Cy Twombly Bibliography (74 Kb)
Cy Twombly was born in 1928, in Lexington, Virginia. He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1947-49), Art Students League, New York (1950-51), and Black Mountain College, North Carolina (1951-52). He died in Rome in 2011.
Following travels in Europe and North Africa, Cy Twombly emerged in the mid-1950s as an important figure among a group of New York based artists including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. After settling in Italy in 1957, Twombly began to develop the gestural brushstroke of Abstract Expressionism and Action painting (to which he had been introduced at Black Mountain College) as a form of handwriting, exploring the potential and expressivity of the line. Drawing inspiration from poetry, mythology, history, and his surrounding landscape, he employed a metaphoric vocabulary of signs and marks in works that often blurred the line between painting and drawing and elicited an immediate emotional and instinctive response from the viewer. This approach has become a hallmark of his long and prolific career. At once epic and intimate, his works undulate between the visible and the hidden, the clear and the hazy, and are understood by some as a struggle between memory and oblivion.
Twombly’s interest in unassuming beauty is also evident in his sculptures. Assembled from found objects, clay, and plaster laths, the sculptures are then painted white to unify the individual parts and suggest a classical form. He sometimes later casts them in bronze.
In 1995 the Cy Twombly Gallery opened at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. Designed by the renowned architect Renzo Piano based on an initial sketch by Twombly himself, the gallery showcases a permanent retrospective of the artist's career.
In 2010 Twombly installed a permanent work at the Musée du Louvre, Paris: a painted ceiling for the Salle des Bronzes. He is only the third artist to have been invited to do so.
