombly is the perfect case study.

Born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928, Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. was named after the legendary pitcher Cy Young. He studied at the Art Students League in New York, then at Black Mountain College, where he crossed paths with titans like Robert Rauschenberg and Franz Kline. Early on, Twombly was lumped in with the Abstract Expressionists, but his work would evolve into something far more delicate, literary, and emotionally rich.

By the 1950s, he had moved to Italy, escaping the noise of New York and immersing himself in the layered history of classical antiquity. It was there, amid crumbling ruins and Renaissance light, that Twombly developed his signature style: scribbles, smudges, scratches, often over massive white canvases. But these were no random marks. They referenced Homeric epics, Greek tragedies, Latin poetry, and eroticism. Twombly painted with both body and brain, his gestures raw, but his references sublime.

At first glance, a Twombly painting may look like a child’s scrawl. But look closer, and you'll find layers of myth, memory, and motion. His canvases feel like palimpsests, haunted surfaces where ancient texts have been erased and rewritten. He didn’t just paint; he invoked.

Twombly fused classical civilization with modern abstraction, dragging history into the present with each mark. In works like Apollo and the Artist or Leda and the Swan, he wasn’t telling stories; he was channeling them through color, gesture, and rhythm. He once said, “My line is childlike but not childish. It is very difficult to fake... to get that quality, you need to project yourself into the child’s line. It has to be felt.”

What makes his work powerful is that it refuses to explain itself. It asks to be experienced, not decoded. Like music or poetry, it bypasses logic and goes straight for the gut.

Yes, it’s true: during the Cold War, the CIA indirectly promoted Abstract Expressionism as part of a broader cultural strategy. Through a covert program known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA funneled funds into exhibitions, publications, and cultural institutions that highlighted American modern art, especially Abstract Expressionists like Pollock, Rothko, and de Kooning. The aim? To showcase American creativity, freedom of expression, and individualism in contrast to the state-sanctioned realism of the Soviet Union.

But it’s important to clarify: artists like Cy Twombly were not “in on it.” Many had no idea this funding was taking place. The art wasn't created for propaganda; it was used as propaganda after the fact. The CIA didn’t invent abstract art; they simply recognized its potential to symbolize Western values and subtly boost American cultural dominance.

So yes, there’s a Cold War backstory. But Twombly’s work wasn’t about politics; it was about poetry, myth, and emotion. If anything, the CIA’s co-opting of the movement speaks to its undeniable power: even intelligence agencies knew that abstraction could stir the soul.

Twombly’s canvases now sell for tens of millions of dollars. His 1970 chalkboard-like painting Untitled (New York City) sold for $70.5 million in 2015. He has been the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, and MoMA. His work lives in the permanent collections of nearly every major museum of modern art.

So what are collectors and curators seeing that skeptics don’t? The answer is in the feeling. Twombly’s work isn’t about technical mastery or realism; it’s about translating the texture of memory, the echo of literature, the sensuality of the human hand. It takes confidence to stand in front of a blank canvas and trust that your marks, your personal symbols, can carry meaning. It’s not easy to look at a scribble and call it art. But that’s the point.

Part of the discomfort around abstract art comes from the fear of being “duped.” People worry they’re being tricked, that a canvas full of looping lines or finger smears is some grand con. But this is rooted in the false idea that art must look like something to mean something.

What critics like Rogan miss is that abstraction isn’t trying to imitate life. It’s trying to express it through form, color, and mark. Twombly's scribbles are not carelessness; they are confidence. A refusal to obey the rules of conventional beauty.

It’s also worth noting that some of the world’s most emotional and philosophical works are non-representational. We don’t ask Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to be “about” something. We feel it. Abstract painting, like music, operates on a plane of sensation.

Cy Twombly bridged eras, cultures, and disciplines. He made room in the art world for vulnerability, for a softer, more poetic modernism. His work is not for everyone, and that’s okay. But to dismiss it as nonsense is to overlook the sheer ambition of turning myth into motion, language into landscape.

So when people mock Twombly, they’re not just mocking his scribbles. They mock the idea that art can be emotional, indirect, or even mysterious. And that’s a shame, because Twombly dared to leave things unfinished in a world that demands instant meaning and polished perfection.

And that, in the end, is what makes his work unforgettable.

All archival images in this article are used under fair use for educational and non-commercial purposes. Proper credit has been given to photographers, archives, and original sources where known.

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