Cy Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia, USA, on April 25, 1928. His interest in art started during his teenage years. Between fourteen and eighteen years old he took classes with Pierre Daura, a Spanish painter who had moved to Paris during the Spanish Civil War and was married to a Lexington woman. Between 1948 and 1951 he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where German Expressionism was the most studied artistic current, the Washington and Lee University in Lexington, and the Art Students League in New York where he met Robert Rauschenberg. During these years, Twombly was mainly interested in Dada and Surrealism. He loved the works of Kurt Schwitters, Chaïm Soutine and Lovis Corinth, as well as those of Alberto Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet. In New York, he got acquainted with the works of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still and Robert Motherwell at Betty Parsons and Samuel Kootz Gallery, as well as with Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline at Egan Gallery.
Following Rauschenberg’s suggestion, in 1951-52 he pursued his interests by studying at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he took courses from Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Ben Shahn among others. Following an exhibition organized by The Seven Stairs Gallery in Chicago, his first solo exhibition was organised in 1951 by the Kootz Gallery in New York. This period’s work is influenced by Kline’s black-and-white expressionism of and Paul Klee’s playful imagery.
In 1952, thanks to a fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Twonbly traveled to North Africa, Spain, France and Italy. His first Italian exhibitions were held during the spring of the following year at the Galleria di Via della Croce 71 in Rome and at the Galleria d’Arte Contemporanea in Florence. Upon his return to the United States in 1953, he joined the Army as a cryptographer. The same year he exhibited at Stable Gallery (New York) and Little Gallery (Pincerton, New York). Between 1955 and 1959 he worked in New York and Italy. Following his colleague’s Toti Scialoja suggestion he decided to settle in Rome. He exhibited again at Stable Gallery and selected a small group of works, Tiznit, A-Oe, Solon I, Solon II, Quaday, La-La, Volubilus, Marrakech, for an exhibition at the Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
In Rome, he produced works such as Olympia, Arcadia, Blue Room and Sunset. He worked at Salvatore Scarpitta’s studio on Via Margutta and in 1958 he exhibited at Galleria La Tartaruga (Rome), Galleria del Cavallino (Venice) and Galleria del Naviglio (Milan). He returned to New York, where he started a long collaboration with Leo Castelli Gallery. In Rome again in 1959-1960, he began delving into sculpture, a medium he would, however, abandon until the mid-1970s. At that time, he painted The Age of Alexander, to Leonardo, Crimes of Passion I and II, Odeion, Sunset Series, Garden of Sudden Delight (to Hieronymus Bosch), School of Fontainebleau, Sahara and Herodiad. In 1961, between the atelier in Piazza del Biscione and the house in via Monserrato, Twombly painted Triumph of Galatea, Empire of Flora, Bay of Naples, the series of five canvases entitled Ferragosto  and School of Athens. In the fall he exhibited first at Galerie Rudolf Zwirner (Essen) and then at Galerie J (Paris). During 1962-1963 he painted Birth of Venus, Leda and the Swan, Hero and Leander, Hyperion (to Keats), Second Voyage to Italy, Dutch Interior and Nine Discourses on Commodus, presented by Leo Castelli the following year in New York.
In the fall of 1964 he exhibited a series of paintings entitled The Artist in the Northern Climate at Galerie Friedrich + Dahlem in Munich. The following year his first museum exhibition was held at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, later taken to the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels and to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Twombly began working on the series of gray printings around the mid-1960s. An initial core was exhibited at the News Gallery in Tornio and later shown by Leo Castelli. In 1968, the Milwaukee Art Centre presented the first major U.S. retrospective devoted to the artist entitled Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings. Others would follow over the years, such as those organized by The Whitney Museum of American Art in 1979, the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1987 (later exhibited at the Palacio de Velàzquez / Palacio de Cristal, Madrid; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; the Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris); the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris in 1988; the MoMA, New York in 1994; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich in 2006; the Tate Modern, London in 2008; and the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Twombly traveled continuously between the United States and Italy. He produced works such as Anatomy of Melancholy, a work completed in 1994 and titled Untitled (Say Goodbay, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor), and he also participated in new museum retrospectives, such as in the Bern Kunsthalle in 1973, or the exhibitions organized a couple of years later by the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, then shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Between 1977 and 1978 he made the monumental cycle in ten canvases, Fifty Days at Iliam, staged in 1978 at the Lone Star Foundation in New York.
The 1980s opened with his participation in the 39th Venice Biennale with a cycle of works entitled Five Days Wait at Jiayuguan. In 1981 it was the turn of the first exhibition on the sculptures, made by Twombly since 1958 at Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld. That same year, an exhibition of works on paper opened at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (Newport Beach, California) that was later mounted at the Elvehjem Museum of Art (Madison), the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond), and the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto). The following year he also participated in Documenta 7 in Kassel. In the second half of the 1980s, Twombly also worked on series of drawings and paintings such as:  Proteus, Hero and Leander, Hero and Leandro (to Christopher Marlowe), Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair and Venus Above Gaeta. In 1986 it was the turn of a new retrospective, Cy Twombly: Drawings, Collages and Paintings on Paper: 1955-1985, organized by Lerry Gagosian in New York.
In September 1994, as noted above, a new Twombly retrospective was held at MoMA, later shown to the Menil Collection in Houston, the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles, and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The following year the Cy Twombly Gallery opened in Houston to exhibit works made since 1954. In 1997 his first sculptural exhibition was organised in the United States by Lerry Gagosian and titled Cy Twombly: Ten Sculptures.
Sculpture continued in the 2000s with the exhibition Cy Twombly: The Sculpture, organized by the Kunstmuseum Basel and subsequently shown at the Menil Collection in Houston and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. In the summer Three Studies for the Temeraire, a cycle inspired by Turner, was displayed at the National Gallery in London in dialogue with The English master’s original work. Cy Twombly worked on the series Lepanto, first presented at the 49th Venice Biennale, and on other cycles such as A Gathering of Time, Bacchus and  Blooming: A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things. In 2008, the Tate Modern inaugurated Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, a retrospective that also traveled to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. In 2011, before passing away in Rome, sealing a very long and prolific career, Twombly completed the eight canvases of the cycle Untitled (Camino Real). In the meantime, the Museum Brandhorst in Munich opened an exhibition on the artist’s photographic work, which was later revived by the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Sigen and BOZAR – Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels.