Artist Cy Twombly Dead at 83

Painter Cy Twombly, a towering figure in the torrid New York arts scene of the 1950s and 1960s who took expressive scribbles and turned them into masterpieces of modern art, has died at 83, a French gallerist has announced. Twombly had been living in Italy and died in a Roman hospital. Alongside his contemporaries Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Twombly gained fame for work that often featured scribbles and calligraphy. He moved to Italy in the late 1950s and took up classical and Mediterranean themes in his art. He had been suffering from cancer.