Edited by Nicola Del Roscio. Essay by Arthur Danto.

Cy Twombly, born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928, entered the stage of contemporary art with his drawings. His nervous line making distinguished him from all his colleagues who in the 50s and 60s were involved in Abstract Expressionism. His tumbling and nervous markings opened new psychological spaces to a personal and very conceptual art. At first mistaken for something between graffiti and criture auto matique, Cy Twombly s graphic notes eventually transformed into huge canvases of paintings in which
he incorporated these notes as a maelstrom of emotional states. The Catalogue Raison of...

Volume 2 of Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonne 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...

Cy Twombly, born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928, entered the stage of contemporary art with his drawings. His nervous line making distinguished him from all his colleagues who in the 50s and 60s were involved in Abstract Expressionism. His tumbling and nervous marking opened new psychological spaces to a personal and very conceptual art. At first mistaken for something between graffiti and ecriture automatique, Cy Twombly's graphic notes eventually transformed into huge canvases of paintings in which he incorporated these notes as a maelstrom of emotional states. The Catalogue Raisonne of...

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 Raisonne of...

Along with trips to Turkey, Greece, USA, Egypt, and the Seychelles, the 1980s are defined by Twombly's growing weariness of life in Rome and his escapes to Porto Ercole and Gaeta, where, in the 1990s, he'll establish a secluded new home and studio that will be his main residence for the rest of his life. Twombly experiments with applying the paint with bare fingers. His new environment inspires him to works such as Scenes From an Ideal Marriage. His love for the Sufi poems of Jalal al-Din Rumi yields a series of drawings dedicated to the Persian poet; ancient Greek poet Archilochos and Rainer...

Vol. 8 of the Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonne completes the edition of the artist's graphic works presenting a total of 1,890 works on 1,952 pages. As a student at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s, Cy Twombly had startled his teachers, among them Ben Shahn and Robert Motherwell, with anarchistic pencil drawings. At the time considered an eccentric streak of Abstract Expressionism, they evolved, in the course of his career of sixty years, into an enormous and unparalleled artistic oeuvre encompassing painting, sculpture, and photography as well. His graphic work, though, continued to be...

Das Gesamtwerk der Zeichnungen in 8 Bänden.