About the Artist
Cy Twombly (1928-2011) studied at the Boston Museum School fo Fine Art (1948-1949) and Washington and Lee University (1949-1950) before attending Black Mountain College (1 950-1951), where he studied with Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline. For much of the 1950s Twombly traveled and lived in North Africa, Spain, and Italy; in 1957 he settled in Rome. Today he lives and works in both Europe and Lexington, Virginia.
Twombly’s calligraphic abstractions were first shown in New York at Kootz Gallery (1951); since then his paintings have been widely exhibited internationally, appearing in the Venice Biennale (1964) and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual and Biennial Exhibitions (1967, 1969, and 1973). Retrospective exhibitions of his art have been organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art (1979) and the Museum of Modern Art (1995). Robert Rauschenberg introduced Twombly to ULAE in the summer of 1967, inviting him to view a series of lithographs then in progress. This encounter resulted in the creation of a number of prints by Twombly; many of these prints were not editioned until the mid-1970s, largely because of the infrequency of the artist’s visits to the United States. Twombly’s first ULAE portfolio was Sketches, 1967-1975, six intimately scaled etchings; his Note, 1967 series, which is closer in style to the calligraphic abstraction for which he is best known, also shows how Tatyana Grosman encouraged artist’s to incorporate the unusual, often hand-made, paper as an essential part of their print projects.
