American painter Edwin “Cy” Twombly was BOTD in 1928. Born in Lexington, Virginia, he developed an early interest in art, taking private lessons before studying at the Boston Museum School and Washington & Lee University. In 1950, he won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York City, where he met Robert Rauschenberg. They became lovers, studying together at Black Mountain College before travelling through Italy and North Africa. In 1954, he was drafted into the US Army, working as a cryptographer before returning to New York, sharing a studio with Rauschenberg and befriending Jasper Johns. Largely rejecting the Abstract Expressionist movement, he developed an idiosyncratic style inspired by Dada and Paleolithic art, featuring graffiti-like repetitive scribbles on canvas and paper, often incorporating snippets of handwritten text or cartoon-like drawings of penises and buttocks. He experimented repeatedly with his own technique, drawing in the dark to try to lose techniques he had learned in art classes, scratching and gouging his canvases, or sitting on the shoulders of a friend while applying fluid lines of paint. He moved to Italy in 1957, making Rome his primary residence. Two years later, he married Tatiana Franchetti, a painter from a wealthy Italian family, with whom he had a son. In 1964, his work was included in one of the first American exhibitions to explore the ideas of Minimalism, alongside rising stars Agnes Martin, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. Another exhibition in the same year, in New York, was critically savaged. Undeterred, Twombly carried on, avoiding publicity and refusing to comment on or interpret his work. By the 1980s, he was hailed as one of the most important American artists of the century, commanding million-dollar prices at auction and inspiring generations of younger artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 1989, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented a retrospective of his work, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened a permanent display of his 10-painting series Fifty Days at Iliam. Twombly was in a long-term relationship with Nicola Del Roscio, who he met in 1964. The relationship was tolerated by Tatiana, and they remained married and on friendly terms. He and Del Roscio remained together until his death in 2011, aged 83.