Published in: May-June 2019 issue.
Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly
by Joshua Rivkin
Melville House. 496 pages, $32.
AMONG the notable 20th-century painters, Cy Twombly is one of the most polarizing, either adored or despised by critics and the public, with few people in between. If his admirers consider him a poetic genius, his detractors claim that a child with a crayon could do as well. In 1993, Twombly was the subject of a 60 Minutes piece by Morley Safer titled “Yes, But Is it Art?”
