Early in Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly, author Joshua Rivkin confesses that the book 'is not a biography' ... part of the excellence of this biography (I respectfully refuse Rivkin’s refusal of the term) is that it alchemizes this challenge into an asset. The book is more personal than a biography because the biographer, who is already an accomplished poet, offers details from his own life as they mirror that of the artist. Though it may sound like misplaced exhibitionism, Rivkin’s vulnerability is a gift. Because so many details of Twombly’s life were erased, withheld, or obscured, Rivkin’s brief autobiographical interludes seem to transform those erasures from an absence to a presence. In this respect, at least, Rivkin is right to say that Chalk is not a biography ... At times, the text scatters into vivid fragments, a linguistic reflection of Twombly’s work. The reader can infer that the artist’s style has changed Rivkin’s own, shifting it like a house off its foundation. If there is a flaw of this approach, it is that the text sometimes swerves into lyrical saturation. But for the most part, buoyed with insights from hundreds of writers from Albee to Woolf, Rivkin stays afloat ... for every boyish burst from Rivkin, there are plenty of measured, keen observations ... it is a fitting thrill to end Chalk still wanting more.

... the most substantive biography of the artist to date ... Rivkin describes these tense meetings in a tone of anxious exasperation, though this is by no means his only voice. When he is talking about Twombly’s art, or the book’s larger themes of evasiveness and evanescence, you stop hearing the thwarted reporter and start hearing the poet, who approaches this art as a gold mine of metaphors and symbols, and finds the experience enrapturing ... Poetic ardor can be exhausting. (As the many quotes from art critics that pepper Rivkin’s book demonstrate, Twombly tends to send writers into lyric overdrive.) But it is also a propulsive, positive and persuasive mode. Over the stretch of this long but surely not last Twombly biography, it carries the day.

...even in ideal conditions, Rivkin’s book was unlikely to be a definitive traditional biography. A poet and creative writing professor, Rivkin often filters his understanding of Twombly’s art and life through his own experience of grappling with it, focusing as much on the tantalizing ambiguities presented by the artist’s work as on the available facts. Given his relative lack of access to primary source material (and the gaurded interviews to which important figures such as Twombly’s son, Alessandro, did submit), another writer might have simply written a short, impressionistic appreciation or settled for a pithy portrait of the artist as an enigma sealed off by his posthumous handlers ... Instead, Rivkin combines these modes with that of a full-dress chronicle, recounting Twombly’s life with the biographical information he was able to dig up (most significantly from the archives of Twombly’s friend and sometime lover Robert Rauschenberg). Interspersed throughout, meanwhile, are close readings of the work, well-­researched accounts of important exhibitions and milestones, the narrative of the author’s own engagement with the important sites of Twombly’s life, and his quixotic attempts to wrangle information from the living members of Twombly’s small circle. Though Rivkin is at times left to throw up his hands and admit that he won’t be getting to the bottom of this or that episode or painting, his book is nevertheless a valuable synthesis of what’s been said and written about Twombly, and the author’s lyrical analyses of Twombly’s paintings are both lovely and insightful ... Rivkin is often at his best navigating the complex territory of reputation formation, carefully tracking the reception of the ­MoMA show (aided by the rare profiles to which Twombly submitted in order to promote it) and the concurrent exhibition of Say Goodbye, Catullus[.]

Rivkin travels in Twombly’s footsteps. He conducts scenic interviews with Twombly’s son and peripheral characters (the artist’s estate did not cooperate with the book). He scrapes up what he can, but very little is new, or surprising. The juiciest stories still come from the Vogue profile, the most sensitive readings of the work from an essay by Roland Barthes and the sharpest analysis of the man from Edmund White, who has written critically about Twombly’s decision to stay closeted ... Rivkin does his best Janet Malcolm impression as he considers the question of who own the facts of a life. But this besotted, often very beautiful book continually loses its way. Rivkin is an anxious writer, with a slightly clammy style ... He takes cover behind other people’s statements, pelting us with distracting, irrelevant quotes. And where Twombly is concerned, Rivkin makes the occasional wildly intriguing claim...only to hide his face and retreat into ambiguity, marveling at all we will never know about Twombly ... It’s not that such sentiments aren’t true, it’s that they begin to seem self-serving. The flaw of the book becomes its fetish. Vladimir Mayakovsky has a poem titled 'Cloud in Trousers,' and that is what Twombly remains in this book. We don’t see the bawdiness, the nasty wit described by his friends, including the photographer Sally Mann and Rauschenberg ... Among the genuine discoveries in Chalk is that Twombly, a frenetic collector, owned a handwritten letter by Monet.

