Cy Twombly: In Beauty It Is Finished: Drawings, 1951–2008

Cy Twombly: In Beauty It Is Finished surveys one of the least publicly seen strands of the artist's output: his drawings, made between 1951 and 2008.

The 125-page hardcover volume was published by Rizzoli in association with Gagosian Gallery to accompany a gallery exhibition of the same title, and gathers works on paper spanning Twombly's full career, from his early graphite and crayon studies through the looser, more gestural sheets of his later decades. The book is edited by Mark Francis, former Gagosian director and a longtime scholar of Twombly's work, with an essay by the art historian David Anfam situating the drawings within Twombly's broader practice.

Twombly (1928–2011) is best known for large-scale paintings that fuse gestural abstraction with classical and literary allusion; this catalogue makes the case that his works on paper, often treated as preparatory or secondary, form a parallel and equally sustained body of work.