- Accompanies a vast, non-traveling retrospective at the Centre Pompidou (11/30/16-4/26/17) with works from public and private collections worldwide
- Includes texts by notable scholars and art historians, writers, artists, and collectors
- Features archival material and personal photographs
Twombly's artistic development is traced through more than 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs which span his entire career, including three major history painting cycles - Nine Discourses on Commodus (1963), Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), and Coronation of Sesostris (2000). From his early works at the beginning of the 1950s which were characterized by the interweaving of text with his signature scrawled lines, to his final, vibrantly colored, paintings, this survey underscores Twombly's career as a series of cycles in which he invented painting anew.
Polyphonic in conception, Cy Twombly presents a range of views with essays that shed light on the various aspects and phases of his body of work. It includes reflections by contemporary artists (Sally Mann, Edmund de Waal, and Katharina Grosse, among others) as well as recollections by Twombly's assistant Nicola Del Roscio. Together these multiple voices bring Cy Twombly to life, illuminating his creative process and the humanity that underlies his work.