A giant new exhibition opens this week in Vienna's Museum of Modern Art dedicated to influential US artist, Cy Twombly, the 81-year-old master of abstract expressionism.

The show, entitled Sensations of the Moment, is the first time Mr Twombly's works have been exhibited in the Austrian capital and comprises around 200 drawings, paintings, sculptures, collages and photos.

"Cy Twombly is the link between the formal radicalisation of US post-war art and the complexity of European painting," Mumok director Edelbert Koeb said ahead of the opening, of one of the museum's costliest-ever exhibitions.

Born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928, Edwin Parker Twombly, given the nickname Cy by his father, studied art at the famous Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, in the 1950s where he met the likes of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

It was with Rauschenberg that Mr Twombly travelled to South America, Spain and Italy before moving permanently to Rome in 1959.

Mumok's retrospective spans the 50-year career of Mr Twombly, who rarely gives interviews or appears in public.

It was the artist himself who chose the name for the show, which contains works that illustrate many of the Mr Twombly's guiding principles: The use of the colour white, and of writing, the principles of collage and, in his photos, the play of light.

"It was difficult to get all these pieces together, because collectors were very reluctant to loan them," said director Mr Koeb.

Some of the largest pieces in the exhibition are valued at €5 to €15.0 million apiece.

The painting that opens the exhibition was "fresh out of (Mr Twombly's) studio", said the show's curator, Achim Hochdoerfer.

The untitled triptych comprises three huge blue canvases with white scribblings.

"The seeming banality of the scribbling against this deep blue creates a contrast that constitutes a great moment in painting," he said.

A series of white-dominated paintings follows, with spatterings of colour and words scribbled in crayon.

"Is the white a symbol of purity, as with the poet Mallarme, or a conception of silence as with John Cage?" Mr Hochdoerfer asks before coming to a halt in front of a sculpture, untitled as most of the works in the exhibition are.