Cy Twombly dies at 83.

Edwin Parker “Cy” Twombly, Jr., American abstract artist, died in Rome yesterday at te age of 83. Well known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, Twombly was of the same school as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and other abstractionists who hit their early peak in the 1950s and 60s.

When my wife told me this morning that Twombly had died, I was very sad. He is one of those artists whose work I had the opportunity of originally seeing in Chicago when I was a student at Northwestern and his work always appealed to me.

Twombly was born in Virginia and nicknamed Cy (as was his father) after the famous baseball player Cy Young.

Late 1960s painting by Cy Twombly

On a tuition scholarship from 1950 to 1951, he studied at the Art Students League of New York, where he met Robert Rauschenberg, who encouraged him to attend Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina where he studied with Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Ben Shahn, and met John Cage. His first Solo Exhibition (heavily influenced by Kline) was at the Samuel Kootz Gallery in 1951.

In 1957 Twombly moved to Rome, where he married the Italian Tatia Franchetti, in 1959 – sister of his patron Giorgio Franchetti. He died in Rome after being hospitalized for several days, and had cancer for many years.

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