Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly—born Edwin Parker Twombly Jr. in Lexington, Virginia, on April 25, 1928—was an American artist who worked across painting, sculpture, and photography. He is best remembered for his large, scribbled, graffiti-like canvases, often set against muted backgrounds of gray, tan, or off-white. Over time, his work grew more romantic and symbolic, with titles that viewers could read through shapes, forms, and words. Twombly frequently wove in references to poets like Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke, and John Keats, as well as classical myths and allegories. Examples include *Apollo and The Artist* and a series of eight drawings that repeat only the word "Virgil."

His art appears in major modern art collections worldwide, including the Menil Collection in Houston, the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Munich's Museum Brandhorst. He also received a commission to paint a ceiling at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

Twombly’s father, also nicknamed “Cy,” was a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox; both father and son took their nickname from baseball legend Cy Young. At age twelve, Twombly began private art lessons with Catalan modernist Pierre Daura. After high school, he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Washington and Lee University, and the Art Students League of New York, where he met Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he had a brief romantic relationship. Rauschenberg encouraged him to attend Black Mountain College, where he studied under Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Ben Shahn, and met John Cage. Poet and college rector Charles Olson also influenced him deeply.

Motherwell arranged Twombly’s first solo show at the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery in New York in 1951. At that time, his work showed the influence of Kline’s black-and-white gestural abstraction and Paul Klee’s imagery. A grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1952 let him travel to North Africa, Spain, Italy, and France with Rauschenberg. After serving as a U.S. Army cryptographer in Washington, D.C., he taught at Southern Seminary and Junior College in Buena Vista, Virginia, painting in New York during summer breaks.

In 1957, Twombly moved to Rome, making it his primary home. There he met Italian artist Tatiana Franchetti, sister of his patron Baron Giorgio Franchetti. They married in 1959 and bought a palazzo on Rome’s Via di Monserrato, also owning a 17th-century palace in Bassano in Teverina, near Viterbo. (That palace was restored and reopened in 2023 as an artists’ residence and exhibition center, with American painter Robert Nava as its first resident.) The couple had a son, Alessandro. Around 1961, through artist Afro Basaldella, Twombly met American painter Joseph Glasco in Mykonos; they saw each other there every summer for years. In 1964, Twombly met Nicola Del Roscio of Gaeta, Italy, who became his longtime assistant, companion, and archivist. Twombly bought a house and rented a studio in Gaeta in the early 1990s. He and Tatiana never divorced and remained friends until her death in 2010.

Twombly died in Rome in July 2011 after a brief hospitalization, following several years of cancer. A plaque in Santa Maria in Vallicella commemorates him.

His time as a cryptologist in the army left a clear mark on his style. From 1955 to 1959, he worked in New York, sharing a studio with Rauschenberg and becoming part of a circle that included Jasper Johns. The emerging New York School pushed him away from figuration toward simplified abstraction. He became fascinated with tribal art and used early-1950s painterly language to evoke primitivism, reversing the usual trajectory of the New York School. He developed a technique of gestural drawing with thin white lines on dark canvas, often applying bitumen quickly and coarsely to create a scarred, tactile surface. He stopped making sculptures in 1959 and did not resume until 1976. During the 1960s, he frequently inscribed the names of mythological figures on his paintings. His move to Gaeta in 1957 brought him closer to classical sources.