In the United States, Postmodern skepticism often has relegated Cy Twombly’s engagement with classical and humanist themes to nostalgia, irrelevance, or an over-indulgence in European tropes. However, during Twombly’s artistic upbringing, in the 1940s and 50s, America’s left-leaning artists and intellectuals proposed that the development of a “new humanism” was necessary to redeem human behavior and assure freedom in the face of the Cold War. Central to this cultural project were efforts to understand the true nature of the human subject and to query the past for core human values. Twombly gravitated to the avant-garde for whom this was an urgent cultural imperative. This dissertation will survey Twombly’s formative years and will read his production through the theoretical models of humanism that arose after World War II.

Twombly was exposed to a potent version of the “new humanism” at Black Mountain College where he encountered two of its most active polemicists, Robert Motherwell and Charles Olson, the leader of the Black Mountain poets. Both men recognized Twombly’s early works as compatible with their own ideologies and artistic strategies. I will argue that Twombly’s early emulation of Abstract Expressionist practice moved him toward “existential” painting and sculpture. By interpreting Twombly’s works through the humanist phenomenological ontology that Sartre proposed, it is possible to understand the artist’s endeavor not only as an assertion of being-in-the-world but as a contribution to a humanist model of “existence.” To a great extent, in the American context, Olson’s humanism, “primitivisms,” and poetics elaborated on Sartre’s existentialism. Moreover, his theories of “open” form, language, and history were executed in a style of “projective verse.” This practice allowed one perception to follow another without concern for traditional poetics and has much in common with Twombly’s artistic solutions. Although Twombly’s embrace of the culture of experimentation and spontaneity cultivated at Black Mountain College launched him toward his mature work, I also will argue that his artistic breakthroughs occurred in tandem with important, early contacts with and his ultimate immersion in Italian culture.

Twombly participation in an American revision of humanism prepared a foundation for the artist’s life-long commitment to humanist discourse. By analyzing the artistic and intellectual grounding that supported Twombly’s education and early work, an historically situated humanism emerges as a new interpretive framework for Twombly’s career.