America’s first graffiti painter Cy Twombly died in Rome Tuesday at the age of 83. Known for his groundbreaking (or wall breaking) conflation of drawing, painting and writing, he is memorialized in an eponymous pavilion at Houston’s Menil Collection, which has an extensive collection of his works. Oddly enough, his contemporary Donald Judd, also beloved by art-as-spirit minded Texans was one of his most bitter critics, and called Twombly’s 1964 show at Leo Castelli “a fiasco”.
