Description from the Publisher

In this revelatory monograph, Kate Nesin first establishes, then evaluates Cy Twombly’s long engagement with the historical and contemporary limits of sculpture, both as medium and as word.

While others have described Twombly’s three-dimensional works as timeless, transcendent, and poetic, Nesin complicates our sense of their so-called poetry, focusing on the prosaic, conspicuously material operations of these sculptural “things,” and emphasizing the inherent difficulties as well as possibilities of the language used to characterize them.

Through close readings of individual works and in-depth analyses of certain guiding concerns, such as surface, naming, gaps, and repetitions, she illuminates Twombly's remarkable sculptural practice.

Cy Twombly's Things. By Kate Nesin. Published by Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2014. 248 pages; Fully illustrated. English edition.