[Chalk] is a laudable effort to lift the veil on an artist of concealment. It is also the story of trying to write about a human subject who was not just an extremely private person, but whose legacy (and personal life) is still actively protected, even controlled ... [Rivkin] certainly devotes himself to the hard job of biography, bringing every tool to bear on understanding ... the writing doesn’t always seem terribly well matched to a painter whose aesthetic was more about intimation and, frequently, erasure. Yet Chalk is an illuminating book, especially good on instances of artistic development and image-making ... Rivkin has thoroughly mined the public archives and lets his readers in on what amounts to an ongoing conversation by critics, art historians, and others who have admired or contended with Twombly ... In some ways, Chalk takes readers on a failed journey, but it returns them to the paintings, the drawings, and the sculpture, and to all those poets, too.

Rivkin, a poet himself, does not shrink away from the required speculation, nor does he approach it with embarrassment or apology. His writing about Twombly has, at its center, a deeply personal and, subsequently, moral character to it that extends beyond academic interest, and into visceral desperation ... In other projects this sort of intimate attachment and personal desire to understand the subject could pose a danger to objectivity and the facts, but in a project like Chalk, where the facts are spread so thin, Rivkin’s preference is what makes the book work. He is meticulous in tracking down and interrogating the entire pool of available research, presenting it to the reader in clear, precise prose ... The book is a biography of Cy Twombly, but at the same time it is overlaid by a sort of memoir, the story of an author who, in searching out the cherished secrets of a private life and its work, learns something about himself. This sort of overlay, memoir over biography, is itself reminiscent of the sort of mixed-medium work Twombly was interested in in life ... It’s as if the readers, alongside the author, are seeking to solve Twombly, to understand what motivated him and how he saw the world.

Rivkin brings his sensibility and prowess as a poet and essayist to this unusually reflective, stealthily dramatic inquiry into the enigmatic life and work of artist Cy Twombly ... An extraordinarily involving, gorgeously written chronicle of art, controversy, fame, and the perils of biography.

As neither critic nor art historian, Rivkin is a refreshing 'innocent eye' uninterested in theory or formalism, while still a savvy reader of art that is, to quote the poet Louise Glück, 'utterly clear and deeply mysterious' ... Concerned that Rivkin was seeking gossip over formal penetration, Del Roscio withheld access to much of Twombly’s life and, most punitive, withheld reproduction rights. But it hardly matters. For images, there’s always Google. For all the rest there’s a story well told, of art and the man. It’s more than enough.

In Chalk, Rivkin does an admirable job of fleshing out [Twombly's] life ... The humming mystery emanates from the life as much as the work ... While [Rivkin's] patient, loving exploration succeeds in so many ways, the book is charged with the sense of what is unfinished, what is left unrevealed. Since this is what attracts us to the art, we may learn to accept it in the life as well.

Like Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (1947), Rivkin’s portrait of Twombly is meditative, personally reflective, and poetic. He’s traveled and done all the research, interviewed many key figures in Twombly’s life, and observed and felt the wonder of an 'ecstatic' art he greatly admires ... Rivkin’s first book—impeccably researched, lavishly and lovingly written, insightful and discerning—is a joy to read.

While Chalk suffers somewhat from the 'personal'—Rivkin's self-references can feel intrusive—the book's 'stranger' aspect (sentence fragments, patchy chronology, poetry excerpts) creates a singular reading experience.