Cy Twombly, one of America`s greatest living artists, defies easy categorization. Subverting traditional distinctions between painting and drawing, brush and pencil work, written words and images, he has made a highly individual contribution to the history of 20th-century art.

This monograph interprets Twombly`s huge and complex body of work through a close study of his pictures, following both a thematic and chronological progression from the late 1950s to his most recent work. From a scrawl to a drawing or a word, Twombly`s deeply sophisticated work is an articulation of the language of memory and desire, from a place in which painting, drawing and writing merge into a single entity.