The artist Cy Twombly died Jul 5 in Rome at the age of 83, it has been announced. The cause of death has not been revealed, but according to the New York Times Twombly had been engaged in a long battle with cancer.
A representative figure of postwar art, Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia, and studied art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as well as with the Art Students League and at Black Mountain College. Along with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, he began attracting critical attention in the 1950s, moving his primary studio to Rome in 1957.
Since his first retrospective at the Milwaukee Art Center in 1957, he has exhibited widely across the world. In 1995, the Menil Collection in Houston opened its Cy Twombly Gallery, designed by architect Renzo Piano on one of the artist’s sketches. In 2010, Twombly unveiled a ceiling mural for the Louvre’s Salle des Bronzes, one of the museum’s largest galleries. In 1996, he was awarded Japan’s Praemium Imperiale, one of the world’s highest distinctions in the arts and culture.
A solo exhibition of Twombly’s work at Collection Lambert in Avignon, “Le temps retrouvé,” is on view through Oct 30.