The years 1970-71 were a very prolific period in which Cy Twombly, influenced by Leonardo da Vinci's Deluge drawings, created his iconic style: scribbled, calligraphic, and graffiti-like works on solid fields. In the late Kirk Varnedoe's words, this--most minimal-- phase of Twombly's oeuvre is characterized by a "nervous, obsessed energy, yet its trance-like mono - tony also opens out into a sense of serene, oceanic dissolution, in a nebular cloud of great depth and infinite complexity". His drawings of this phase featured in Vol. V of his Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings include, among others, acclaimed extensive series such as Roman Notes, Study for Treatise on the Veil, and Beyond (A System of Passing).

Volume 2 of Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings covers the very fruitful years between 1956 and 1960. Still a resident of New York in 1956, Twombly moves to Italy in early 1957 where he will stay, with intervals, until the end of his life. His first shows in Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome, Galleria del Cavallino, Venice, and Galleria del Naviglio, Milan, make him well-known in European avant-garde circles. In the summer of 1959 he rents an apartment in the village of Sperlonga at the Tyrrhenian Sea between Rome and Naples. Here he creates his sequence "Poems to the Sea" influenced by Mallarmé's poetry. The year 1959 is also marked by the artist's marriage and the birth of his son Alessandro in December. His work is increasingly dealing with color, yielding most beautiful colored drawings. The influence of street graffiti, too, is evident in his work incorporating explicit sexual allusions and jokes. At the end of 1960 Cy Twombly has his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York.

**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.