Elizabeth Stokes
I came to Chalk with an adoring familiarity with Twombly’s work but almost no knowledge of his life. He would have wanted it this way, as he was mysterious with reporters and often secretive with even his closest friends. When the writer Edmund White asked him what his parents did, Twombly said, “They were Sicilian ceramicists.” (This was a lie.) When asked how many paintings would be in his MoMA show, he said, without blinking, “Forty thousand.” The Twombly Foundation, under the presidency of del Roscio, is faithful to the artist’s recalcitrance. Yet Rivkin takes the position that “Life and art are never separate conversations. It’s easy to read—and overread—the biographical in Twombly’s art. He practically dares you.”
Rivkin’s torrid relationship with the Twombly Foundation becomes, by necessity, a part of the plot. After several threats, the foundation refused to license any images of Twombly or his work for Chalk. (The few photographs that do appear were authorized by other estates and archives.) In the end, the foundation (more specifically, del Roscio) was appalled and annoyed by Rivkin’s project. Attorneys appear. Threatening letters appear.
Yet 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. Portraiture is always an act of triangulation; a biography, no matter how removed the writer may try to be, is always covered in fingerprints.
Twombly, at once Southern and queer and closeted and famous . . .
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