Fifty Years of Works on Paper

Julie Sylvester is Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

Cy Twombly is undoubtedly the most sensitive mind among the greats of contemporary art. His work finds hts most personal expression in small, intimately sized drawings which he has from the very outset produced as accompaniments to his paintings: theynot only reflect all the stages in the development of his painterly oeuvre but also transcend it. Our book now available as a softcover reprint covers the major retrospective, which the Hermitage organized to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the city of St. Petersburg. The eighty-four drawings, most of them from the artist's own collection, date from between 1953 and 2002 and thus embrace his entire oeuvre, from the early monotypes to the major mythological cycles of later years. This unique retrospective on fifty years of his marvelous drawings fully reveals just how fascinatingTwombly's aesthetic approach is and attests to his great talent for invention.