Chalk follows the life and career of the great American painter Cy Twombly, from his life as a young painter, to his expatriate years in Italy; his obsession with myths and history, to his struggle for recognition. Twombly carefully managed his own image, writing almost nothing about his life and work, and giving only a handful of interviews. Through years of scholarship and archival research, first-person interviews, and a sensitive eye to Twombly's art, Joshua Rivkin separates the myth from the reality to bring to life a more complicated and fascinating Twombly than we've ever known.