Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly made paintings that look like a wall someone has scribbled on and hung them next to the Iliad. He came from Lexington, Virginia, studied at Black Mountain under Josef Albers and Robert Motherwell, travelled through Europe and north Africa with Robert Rauschenberg in 1952-53, and did his military service as a cryptologist, which he said taught him to draw without looking. In 1957 he moved to Rome and stayed in Italy for the rest of his life, which separated him from the New York scene at exactly the moment it became dominant. The work is loops, smears, pencil scrawl and half-legible names scratched into wet paint - Leda, Achilles, Bacchus - and it was received in America as a joke or an insult for the better part of twenty years; a 1964 New York show sold nothing. What changed was that people started reading the pictures as writing rather than as failed painting. The late series, particularly the ten Lepanto panels and the red Bacchus canvases, are enormous and unembarrassed. He painted a ceiling for the Louvre in 2010. Fifty Days at Iliam, ten canvases on the Trojan war, occupies a room of its own in Philadelphia. The Menil Collection in Houston built a gallery for him in 1995 designed with Renzo Piano. In 2007 a woman kissed one of his white canvases in Avignon leaving a lipstick mark and was prosecuted; she said she had been overcome by the work. He married the Italian artist Tatiana Franchetti and also had a long relationship with Nicola Del Roscio, who runs his foundation. His photographs, made on a Polaroid and printed large and blurred, were exhibited only late in his life.

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