Cy Twombly

Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. (April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011) was an American painter, sculptor and photographer.

Twombly influenced artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

His best-known works are typically large-scale, freely-scribbled, calligraphic and graffiti-like works on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors.

His later paintings and works on paper shifted toward "romantic symbolism", and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words.

Twombly often quoted poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke and John Keats, as well as classical myths and allegories, in his works.

Examples of this are his Apollo and The Artist and a series of eight drawings consisting solely of inscriptions of the word "VIRGIL".

Twombly's works are in the permanent collections of modern art museums globally, including the Menil Collection in Houston, the Tate Modern in London, New York's Museum of Modern Art and Munich's Museum Brandhorst.

He was commissioned for a ceiling at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia, on April 25, 1928.

Twombly's father, also nicknamed "Cy", pitched for the Chicago White Sox.

They were both nicknamed after the baseball great Cy Young, who pitched for, among others, the Cardinals, Red Sox, Indians, and Braves.

At age 12, Twombly began to take private art lessons with the Catalan modern master Pierre Daura.

After graduating from Lexington High School in 1946, Twombly attended Darlington School in Rome, Georgia, and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1948–49), and at Washington and Lee University (1949–50) in Lexington, Virginia.

On a tuition scholarship from 1950 to 1951, he studied at the Art Students League of New York, where he met Robert Rauschenberg.

Rauschenberg encouraged him to attend Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina.

He became fascinated with tribal art, using the painterly language of the early 1950s to invoke primitivism, reversing the normal evolution of the New York School.

At Black Mountain in 1951 and 1952 he studied with Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Ben Shahn, and met John Cage.

The poet and rector of the College, Charles Olson, had a great influence on him.

Motherwell arranged Twombly's first solo exhibition, which was organized by the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery in New York in 1951.

At this time his work was influenced by Kline's black-and-white gestural expressionism, as well as Paul Klee's imagery.

In 1952, Twombly received a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts which enabled him to travel to North Africa, Spain, Italy, and France.

He spent this journey in Africa and Europe with Robert Rauschenberg.

After his return in 1953, Twombly served in the United States Army as a cryptologist, an activity that left a distinct mark on his artistic style.

In 1954, he served in the U.S. Army as a cryptographer in Washington, D.C., and would frequently travel to New York during periods of leave.

From 1955 through 1956, he taught at the Southern Seminary and Junior College in Buena Vista, Virginia, currently known as Southern Virginia University; during the summer vacations, Twombly would travel to New York to paint in his Williams Street apartment.

From 1955 to 1959, he worked in New York, where he became a prominent figure among a group of artists including Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he was sharing a studio, and Jasper Johns.

Exposure to the emerging New York School purged figurative aspects from his work, encouraging a simplified form of abstraction.

In 1957, Twombly moved to Rome and made it his primary city, where he met the Italian artist Tatiana Franchetti – sister of his patron Baron Giorgio Franchetti.

They were married at New York City Hall in 1959 and then bought a palazzo on the Via di Monserrato in Rome.

Around 1961, through their mutual relationship with the artist Afro, Twombly met the American artist Joseph Glasco in Mykonos.

According to Glasco, he and Twombly "saw each other every summer in Mykonos for years ... and saw a lot of each other daily".

In 1964, Twombly met Nicola Del Roscio of Gaeta, who became his longtime companion.

Twombly bought a house and rented a studio in Gaeta in the early 1990s.

In a 1994 retrospective, curator Kirk Varnedoe described Twombly's work as "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."

Twombly and Tatiana, who died in 2010, never divorced and remained friends.

In July 2011, after suffering from cancer for several years, Twombly died in Rome after a brief hospitalization.

A plaque in Santa Maria in Vallicella commemorates him.

In addition, they had a 17th-century palace in Bassano in Teverina, near Viterbo.

In 2023, the palace was restored and reopened to the public as an artists residence and an exhibition center.

The first artist being hosted is American painter Robert Nava.