The Metropolitan Museum of Art may be preparing a milestone event: the first major U.S. retrospective of Cy Twombly in more than three decades. According to a recent job posting, the museum is seeking a researcher for a 2029 exhibition that will encompass Twombly’s paintings, sculptures, and drawings, tracing his journey across continents and exploring the ancient myths, literature, and travels that shaped his vision.

While the Met has yet to officially confirm the show, the prospect alone signals a new moment in the reevaluation of one of America’s most enigmatic postwar artists.

From MoMA to the Upper Echelons of Abstraction

Twombly’s last U.S. retrospective took place at the Museum of Modern Art in 1994, when the artist was still alive. That exhibition traveled to Houston’s Menil Collection, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. At the time, critics were cautiously receptive. Peter Schjeldahl wrote that he would not be “unhappy if Twombly’s MoMA show squares my taste with that of the collectors,” while Michael Kimmelman positioned Twombly as a leading postwar abstractionist, though “not at the front.”

Since then, Twombly’s stature has grown significantly. His signature “blackboard” paintings, composed of repeated white scrawls on gray backgrounds, now command international acclaim and record prices—Christie’s sold one such work for $70.5 million in 2015. Later canvases, with their drippy swirls of red and graffiti-like marks, have further cemented his reputation. Travis Jeppesen hailed him as “the greatest American painter of the twentieth century, and the greatest painter after Picasso, period.”

Twombly’s Artistic Odyssey

Born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia, Twombly studied at the experimental Black Mountain College alongside luminaries such as Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. In 1957, he moved to Rome, where he would live and work for the remainder of his career. His engagement with classical European culture, mythology, and literature informed the fluidity and intellectual depth of his abstract expressionism. Twombly received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2001, further consolidating his international stature.

Twombly’s practice extended beyond painting into sculpture, a facet of his work less widely recognized in the United States. The Menil Collection in Houston houses a dedicated pavilion for the artist, offering a rare, permanent insight into both his blackboard paintings and sculptural experiments.

A Retrospective to Anticipate

Should the Met’s Twombly retrospective materialize, it will mark a pivotal moment for the artist’s legacy in the U.S., offering curators, collectors, and the public an opportunity to reconsider the scope and depth of his oeuvre. From the gestural energy of his early abstractions to the lyrical drama of his later canvases, Twombly’s work is a bridge between American postwar innovation and the classical resonances of the Mediterranean world.

For those eager to immerse themselves in Twombly’s universe in the meantime, the Menil Collection remains an unparalleled destination, preserving the dialogue between his canvases, sculptures, and the myths that inspired them. By 2029, the Met may well transform this dialogue into a national celebration of one of the most poetic and intellectually charged painters of the twentieth century.