Artist Cy Twombly, who scrawled wildly on canvas, dies at 83

Mr. Twombly’s canvases are typically huge, with large areas often left unmarked. They are punctuated with scribbles, smudges, mathematical symbols, fragments of poetry, references to classical antiquity, obscene doodles, and - increasingly in his later years - vigorous blotches and drips of bright paint.

He was a voracious reader whose works are filled with casual allusions and quotations, many indecipherable. The marks he left on his canvases at times resemble scrawled marginalia in textbooks or poems, at other times the graffiti he saw in Rome.

Mr. Twombly was born in Lexington, Va., but lived a peripatetic life. He studied briefly in Boston at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and holidayed frequently as a child on the Massachusetts coast. Although he was based for most of his adult life in Rome, he spent a large portion of his final years back in Lexington.

According to photographer Sally Mann, a friend in Lexington, there was “a negligent grace, a whiff of mischief, and a charming insouciance’’ about him.

His affluent Southern upbringing affected his sensibility. In recent lectures at Harvard, Mann said: “Cy and I share similarities in our childhood experiences. We were both reared by black women, whom we adored beyond all telling,’’ and his delivered “some kick-ass lessons in proper manners.’’

Mr. Twombly went to high school in Rome, Ga., before coming to Boston to study. He spent 1950-51 on a scholarship at the Art Students League of New York. There, he met Rauschenberg, who encouraged him to apply to Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

One of his teachers at Black Mountain, painter Robert Motherwell, remembered Mr. Twombly as a “natural.’’ He had a “native temperamental affinity with the abandon, the brutality, and the irrational in avant-garde painting at the moment,’’ he wrote in 1951 in a note accompanying his first solo exhibition at The Seven Stairs Gallery in Chicago.