In 1952, when Cy Twombly was 24, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts gave him a grant. It was a defining moment. He left the United States for the first time, and headed for stops in Europe and North Africa. In Casablanca, he met up with the painter Robert Rauschenberg. Over the next few weeks, the pair traveled to Marrakech, traversed the Atlas Mountains to Tangier, and then went on to Tétouan, where they met the composer Paul Bowles and conducted an archaeological excavation. All the while, Twombly sketched Roman ruins and the villages they passed through. In 1953, when they returned to Rome, he visited the Museo Nationale Preistorico ed Etnografico Luigi Pigorini and studied tribal artifacts. This exhibition presents Twombly’s wondrous sketchbooks from those travels in North Africa. —Elena Clavarino