Cy Twombly Biography
Twombly Cy (Lexington, 1928 - Rome, 2011) Cy Twombly was an American painter. He studied art in Boston and at the Art Students League in New York, where he met Robert Rauschenberg and later Jasper Johns and John Cage in North Carolina, who greatly influenced his painting. He had his first solo exhibition in New York in 1951 and thanks to a scholarship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts he was able to travel to North Africa, Spain, France and Italy. The artist conceived his painting as a set of lines to be understood as simple testimonies of the moment in which they were drawn, not as symbols to be deciphered. In 1957 he moved to Rome, a city from which he never left. In fact, it was here that he married the sister of the famous collector Giorgio Franchetti. The works produced at the end of the 1960s resembled blackboards with a dark and gray background, with lines that resembled writing. Despite his friendship with the artists Rauschenberg and Johns, Twombly never created impactful graphics, capable of placing him in the category of Pop Art. Twombly's problem in fitting into the artistic context of the time lay in his pictorial originality, which made him led to following both the trends of pictorial and geometric abstraction and those of classicism and mythology. It became difficult to understand him even in that main line of post-war art, which went from Pollock to Warhol. Despite this, in the following years, his fame consolidated: the Cy Twombly Gallery of the Menil Collection in Houston contains more than thirty paintings, sculptures and works on paper, dating from 1953 to 1994; there is a large collection of his works in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and the Moma in New York bought 9 of his works in 2011.
