Part of the generation immediately following Abstract Expressionism, Cy Twombly rejected the artistic movements taking shape around him and provoked the art world with his graffiti-like scribbles and scratches, immediately setting himself apart from his peers. Throughout his long career, Twombly has consistently reinvented his technique, media and motifs, experimenting with both penciled lines and thick paint. At the same time, his distinctive style, notable for its originality, has made him highly influential in the art world for the last 60 years.

• Twombly sought to contradict audiences' conventional understandings of art, blurring long-held distinctions between drawing and painting, as well as depicting refined Classical themes with unidentifiable doodles and splotches. Similarly, he often made works deliberately opaque to challenge viewers to find their own meanings; in some cases Twombly intended his works to echo a specific inspiration or story, while in other instances he simply selected random titles after their completion.
• Although influenced by the gestural brushstrokes and compositions of action painters, as well as by Dadaism and Surrealism, Twombly drastically reimagined aspects of those techniques and concepts to create an immediately recognizable, individual style.
• Writing and language served as major conceptual foundations for Twombly's art; the written word, in the form of poems, myths and histories, inspired much of his work. He focused on the process of writing, both by sketching words directly onto the canvas and by creating line- and handwriting-based compositions.

Edwin Parker Twombly, Jr. was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928. Like his father, who briefly pitched for the Chicago White Sox, he was known as Cy, after Cy Young. His father later became a coach and athletic director at Washington and Lee University. Twombly's parents were from the Northeast, so he made frequent trips to Massachusetts and Maine, but the South, with its sense of history and autonomy, ultimately became an integral aspect of his identity. As a young boy, Twombly's parents encouraged his interest in art, and at 12 years old he started studying with Spanish modern painter Pierre Daura.

Following high school, Twombly began formal art training at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1947-1949), where he became interested in the Dadaist and Surrealist work of artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Alberto Giacometti. At his parents' suggestion, Twombly then spent a year at Washington and Lee's newly created art program before moving to New York in 1950 to study at the Art Students League. Exposure to numerous New York gallery exhibitions of artists such as Kline, Pollock and Motherwell began to shape Twombly's own aesthetic away from the figurative toward abstraction. While at the League, he met Robert Rauschenberg, who became a close friend and artistic influence. At Rauschenberg's encouragement, Twombly studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina (1951-1952). In 1952, Twombly traveled to Italy and North Africa with Rauschenberg on a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. Upon returning, the two artists had a joint 1953 exhibition at Stable Gallery in New York, which resulted in such a hostile and negative response from the public that gallery director Eleanor Ward had to remove the visitor comments book.

Twombly's work at this time was largely in black and white, influenced both by Rauschenberg's paintings and the monochromatic work of De Kooning, Kline and Motherwell. Twombly drew on ideas of the primitive, notions of ritual and the psychoanalytic concept of the fetish, and also took inspiration from his European travels in these early works. From 1953 to 1954, Twombly was drafted into the army, where he served as a cryptographer at Camp Gordon near Augusta, Georgia and at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. On weekend leaves, Twombly spent time in his hotel room in Augusta making scrawled, biomorphic drawings, which he has said set "the direction everything would take from then on." While in the army, he also modified the Surrealist technique of automatic drawing by creating compositions in the dark after lights out. These "blind" drawings resulted in elongated, distorted forms and curves that became distinct stylistic motifs in his later work.

In 1957, Twombly returned to Italy, living in Rome and near the Mediterranean Sea, which inspired a more tranquil, light tone in his work, which also began to allude to Classical culture and literature. Greco-Roman themes infused much of his work throughout his career. After spending time in Lexington, Virginia and New York in 1959, joining gallery owner Leo Castelli's roster of artists, Twombly settled permanently in Rome in 1960. His first Castelli exhibition was the same year in New York. In Rome, Twombly's early 1960s work took on greater scale and more vibrant color, while also drawing on themes of eroticism and violence, particularly in several paintings referring to Rome's historic moments of defeat. Although Twombly's work was well-received in Italy, a New York Castelli show of Twombly's 1963 Nine Discourses on Commodus received brutal reviews. From 1966 to 1972, Twombly created a number of canvases that resembled blackboards, with light-colored loops and scrawls flowing across grey backgrounds.

Twombly worked less frequently in the late 1970s and 1980s, but continued creating important canvases. In the mid-1970s, he also returned to sculpture, a medium in which he had not worked for almost 20 years. These sculptures, often focusing on Classical themes, were largely assembled from found objects and painted white. His time in Italy continued to influence Twombly's work; he spent much time in the medieval port city of Gaeta, and many of his paintings from the 1980s reflected his interest in the sea. Critical reception of his work became more positive in the 1980s, as well, partially due to a new interest in modern European art. Classical references persisted in his later work, particularly in the form of Bacchus, the god of wine. Twombly's paintings in the next decades expanded his previous use of color, applied with gestural brushstrokes that occasionally depicted more recognizable forms, such as flowers and landscapes. Currently living in Italy and Virginia, Twombly is represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York.

Twombly's distinctive aesthetic was both a continuation of Abstract Expressionist techniques and an incendiary break toward using "low" art practices of penciled words and scribbled crayon in "high" art. His work has always been contentious to both audiences and critics, and despite his renown, continues to be so today. Over the past several decades, he has been the subject of numerous retrospectives and his work has been acquired by museum collections worldwide. Twombly has proven to be a major figure in the international art world, serving as a strong influence for the Neo-Expressionism movement and continuing to impact today's artists.
Below are Cy Twombly's major influences, and the people and ideas that he influenced in turn.




My line is childlike but not childish. It is very difficult to fake.. to get that quality you need to project yourself into the child's line. It has to be felt.

Graffiti is linear and it's done with a pencil, and it's like writing on walls. But in my paintings it's more lyrical.

When I work, I work very fast, but preparing to work can take any length of time.

Paint is something that I use with my hands and do all those tactile things. I really don't like oil because you can't get back into it, or you make a mess. It's not my favorite thing..pencil is more my medium than wet paint.

I sit for two or three hours and then in 15 minutes I can do a painting, but that's part of it. You have to get ready and decide to jump up and do it; you build yourself up psychologically, and so painting has no time for brush. Brush is boring, you give it and all of a sudden it's dry, you have to go. Before you cut the thought, you know?