Drawings - Catalogue Raisonné Vol. 8: 1990-2011

Nicola Del Roscio, born in Rome in 1944, was Twombly's long-time assistant. The editor of the present Catalogue Raisonné, he is president of the Cy Twombly Foundation (New York/Rome) and the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio (Gaeta).

Vol. 8 of the Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonné 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 the primal ground of his creativity that revolves around one major issue: to create, by means of a script-like sign system, an art in which chance and determinism interweave to a carpet of consciousness. It constitutes one of the essential contributions to the human condition in the 20th century. Introductory essay by Nicola Del Roscio.