Twombly often quoted poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke, and John Keats, as well as classical myths and allegories, in his works.

[4] In a 1994 retrospective, curator Kirk Varnedoe described Twombly's work as "influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well.

In 1952, Twombly received a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts which enabled him to travel to North Africa, Spain, Italy, and France.

He would apply bitumen on the canvas in a quick and coarse fashion, making the painting tactile and scarred with his energetic, gestural lines that would become his signature style.

[25] Twombly's 1964 exhibition of the nine-panel Discourses on Commodus (1963) at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York was panned by artist and writer Donald Judd who said "There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line," he wrote in a review.

This series features terse, colorless scrawls, reminiscent of chalk on a blackboard, that form no actual words and are examples of asemic writing.

Twombly made this work using an unusual technique: he sat on the shoulders of a friend, who shuttled back and forth along the length of the canvas, thus allowing the artist to create his fluid, continuous lines.

"[29] In the mid-1970s, in paintings such as Untitled (1976), Twombly began to evoke landscape through colour (favouring brown, green and light blue), written inscriptions and collage elements.

[30] In 1978 he worked on the monumental historical ensemble Fifty Days at Iliam, a ten-part cycle inspired by Homer's Iliad; since then Twombly continued to draw on literature and myth, deploying cryptic pictorial metaphors that situate individual experience within the grand narratives of Western tradition, as in the Gaeta canvases and the monumental Four Seasons concluded in 1994.

Usually drawing on the most familiar gods and heroes, he restricts himself to just a few, relatively well-known episodes, as narrated by poet-historians, given visible shape by artists and repeatedly reinterpreted in the literature and visual art of later centuries ... His special medium is writing.

Starting out from purely graphic marks, he developed a kind of meta-script in which abbreviated signs, hatchings, loops, numbers and the simplest of pictographs spread throughout the picture plane in a process of incessant movement, repeatedly subverted by erasures.

[31]However, in a 1994 article Kirk Varnedoe thought it necessary to defend Twombly's seemingly random marks and splashes of paint against the criticism that "This is just scribbles – my kid could do it".

One could say that any child could make a drawing like Twombly only in the sense that any fool with a hammer could fragment sculptures as Rodin did, or any house painter could spatter paint as well as Pollock.

In each case the art lies not so much in the finesse of the individual mark, but in the orchestration of a previously uncodified set of personal "rules" about where to act and where not, how far to go and when to stop, in such a way as the cumulative courtship of seeming chaos defines an original, hybrid kind of order, which in turn illuminates a complex sense of human experience not voiced or left marginal in previous art.

[36][34] During this period, Twombly worked in nearly all traditional printmaking techniques, including line etching, mezzotint, aquatint, lithography, screenprinting and collotype.

[38] In 1993, at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, an exhibition of Twombly's photographs offered a selection of large blurry color images of tulips, trees and ancient busts, based on the artist's Polaroids.

For the season 2010/2011 in the Vienna State Opera Cy Twombly designed the large scale picture (176 sqm) Bacchus as part of the exhibition series Safety Curtain, conceived by museum in progress.

[42] In 2001, the Menil Collection, the Kunstmuseum Basel, and the National Gallery of Art presented the first exhibition devoted entirely to Twombly's sculpture, assembling sixty-six works created from 1946 to 1998.

[43] The European retrospective Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons opened at the Tate Modern, London, in June 2008, with subsequent versions at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome in 2009.

The exhibition also explores how Twombly is influenced by antiquity, myth and the Mediterranean, for example the violent red swirls in the Bacchus 2005 paintings which bring to mind the drunken god of wine.

[44]Some of his work was also shown in an exhibition named Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings which ran from June 22 to October 28, 2012, at Tate Liverpool.

[45] In 1989, the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened permanent rooms dedicated to his monumental 10-painting cycle, Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), based on Alexander Pope's translation of The Iliad.

The exhibition featured examples of Twombly's sculptures made between 1948 and 1995, composed primarily of rough elements of wood coated in plaster and white paint.

In 1984 he was awarded the "Internationaler Preis für bildende Kunst des Landes Baden-Württemberg" and in 1987 the "Rubenspreis der Stadt Siegen" [de].

[51][52] In 2012 it purchased a 25-foot-wide Beaux Arts mansion on 19 E 82nd St, Upper East Side Manhattan, planning to open an education center and a small museum.

[58] In November 2013 a record price of $21.7 million for Poems to the Sea (1959), an abstract, 24-part multimedium work on paper, was achieved at Sotheby's Contemporary Art Sale.

Per Artnet News, "Covered with his trademark looping white scribbles on a slate-gray background, the work recalls his experience as a cryptologist at the Pentagon.

"[61] In 2007, an exhibition of Twombly's paintings, Blooming, a Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things, and other works on paper from gallerist Yvon Lambert's collection, was displayed from June to September at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Avignon.

The prosecution described the act as a "sort of cannibalism, or parasitism", but admitted that Sam was "visibly not conscious of what she has done", asking that she be fined €4,500 and compelled to attend a citizenship class.