One of Houston’s greatest assets is The Menil Collection, a brilliantly conceived collection housed in Renzo Piano’s gracious, light-infused building on one of the city’s shaded streets. Behind the museum, the Cy Twombly Gallery, also by Piano, holds a permanent retrospective the artist’s works.
Twombly’s canvases are about what might have been as much as what is. They are a kind of palimpsest in which act of becoming is more crucial than realization. Twombly famously noted that he painted for the experience of art and considered it “like finding many wonderful rooms in a house that you never knew existed.” Behind this somewhat disingenuous notion are suggestive biographical tidbits like his work as an army cryptographer, travels with Rauschenberg in Italy, Spain, and North Africa, the Sears and Roebuck art kits he played with as a boy, and artistic studies with the likes of Robert Motherwell, Ben Shahn, Franz Kline, and Spanish modern master Pierre Daura.
Robert Hughes called Twombly the third man of the American expressionism triumvirate, and, in some ways, he does seem to share the “present-ness” of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. (There is really only a “triumvirate” in the most superficial sense as all three artists are very different creative minds.) It speaks to Twombly’s uniqueness that he has been characterized as divisive since his work first began appearing in the 1950s.
His move to Italy in 1957 announced to the art world that the Virginian was not interested in cultivating the American scene. Twombly, born Edwin Parker Twombly, Jr., antagonized peers like Donald Judd (himself a minimalist) who called Twombly’s 1964 show at the Leo Castelli Gallery a “fiasco” and declared that wasn’t “anything to these paintings.” However, Twombly’s lightly-worn iconoclasm coupled with his literary erudition should give pause to viewers and critics alike. In spite of the frequent reaction that “any child could paint that,” Twombly’s art is more than mere gesture. It defies neat and easy conclusions.
The Menil Collection Web site offers an elegant summary: “Inspired by ancient Mediterranean history and geography, Greek and Roman mythology, and epic poetry, Twombly created—sometimes on a grand scale, in multiple-panel works—a sometimes-inscrutable world of iconography, metaphor, and myth. The breadth of Twombly’s imagination and his interdisciplinary approach to subjects traverse vast distances, resulting in works that are at once baroque and spare, modern and ancient.”
Photograph: Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1969. Oil and crayon on canvas, 78 × 103 in. (198.1 × 261.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Rudolph B. Schulhof 69.29
© Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved.
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