ROME — Celebrated American painter Cy Twombly, whose large-scale paintings featuring scribbles, graffiti and references to ancient empires fetched millions at auction, died Tuesday. He was 83.
Twombly, who had cancer, died in Rome, said Eric Mezil, director of the Lambert Collection in Avignon, France, where the artist opened a show in June. Twombly had lived in Italy since 1957.
Twombly was known for his abstract works combining painting and drawing techniques, repetitive lines, scribbles and the use of words and graffiti. He is often linked to legendary American artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whom he met as a student in New York in the early 1950s.
His canvases ignited the passions of his followers. In 2007, a woman was arrested in France for kissing an all-white canvas he painted, worth about $2 million. Restorers had trouble getting the lipstick off, and she was ordered to pay hundreds of dollars to the owner and the gallery — and $1.50 to the artist.
Born Edwin Parker Twom bly in 1928, the artist got his nickname from his father, a baseball player.
From 1942 to 1946, he studied modern European art under Pierre Daura, a Spanish artist who was living in his hometown of Lexington, Va., then won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York, where he was exposed to the works of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and others. There he met Rauschenburg, who advised him to enroll at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an experimental school whose alumni are a Who’s Who of contemporary arts.
He opened his first solo exhibit at the Seven Stairs Gallery in Chicago in 1951 and a year later sailed from New York with Rauschenburg for his first trip to Europe.
In 1954, he was drafted and trained as a cryptographer in the U.S. Army. While serving, he would draw in the dark — a practice later evident in his work.
