30 Facts About Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly belonged to the generation of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

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

Cy 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.

Cy Twombly was commissioned for a ceiling at the Musee du Louvre in Paris.

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

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

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

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

Cy Twombly spent this journey in Africa and Europe with Robert Rauschenberg.

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

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

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

Cy Twombly 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.

Cy Twombly soon developed a technique of gestural drawing characterized by thin white lines on a dark canvas that appear to be scratched onto the surface.

Cy Twombly would apply bitumen on the canvas in a quick and coarse fashion, making the painting tactile and scarred with his energetic, gestural lines that would become his signature style.

Cy Twombly stopped making sculptures in 1959 and did not take up sculpting again until 1976.

Cy Twombly often inscribed on paintings the names of mythological figures during the 1960s.

Cy Twombly's move to Gaeta in Southern Italy in 1957 gave him closer contact with classical sources.

Cy Twombly made this work using an unusual technique: he sat on the shoulders of a friend, who shuttled back and forth along the length of the canvas, thus allowing the artist to create his fluid, continuous lines.

From 1976, Cy Twombly again produced sculptures, lightly painted in white, suggestive of Classical forms.

In 1978 he worked on the monumental historical ensemble Fifty Days at Iliam, a ten-part cycle inspired by Homer's Iliad; since then Cy Twombly continued to draw on literature and myth, deploying cryptic pictorial metaphors that situate individual experience within the grand narratives of Western tradition, as in the Gaeta canvases and the monumental Four Seasons concluded in 1994.

Together with Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly is regarded as the most important representative of a generation of artists who distanced themselves from abstract expressionism.

In 1993, at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, an exhibition of Cy Twombly's photographs offered a selection of large blurry color images of tulips, trees and ancient busts, based on the artist's Polaroids.

Cy Twombly had his next retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1979, curated by David Whitney.

In 2001, the Menil Collection, the Kunstmuseum Basel, and the National Gallery of Art presented the first exhibition devoted entirely to Cy Twombly's sculpture, assembling sixty-six works created from 1946 to 1998.

At the heart of the exhibition is Cy Twombly's work exploring the cycles associated with seasons, nature and the passing of time.

The exhibition explores how Cy Twombly is influenced by antiquity, myth and the Mediterranean, for example the violent red swirls in the Bacchus 2005 paintings which bring to mind the drunken god of wine.

Cy Twombly was only the third artist to be invited to contribute in such a way.

The exhibition featured examples of Cy Twombly's sculptures made between 1948 and 1995, composed primarily of rough elements of wood coated in plaster and white paint.

Cy Twombly was invited to exhibit his work at the Venice Biennale in 1964, in 1989 and in 2001 when he was awarded the Golden Lion at the 49th Venice Biennale.