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.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION: TWOMBLY'S BOOKS -- 1 MEDITERRANEAN PASSAGES: RETROSPECT -- 2 PSYCHOGRAM AND PARNASSUS: HOW (NOT) TO READ A TWOMBLY -- 3 TWOMBLY'S VAGUENESS: THE POETICS OF ABSTRACTION -- 4 ACHILLES' HORSES, TWOMBLY'S WAR -- 5 ROMANTIC TWOMBLY -- 6 THE PASTORAL STAIN -- 7 PSYCHE: THE DOUBLE DOOR -- 8 TWOMBLY'S LAPSE -- POSTSCRIPT: WRITING IN LIGHT -- NOTES -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX

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

"This revelatory publication provides a comprehensive and multifaceted account of Cy Twombly's ten-painting masterpiece Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), the pinnacle of the artist's lifelong engagement with Homer's Iliad. In his introduction, Carlos Basualdo provides an account of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's acquisition of the paintings in 1989. Richard Fletcher's and Emily Greenwood's essays explore the intertextual dimension of Twombly's project and his adaptation of Homer's literary tropes as a basis for his visual metaphors. Olena Chervonik traces Twombly's engagement with the theme of the Trojan War, which first appeared in the artist's work in the early 1960s, a decade before he made Fifty Days at Iliam. French photographer Annabelle d'Huart is interviewed by Carlos Basualdo about the circumstances of her visit to Twombly's studio in 1978, and her resulting photographs capturing the moment the paintings were being completed. Finally, Nicola Del Roscio, president of the Cy Twombly Foundation, reminisces about the setting and atmosphere of Twombly's studio in Bassano in Teverina, in central Italy, where this painting cycle was created, and addresses the artist's working process and sources of inspiration"--