Cy Twombly

Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr. (April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011) was an American painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. He painted of large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic and graffiti-like works on solid backgrounds of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. In 1951–2 he studied at Black mountain college, this was an important period for his involvement with Abstract Expressionism. His paintings are now in the permanent collections of the New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

Many of his later paintings and works on paper shifted toward "romantic symbolism", their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words which were written in his signature stylised handwriting. In the 1960s Twombly used subjective, erotic signs in his paintings, and he began to use more intense and denser colours. Twombly often quoted the poet Stéphane Mallarmé as well as the names of mythical figures. Examples of this are his Apollo and The Artist and a series of eight drawings consisting solely of inscriptions of the word "VIRGIL”. Between 1967 and 1971 the 'grey paintings'. This series features terse, colourless scrawls, reminiscent of chalk on a blackboard, that form no actual words. He used the unusual technique of sitting on the shoulders of a friend, who moved back and forth along the length of the canvas. This allowed Twombly to create fluid, continuous lines.