ABOUT CY TWOMBLY
1928
Edwin Parker Twombly is born in Lexington, Virginia, on April 25. His father, Edwin Parker Twombly Sr., was born in Groveland, Massachusetts, and his mother, Mary Velma Richardson, came from Bar Harbor, Maine. Edwin Twombly Sr. was a professional baseball player who once pitched for the Chicago White Sox in the American League. He was Athletic Director of the Washington and Lee University in Lexington and he was so admired by the college that a new swimming pool was named the "Twombly Natatorium" in his honor. The artist inherited his father’s baseball nickname “Cy”, after the baseball player Cyclone Young.
1942
From the age of 14 to 18, Twombly attends lectures on painting given by the artist Pierre Daura. Daura is a Spanish artist, a refugee in Paris during the Spanish Civil War, who had married a woman from Virginia and come to live in Lexington. His lectures and studio classes focus on European contemporary art and its history.
1946
After graduating from Lexington High School, attends Darlington School for Boys in Rome, Georgia.
1947
Spends summer in Ogunquit, an art colony in Maine, and in Groveland, Massachusetts. In the fall he enrolls in the Boston Museum School where German Expressionism is the primary influence. His grandfather lives in Boston. Twombly is greatly interested in the Dada movement, Surrealism, the art of Kurt Schwitters, Chaïm Soutine and Lovis Corinth. The works of Alberto Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet also impress him. He visits the Frick Collection in New York to study the old masters.
1948
Continues his studies in Boston.
1949
Enters the newly established department of art at Washington and Lee University in Lexington. His teacher, Marion Junkin, immediately recognizes his talent and encourages him to apply for a scholarship at the Art Students League of New York, where she had studied. He receives a $ 1000 grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.
1950
On a tuition scholarship, he continues his studies at the Art Students League in New York. His teachers are Will Barnett, Morris Kantor and Vaclav Vytlacil. During the second semester he meets another young artist, Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he shares the same intellectual interests and goals as an artist. In New York he is able to see the avant-garde shows of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still and Robert Motherwell at Betty Parsons and Samuel Kootz Gallery, as well as the work of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline at Egan Gallery.
1951
Attends summer and winter semesters at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where Ben Shahn, Robert Motherwell and the poet Charles Olson are artists in residence. He captures Shahn’s attention, becoming his favourite pupil that year. Motherwell doesn’t comment much on the work of the young Twombly, apart from saying that he has nothing to teach him.
Twombly also studies photography with Hazel-Frieda Larsen with fellow students Robert Rauschenberg and Dorothea Rockburne, and he makes photographs using a pinhole camera.
In November Twombly has his first one-person exhibition at The Seven Stairs Gallery in Chicago, arranged by the photographer Aaron Siskind and the curator Noah Goldowsky, and he exhibits paintings completed that summer at Black Mountain College. At the end of the year, Robert Motherwell writes an enthusiastic text for the exhibition leaflet and initiates Twombly’s first exhibition in New York at Samuel Kootz Gallery, a two-person exhibition with Brody Gandy.
1952
He makes trips to the southern United States, to Charleston, New Orleans, Key West, and from Key West on to Cuba. Works in Virginia during the summer, visiting Black Mountain College where Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Jack Tworkov and John Cage are residing. He engages in photography with a pinhole camera and photographs Franz Kline and John Cage.
In the fall Twombly receives a travelling scholarship of $1800 from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and leaves New York by boat for his first visit to Europe and North Africa with Robert Rauschenberg. He disembarks in Palermo, visits Naples and reaches Rome in the first days of September. Later that month he travels to Florence, Siena, Assisi and Venice. In October he departs from Rome to Morocco for the winter months, travelling to Casablanca, Marrakech, the Atlas Mountains and Tangier.
He visits Paul Bowles in Tétouan and takes day trips with him to surrounding villages in December.
1953
Returns to Rome by train, visiting Spain en route. In February Twombly has his first show in Italy at the Galleria di Via della Croce 71.
On March 14, in Florence at the Galleria d’Arte Contemporanea, he exhibits tapestries made in Tangier and Tétouan.
In the late spring he returns to America to work on paintings, sculptures, and monoprints, using Robert Rauschenberg’s New York studio at 61 Fulton Street.
He has a group show in September at the Stable Gallery, founded by Eleanor Ward.
In October he shows at the Little Gallery, Princeton, New York owned by Larom Munson, and according to Thomas Wilber, exhibits paintings from 1949 with small collages and sculptures.
Drafted into the United States Army, he completes his basic training at Camp Gordon near Augusta, Georgia, and he is stationed in Washington D.C., as a cryptologist. On weekends in Augusta, he rents a hotel room to produce drawings at night in the dark in order to obliterate any graphically expert routine. These drawings form the basis for his first one-man show at the Stable Gallery in 1955, as well as the new direction in his works from then on.
1954
Twombly is still stationed in Washington D.C., assigned to the military’s cryptography department. He often travels to New York during periods of leave, working on the paintings that are shown at the Stable Gallery the following year.
In August Twombly is discharged from the army. He takes a small apartment on 263 William Street in Manhattan, New York. He begins working on a group of six or eight grey-ground paintings, as documented in photographs taken at Rauschenberg’s Fulton Street studio, where they are painted. He starts working on Panorama.
He also makes plaster sculptures in the sand in Staten Island, all of which are now lost.
SOURCE: http://www.cytwombly.org/biography