Cy Twombly’s Drawing and Discovery

John and Dominique de Menil, for whom the venerable Houston-based Menil Collection is named, had a longstanding relationship with Cy Twombly dating back to the 1960s when they began collecting the idiosyncratic artist’s work. Today, the museum houses the largest Twombly collection in North America, including a freestanding gallery designed by Renzo Piano and dedicated to the artist. Last year, the collection grew substantially when the Cy Twombly Foundation donated 121 works, none of which had been previously shown in the U.S., 27 of which compose “The Gift of Drawing: Cy Twombly,” on through August 9.

The works span roughly four decades, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, and include some from 2005, six years before the artist’s death. Among them is a collage titled Narcissus (1975), which, at first glance, appears to be just the name written in crayon on a smudgy white surface. But a closer look reveals two pieces of paper, constituting a collage in the technical sense, with the name inscribed twice, one above the other, as if a reflection, thereby gesturing to the titular mythological hunter entranced by his own countenance.

Narcissus resembles a drawing more than a collage, in some ways fitting with the bulk of the gift, which is mainly drawings and paintings on paper. “On the drawing side, we had a number of works, but there was a big gaping hole, and now we can tell the whole story of Twombly across media and throughout the years,” Edouard Kopp, chief curator of the Menil Drawing Institute, told Observer.

Included are abstract landscapes painted in acrylic and oil on homemade paper. Hinting at the works of Claude Monet, their texture also references Twombly’s gray paintings from the 1980s (also included), which showed at the Venice Biennale. “The paint is thickly applied, interesting and gestural brushwork, impasto not in all places, not evenly, but because of that, the paper is really wavy,” is how Kopp describes the landscapes. “The texture is very subtle and the colors very warm and soothing, and intense in vigor and energy… they’re a little disconcerting.”

” Disconcerting” is a polite way of describing how viewers often interpret Twombly’s work; “scribble-scrabble” is another. Minimalist artist and critic Donald Judd called Twombly’s 1964 show at Castelli Gallery a fiasco, writing in Arts Magazine: “In these paintings, there are a couple of swirls of red paint mixed with a little yellow and white and placed high on a medium-gray surface. There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line. There isn’t anything to the paintings.”

“I think it grabbed his attention,” Kopp said of Judd’s scathing review. “People who don’t know his art well might reproach him at first, and the other reproach might be how elusive he is. He’s interested in the act of de-skilling—moving away from academic skill and seeing what happens on the sheet of paper or canvas if you try to unlearn what you’ve learned.”

To do so, he explored the element of chance in his work, sometimes drawing in total darkness, relying on instincts and primordial forces to guide his hand. “You let your mind and hand go, and it can be completely unconscious,” said Kopp, noting that some such works in the collection date to 1954, when Twombly worked as a cryptologist for the U.S. Army. “When you make a blind drawing, it’s the very opposite of making an academic drawing where you know exactly what you’re trying to achieve. Here, you don’t know what you’ll achieve. The act of drawing becomes an act of discovery. So, you let chance have its influence. Then you decrypt to see what you’ve done.”

Born in Lexington, Virginia, Twombly was named for legendary pitcher Cy Young by his father, who was a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. Educated at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and at Lexington’s Washington and Lee University, he also studied at New York’s Art Students League, where he became romantically involved with Robert Rauschenberg, who suggested he study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There, he met artists like Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Ben Shahn and John Cage before relocating to Rome in 1957, where he spent most of his career.

At the age of 24, he wrote on a grant application, “What I’m trying to establish is that modern art isn’t dislocated, it’s something with roots, tradition and continuity. For myself, the past is the source. For all art is rightfully contemporary.”

Narcissus is just one example of his works named for mythological figures. Not included here are his 1962 pieces, Leda and the Swan and The Birth of Venus. Another example is his Fifty Days at Iliam, a 10-part cycle completed in the 1970s and inspired by Homer’s Iliad. “He’s a contemporary artist, but he’s also deeply connected with the past,” noted Kopp. “He was fascinated by going back to the origins of mankind, the origins of art. So for me, he’s always between the past and the present.”

Twombly’s references in some way predate the ancients, reaching as far back as cave paintings, primitive mark-making, untitled feral scratchings and asemic messaging that place the burden of meaning on the viewer.

“With the art of drawing, he was interested in connecting back to earlier histories of man, primeval qualities and the gesture of drawing. He is not trying to communicate clearly. He’s trying to communicate a field of illusions, a state of interrogation. He’s of a generation that was interested in the idea of the open world, the idea of Umberto Eco,” Kopp said, referencing the Italian semiotician’s “open text” concept introduced in his 1962 collection of essays, Opera aperta, which proposes that literary works are active, dynamic fields of meaning.

“Twombly is interested in creating work where the viewer is a full participant. You have to bring your body, your gaze, some knowledge, and he’ll give you snippets, some trails and perhaps a title,” Kopp offered, adding after a pause, “though most of his work is untitled.”

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