Collection: Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) was an American painter and sculptor whose large-scale canvases of looping script, smeared pigment, and mythological inscription developed a distinctive visual language that resisted both Abstract Expressionism and Pop. Settling in Rome in 1957, he drew on classical antiquity, poetry, and the materiality of the mark itself to produce works of layered historical and sensory complexity. He represented the United States at the 1964 Venice Biennale and was the subject of major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994), and the Tate Modern, London (2008).