It’s difficult to make a calibrated and semi-nuanced case in favor of a prominent artist who’s just died. Opinions at tend to fall emphatically either in the direction of praise (Twombly was one of the greatest American artists of the post-World-War-II era) or bah-humbug (Twombly was a late-to-the-game Abstract Expressionist who tarted up comparatively vacuous paintings with references advertising his erudition). For me, the two extremes are both true, but in a way that leaves my estimation of Twombly not in the middle, but way over on the positive side. Though his works seem to resemble doodling, involuntary drawing or a child
practising writing, he introduces painting in the style of ancient graffiti,
scribbled texts, drawings and simple hand exercises.
Cy Twombly stretched Abstract Expressionism to its limit. He filled his work with a whole lot of white, punctuated by what most critics affectionately call “scribbles,” words printed or written as if by a palsied hand, and clots of nervous brushstrokes that looked like chrysthanemums. 
Fifty Days at Iliam: Shield of Achilles, 1978 by Cy Twombly
There’s still something faintly galling about Twombly’s words on canvas, and I probably don’t believe that he misspelled “Ilium” as “Iliam” in the Fifty Days at Iliam permanent gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on purpose because he wanted an “a” to refer to Achilles. Do we really need the words? Do they really add anything, visually, to the work? Do they really evoke anything about their putative subject, beyond simple labeling?
Many people scratch their heads at abstract art and doubt the skills of abstract artists in general, not to mention when the art looks like scribbles. According to The New York Times’ ArtsBeats blog, “…even critics questioned constantly whether Twombly’s work deserved a place at the forefront of 20th-century abstraction, though he lived long enough to see it arrive there.”
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