Cy Twombly

Painter, born in Lexington, Virginia, USA. He studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School, the Art Students' League, and at Black Mountain College, settling in Rome in 1957, where he lives today. His gestural or ‘doodle’ technique derives from a Surrealist belief in the expressive power of automatic writing to tap the unconscious.

Cy Twombly (born April 25, 1928) is an American abstract artist.

Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia. From 1947 to 1949 he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, and at the Art Students League in New York from 1950 to 1951. In 1952, Twombly received a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts that enabled him to travel to North Africa, Spain, Italy, and France.

Upon his return in 1953, Twombly served in the army as a cryptologist, and this left a distinct mark on his style. In 1959, Twombly went to Italy and settled permanently in Rome.

Twombly is best known for blurring the line between drawing and painting. Twombly had at this point done away with painting a representational subject matter, citing the line or smudge, each mark with its own history, as its own subject. Twombly often quoted the poet Stephane Mallarme, as well as countless myths and allegories in his works.

Twombly was invited to exhibit his work at the Venice Biennale in 1964. The artist has also been honoured by retrospectives at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1987, the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, in 1988, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1994, with additional venues in Houston, Texas, Los Angeles, and Berlin. The Cy Twombly Gallery of the Menil Collection in Houston, which was designed by Renzo Piano and opened in 1995, houses more than thirty of Twombly's paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, dating from 1953 to 1994. A large collection of Twombly's work is also kept by the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.

A recent (1998-1999) Twombly work, Three Studies from the Temeraire, a tryptych, was purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales for $4.5 million AUD in 2004.

Twombly lives in Lexington and Italy.

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