Twombly used the nickname "Cy", after his father (also nicknamed Cy, who was briefly a pitcher in Major League Baseball) and the star baseball pitcher Cy Young. Twombly's paintings blur the line between drawing and painting. Many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s are reminiscent of a school blackboard on which someone has practiced cursive "e"s. Twombly had at this point discarded painting figurative, representational subject-matter, citing the line or smudge – each mark with its own history as its proper subject.
Tate's Director Nicholas Serota gives us a behind the scenes tour of the Cy Twombly exhibition (2008) as he makes the final adjustments to the hang just before opening. A long-standing fan, Serota talks about Twombly's technique, his relationship to Turner, and how the artist, in his eighties, was still producing at the time.
