Cy Twombly emerged in the 1950s, developing a characteristic painting style of expressive drips and active, scribbled, and scratched lines. “My line is childlike but not childish,” he once said. “It is very difficult to fake…to get that quality you need to project yourself into the child's line. It has to be felt.” Early influences included Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell, but more formative would be his relationships with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, along with whom he would distance himself from the dominance of Abstract Expressionism. Twombly's work also appeared in one of the first exhibitions to explore ideas of Minimalism—“Black, White, and Grey” (1964)—along with Agnes Martin, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol.
Works by Cy Twombly are found in major private and public collections, including Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Modern, Paris, France; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Dia: Beacon, Beacon, NY; Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany; Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Musée du Louvre, Paris, France; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and Tate Modern, London, England.