
Cy Twombly
A Monograph
Richard Leeman(Author)
Thames & Hudson Ltd (Publisher)
Will be published approx. on 6. June 2005
Book
Hardback
324 pages
978-0-500-09325-2 (ISBN)
Description
Cy Twombly (b. 1928) is widely considered to be one of the greatest living American artists, and he has received much admiration and international critical praise throughout his fifty-year career.Yet his work defies easy categorization. Subverting traditional distinctions between painting and drawing, brush and pencil-work, written words and images, he has made a highly individual contribution to the history of twentieth-century art. This book interprets Twombly's huge and complex body of work through a close study of his pictures, following both a thematic and chronological progression from the late 1950s to the most recent work. It demonstrates that the signs found in Twombly's paintings - pictograms, numbers, words, colours - which at first sight form an eclectic and multifaceted whole, are in fact organized into a true language whose often archaic forms are combined on canvas with allusive fragments of an enormous cultural world. From a scrawl to a drawing or a word,Twombly's work is an articulation of the language of memory and desire, from a place in which painting, drawing and writing are one single thing.
Reviews / Votes
"'Twombly's paintings are florid, romantic and ornately overstated; they are baroque, decadent concoctions; they are the paintings Edgar Allan Poe's Roderick Usher might have done; they are sensuous flowers of the south; they are seriously unedifying, poisonous vintages. They are letters to history from the heart of a corrupt empire' - Jonathan Jones, The Guardian"More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Illustrated in colour and black and white throughout
Dimensions
Height: 310 mm
Width: 245 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-500-09325-2 (9780500093252)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Previous edition
Book
06/2005
Flammarion
€137.99
Article exhausted; check for reprint
Person
Richard Leeman is a lecturer in the history of contemporary art at the University of Bordeaux, and an adviser to the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art, Paris.