Luscious reproductions of more than 50 of Twombly's paintings, drawings and little-known sculptures, along with classical works of art, tell the story of an American abstractionist's poetical dialogue with antiquity Cy Twombly's first visit to Italy as a young man ignited a lifelong passion for classical culture that is everywhere present in his art. Painted canvases, works on paper and small-scale sculptures reveal the historical soul of Twombly's abstract compositions. Taking on myths and heroes as personal guides, he created a psychologically complex dialogue with the visual and literary art of antiquity. This sumptuously illustrated publication reproduces a carefully chosen selection of the artist's paintings, drawings and sculptures alongside works of classical antiquity, including a number from his personal collection. Illuminating essays by leading scholars and writers, including Anne Carson, Jennifer R. Gross, Brooke Holmes and Mary Jacobus, explore the often enigmatic engagement of Twombly's art with the world of the past. Cy Twombly(1928-2011) was born in Lexington, Virginia, and lived and worked in New York in the early 1950s and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. After traveling around North Africa, Spain and Italy, he settled in Rome, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Cy Twombly (1928-2011) is widely acknowledged as one of the postwar period's most influential American artists, yet his sculptures are little known. From 1946 onward, he made hundreds of rarely exhibited found-object assemblages, often painted or plastered over with diverse coatings of white. Across decades, Twombly thus developed a singular, strikingly consistent body of work, despite the shifting status of sculpture during his lifetime. In this revelatory monograph, Kate Nesin first establishes, then evaluates the artist's long engagement with the historical and contemporary limits of sculpture, both as medium and as word. While others have described Twombly's three-dimensional works as timeless, transcendent, and poetic, Nesin complicates our sense of their so-called poetry, focusing on the prosaic, conspicuously material operations of these sculptural "things," and emphasizing the inherent difficulties as well as possibilities of the language used to characterize them. Through close readings of individual works and in-depth analyses of certain guiding concerns, such as surface, naming, gaps, and repetitions, she illuminates Twombly's remarkable sculptural practice.

Cy Twombly (1928-2011) created art that was remarkable for its versatility, sensitivity and originality. Throughout his career, he followed his own artistic pathway, independent from contemporary trends, and for a long time his work went unnoticed by a wider audience. By the time of his death in Rome, at the age of 83, he was internationally recognized as one of the greatest and most idiosyncratic artists of the 20th and early 21st century. This book provides an authoritative overview of Twombly's complex body of work, bringing together the most important of his paintings and painting cycles, as well as a selection of his drawings, sculptures and photographs.

Along with his celebrated drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs, Cy Twombly has left an imposing body of graphic work as well. As early as 1984, the Berlin-based art writer and Twombly expert, Heiner Bastian, compiled the first catalogue raisonné of the artist's printed graphics which has been out of print for 18 years. Now back in print for the first time, this new edition of the catalogue raisonné has been updated and includes the graphic works Twombly created since 1984 until his death in 2011. Cy Twombly's graphic oeuvre is characterized by a variety of graphic and printing techniques. Along with monotypes, etchings, lithographs, and silkscreens, the artist tested his expertise using offset lithographs and the combination of various print and reproduction techniques. The scholarly portion of the catalogue features 96 works created between 1952 and 2008, all of them illustrated in full color.

"Cy Twombly's work realizes its most personal expression in his intimately sized drawings and paintings on paper. Finding inspiration as much in the forces of nature as in ancient epics and legend, and using the simplest of media - pencils, ballpoint pens, crayons, wall paint - he creates poetic and archaic worlds, usually in series and often as collages." "The eighty-four works in this retrospective, organized by the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, in 2003 to mark Twombly's seventy-fifth birthday, were collected from the artist's studio, and many have not been previously exhibited. Dating from between 1953 and 2002, the drawings embrace the entire career of one of the most important American artists alive today, from his early monotypes to the major mythological cycles of later years, revealing the many nuances of his aesthetic approach."--BOOK JACKET.

**A New York Times Editors Choice** "The most substantive biography of the artist to date...propulsive, positive and persuasive."—Holland Cotter, New York Times Book Review **PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Finalist** **A Marfield Prize Finalist** Cy Twombly was a man obsessed with myth and history—including his own. Shuttling between stunning homes in Italy and the United States where he perfected his room-size canvases, he managed his public image carefully and rarely gave interviews. Upon first seeing Twombly’s remarkable paintings, writer Joshua Rivkin became obsessed himself with the mysterious artist, and began chasing every lead, big or small—anything that might illuminate those works, or who Twombly really was. Now, after unprecedented archival research and years of interviews, Rivkin has reconstructed Twombly’s life, from his time at the legendary Black Mountain College to his canonization in a 1994 MoMA retrospective; from his heady explorations of Rome in the 1950s with Robert Rauschenberg to the ongoing efforts to shape his legacy after his death. Including previously unpublished photographs, Chalk presents a more personal and searching type of biography than we’ve ever encountered, and brings to life a more complex Twombly than we’ve ever known.

A visual celebration of one of the most renowned artists of our time, along with the extraordinary Gallery he helped to create to showcase his work American artist Cy Twombly (1928-2011) created paintings and sculptures that defied conventional classification. In his works, Twombly incorporated a wide variety of elements, from scrawls and calligraphic marks to text from poetry and mythology. Opening in 1995, the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil Collection was designed by Renzo Piano and has become a pilgrimage destination for the artist's avid admirers. The product of close collaboration between the Menil, Twombly, and the Dia Center for the Arts, the Gallery is one of the most extraordinary representations of any single 20th-century artist. Twombly chose the art that would be featured and worked closely with the builders to create the most appropriate venue for its presentation. This sumptuous volume showcases thirty-three paintings and eleven sculptures, including an immense 13 x 52-foot painting. Featuring large-scale, close-up details of many of the works, the book looks at paint, plaster, paintings, sculptures, and the "cues" that Twombly gave in his art about this special collection. Published in association with the Twombly Foundation and the Menil Collection