Cy Twombly Exhibition Poster, 1997 Dimension: 32.9 × 23.4 in | 83.5 × 59.5 cm Accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity Cy Twombly American, 1928–2011 Cy Twombly (b. Lexington, Virginia, 1928; d. Rome, Italy, 2011) was an American painter, sculptor, and photographer best known for large-scale canvases in which calligraphic marks, gestural scribbles, and fragmentary classical text coexist — a singular style that positioned him as one of the most influential abstract artists of the postwar era. His Blackboard paintings, beginning in 1966, stripped the canvas to looping chalk-like marks on gray grounds and are among the most studied works in the history of American abstraction. Twombly studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1948–1949; the Art Students League of New York in 1950; and Black Mountain College, Asheville, North Carolina, in 1951–1952, where he worked alongside Robert Rauschenberg and encountered the influence of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. In May 2015, Untitled (1970, oil-based house paint and crayon on canvas) sold for $70.5 million at Christie's, New York.