One of the most significant painters of the twentieth century, Cy Twombly (1928–2011) developed an individual lexicon of spontaneous marks, calligraphic scrawls, and sweeping gestures that refused modernism’s formal harmony. Reflecting a deep engagement with antiquity and literature, Twombly’s paintings feature repetitive scratches, drips, erasures, bursts of pigment, glyphs, and penciled passages of verse, subverting various conventions and categories of drawing and painting, text and image. In 1957, he wrote that each line he made was “the actual experience” of creating the line, observing: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” His practice emerged beside but skirted Abstract Expressionism and was contextualized in early assessments of Minimalism; in the 1980s, the rise of neo-Expressionism brought newfound critical appreciation to his artwork.

Born Edwin Parker Twombly Jr. in Lexington, Virginia, the artist attended the Boston Museum School and Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. In 1950, he received a scholarship to the Art Students League and moved to New York. There, he met Robert Rauschenberg, who urged him to enroll at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College and with whom he traveled to Italy, North Africa, and Spain between 1951 and 1953. In 1951, Twombly mounted his first New York solo exhibition at the Kootz Gallery, and in 1953 he began exhibiting with Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery in New York. That year, he was drafted to work as a cryptographer for the army. In 1957, Twombly settled in Rome, where he made diagrammatic works brimming with eroticism and later his more subdued “blackboard” paintings. In 1958, he began showing with Leo Castelli. Over the next decades, Twombly traveled widely and created drawings, collages, photographs, prints, and sculpture in addition to his lyrical canvases; his final residence was in Gaeta, Italy.

Twombly’s work has been the subject of major retrospectives organized by such museums as the Milwaukee Art Center (1968); Kunsthalle Bern (1973); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1979); Kunsthaus Zürich (1987); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994); Tate Modern, London (2008); and Art Institute of Chicago (2009), among numerous others. In 1989, the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened permanent rooms housing his monumental painting cycle Fifty Days at Iliam, and in 1995, the Menil Collection in Houston inaugurated a gallery dedicated to his work. In 2010, the Louvre unveiled a commissioned ceiling painting comprising 3,750 square feet of the museum’s Salle des Bronzes. Twombly participated in Documenta, Kassel, in 1982 and in the Venice Biennale in 1964, 1980, 1988, and 2001, when he was awarded the Golden Lion. Among numerous recognitions, he received a Praemium Imperiale award from the Japan Art Association in 1996.