The Renzo Piano-designed Cy Twombly Gallery on the Menil Collection campus may now represent a memorial to the venerated post-war abstract artist, who died at the age of 83 in Rome on Tuesday following a multi-year battle with cancer. According to Eric Mezil, director of southern France's Lambert Foundation, Twombly will be burried in Rome, "the city he has cherished for 50 years."

For his inventive aesthetic in vast, scribble-based paintings and sculptures, Twombly is largely considered unclassifiable into the canon of 20th-century art movements. Like the ancient epic poems that he admired, Twombly's canvases express a distinct, hidden mythology that ignited the senses of audiences — particularly John and Dominique de Menil.

Houston's Cy Twombly Gallery was the joint effort of the artist himself, the Menil Collection and the Dia Foundation. The intimate galleries, opened in 1995, reflect the de Menils' homage to the artist's meditative canvases, sculptures and drawings. Light filters into the eight galleries through Piano's intricate roofing system and chosen canvas sailcloths, making the experience of more than 30 Twombly pieces all the more transformative.

As a space for quietly observing a retrospective-scale body of work, the Cy Twombly Gallery is unparalleled.

In a statement, Menil director Josef Helfenstein praised Twobly as "a giant of postwar American art."

"We are proud to house at the Menil a veritable retrospective of this great artist's work. His brilliance and understanding of the human condition is evident in every work on paper, painting and sculpture that he produced. I cannot express how sad I am at the loss of such a great artist, friend and patron of the Menil," Helfenstein said.

Twombly was born Edwin Parker Twombly in 1928 in Lexington, Va. Nicknamed by his father as "Cy," Twombly became interested in the Dada and Surrealist art of Kurt Schwitters and Alberto Giacometti while attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1948. After stints at Washington and Lee University and New York's Art Students' League, he transferred to North Carolina's Black Mountain College in the 1950s, where he studied under Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. Twombly enjoyed his first solo exhibition in 1951 at New York's Samuel Kootz Gallery.

Following travels with Robert Rauschenberg to South America, Spain and Italy, Twombly founded a studio in the town of Gaeta, Italy at the end of the '50s. He abandoned representational subjects, favoring explorations of lines and smudges. In his later "romantic symbolism" period, he increasingly referenced the Mediterranean landscape, classical fables and the poets Stéphane Mallarmé, Ezra Pound and Rumi. His accolades include invitations to exhibit at the Venice Biennale in 1964, 1989 and 2001 and retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Kunsthaus Zurich, the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris and the Tate Modern.

A 1994 retrospective organized by New York's Museum of Modern Art traveled to Houston. In 2005, the Menil exhibition, Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper, traveled to MoMA.

In the oft-vexing realm of contemporary abstraction, Twombly's touch simply communicates the human compulsion to create. "It's more like I'm having an experience than making a picture," he once said.

NPR's Melissa Block interviews Menil Collection's Josef Helfenstein about the amazing Cy Twombly:

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