Chalk

September 1, 2018
A creative portal into the life of the enigmatic, reclusive, modernist painter.It's appropriate that a poet would write the first biography and comprehensive assessment of the paintings, sculptures, and photographs of Cy Twombly (1928-2011). His often massive art is as much lined poetry as it is scribbled, smudged paint, explosions of color, many marked with his unique chalk flourishes. "White paint," Twombly said, "is my marble." When young Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg were students at Black Mountain College in 1952, Charles Olson wrote to Robert Creeley admiringly about Rauschenberg's very close friend and lover, the "clear genius of this lad." Like Olson's Call Me Ishmael (1947), Rivkin's portrait of Twombly is meditative, personally reflective, and poetic. He's traveled and done all the research, interviewed many key figures in Twombly's life, and observed and felt the wonder of an "ecstatic" art he greatly admires. For Rivkin, "every painting [is] a self-portrait, not of the surface, the face in the mirror, but a reflection of that wilderness inside." Twombly was a Southerner his whole life. He favored long-sleeve white shirts and suspenders. He was born in Lexington, Virginia, and his mother saw to it that he had a fine artistic education. As he traveled all over, he painted, always worried that his works weren't selling. He married an Italian artist, Tatiana Franchetti, and they had a son, Alexander. In 1959, Twombly painted the massive "The Age of Alexander." "Literary and historical and personal," it is "both wild abandon and careful mark. A space that's both, paradoxically, full and empty." In 1964, he met Nicola Del Roscio, who would become his longtime companion and assistant. The author eagerly roams throughout the oeuvre, tracing Twombly's growth as an artist, from the blackboard paintings, "minimal, ahistorical, singular," to the "meditative and gracious" Green Paintings, and beyond.Rivkin's first book--impeccably researched, lavishly and lovingly written, insightful and discerning--is a joy to read.

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Starred review from October 15, 2018
Rivkin brings his sensibility and prowess as a poet and essayist to this unusually reflective, stealthily dramatic inquiry into the enigmatic life and work of artist Cy Twombly (1928-2011). Rivkin's fascination with Twombly's atmospheric paintings and how they capture motion and emotion in layered scribbles, loops, drips, lines from poems, incisions, and vortexes?often massive works that evoke windows, veils, water, wind, war, desire and despair, time and memory?led him on an arduous 10-year quest. Rivkin begins his complex portrait with a haunting scene at Black Mountain College between Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg, a key figure in Twombly's evolution, then looks back to Twombly's straitlaced upbringing in Lexington, Virginia, and forward to the artist's expat life in Rome. Married to an Italian aristocrat, Tatiana Franchetti, with whom he had a son, Twombly devoted himself to art in an existence free of the usual practical concerns yet complicated by his relationship with a man who was both his lover and his assistant. A world traveler, Twombly eventually returned to Lexington, where he painted his final masterpieces. Rivkin tracks Twombly binaries ? American/European, straight/gay, secretive/public, "restrained/ abandoned"?and reveals why so many aspects of Twombly's life remain as elusive or even erased as the subjects of his work. An extraordinarily involving, gorgeously written chronicle of art, controversy, fame, and the perils of biography.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)