Cy Twombly Original Prints

About Cy Twombly

Twombly’s printmaking practice was more sporadic than his contemporaries, it was also a highly formative experience for the artist, who was keen to explore virtually every traditional method from etching to screenprinting. He first experimented with a diverse range of intaglio techniques alongside his close friend Robert Rauschenberg in the late 1960s, but it was in the planographic medium of lithography that he found his footing. This more “painterly” form of printing allowed Twombly to engage in a more fluid and expressive approach to mark-making by drawing directly onto lithographic stones. His editions from the mid-1970s, saw the artist pushing against the technical limits of printmaking.

Cy Twombly was born in 1928, in Lexington, Virginia. From 1948 to 1951, he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Washington and Lee University, Lexington; and the Art Students League, New York, where he met Robert Rauschenberg. At Rauschenberg’s encouragement, he attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1951 to 1952 where he studied under Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Ben Shahn. The Kootz Gallery, New York, organized his first solo exhibition in 1951. At this time, his work was influenced by Kline’s black-and-white gestural Expressionism, as well as by Paul Klee’s childlike imagery. In 1952, Twombly received a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts that enabled him to travel to North Africa, Spain, Italy, and France. Upon his return in 1953, he served in the army as a cryptologist.

From 1955 to 1959, he worked in New York and Italy, finally settling in Rome. It was during this period that he began to create his first abstract sculptures, which, although varied in shape and material, were always coated with white paint. In Italy, he began to work on a larger scale and distanced himself from his former expressionist scribbles, moving toward a more literal use of text and numbers, drawing inspiration from poetry, mythology, and classic history.

Twombly was invited to exhibit his work at the Venice Biennale in 1964. In 1968, the Milwaukee Art Center mounted the first retrospective of his art. The artist has been honored by numerous other shows, including major retrospectives at the Kunsthaus Zurich in 1987; the Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in 1988; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1994, with additional venues in Houston, Los Angeles, and Berlin. In 1995, the Cy Twombly Gallery opened in Houston, exhibiting works made since 1954. Twombly died in 2011.