Cy Twombly

Edwan Parker “Cy” Twombly, Jr.(1928–2011) was an American painter, sculptor, and photographer who’s contemporaries are Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. His works are generally large-scale graffiti-like paintings on flat backgrounds that are mostly neutral colors, and are on display in most modern art museums around the world.

Cy was from Lexington, Virginia and bears the same nickname as his father who was a pitcher for the Chicago Whitesox. The nickname is after the baseball pitcher Cy Young. An art lover from a young age, Cy joined the famous Black Mountain college of the 50’s that includes Rauschenberg among others. From school he served in the US army as a cryptologist, which left a distinctive mark on his artistic style. In the mid-50’s he moved to New York and his work shifted to a simplified form of abstraction. Fascinated with tribal art, he used the painterly language of the 1950’s to evoke a primitivism in his work. Together with Rauschenberg and Johns, Twombly is regarded as one of the most important representatives of the art movement that began to distance themselves from Abstract Expressionism.