The New York Times’s Randy Kennedy says Gagosian Gallery has announced Cy Twombly’s death despite early reports from Europe citing Fondation Lambert’s Eric Mézil. Kennedy tries to further explain the eventual rise of Twombly’s reputation.

Mr. Twombly was a divisive artist almost from the start. The curator Kirk Varnedoe, on the occasion of a 1994 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote that his work was “influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well.” The critic Robert Hughes called him “the Third Man, a shadowy figure, beside that vivid duumvirate of his friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.” […] But by the 1980s, with the rise of neo-Expressionism, a generation of younger artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat found inspiration in Mr. Twombly’s skittery bathroom-graffiti scrawl. Coupled with rising interest in European artists whose work shared unexpected ground with Mr. Twombly’s, like that of Joseph Beuys, the new-found attention brought him a kind of critical favor he had never enjoyed. […] Despite this growing acceptance, Mr. Varnedoe still felt it necessary to include an essay in the Modern’s newsletter at the time of the retrospective, titled “Your Kid Could Not Do This, And Other Reflections on Cy Twombly.”

Le Monde reports that Cy Twombly died on Tuesday July 5th according to Eric Mézil of the Fondation Lambert which is holding an exhibition of his work in Avignon.

The Artist Cy Twombly is Dead (Le Monde)

US Artist Cy Twombly Dies in Rome: French Gallery (AFP)

Cy Twombly, Idiosyncratic Painter, Dies at 83 (Arts Beat/New York Times)