
Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly

but a photo tucked at the end of an obscure catalogue, and the drawings that overlap with those days, a vision of a self, intimate and true: the life that went into the work, the work that went into the life.
Joshua Rivkin • Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly
“Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life,”
Joshua Rivkin • Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly
Maybe this, too, is what Twombly teaches. To embrace failure. To love absence.
Joshua Rivkin • Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly
Twombly’s sexuality, in and of itself, isn’t interesting. What’s remarkable is how, even after his death, it is still ignored or resisted or denied.
Joshua Rivkin • Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly
had relationships with one another; these relationships not only informed their thinking about audience and meaning-making in a context of grave constraint,
Joshua Rivkin • Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly
“Living, looking, making:” writes David Sylvester, “Twombly seems to be someone for whom there is no break between these.”
Joshua Rivkin • Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly
Understanding Twombly’s art in no way depends on knowing his sexuality; the fact of Twombly’s complicated sexuality hardly leads to any easy explanations.
Joshua Rivkin • Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly
but Twombly is working in a tradition that associates homosexuality with an ideal human freedom.”
Joshua Rivkin • Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly
Isn’t that the way all love affairs run—from dream and cloud-journey to earth-firmness?”1 I’m not the same man as I was that night. Now, I know too much.