Once, at the Menil Collection in Houston, a French woman took off her clothes and danced naked in front of Cy Twombly’s epic Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor). Such a performance is unlikely to await you or me, but art can affect people in unexpected ways. And as it happens, Twombly is experiencing an unexpected annus mirabilis. Gallerists: Beware!
This article appears in Issue 32 of Alta Journal.
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Earlier this year, three different shows in New York featured Twombly’s work, including a brilliant exhibit curated by Hilton Als at Hill Art Foundation and a massive solo show at Gagosian. Additionally, the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil is celebrating its 30th anniversary by hosting a series of high-profile programs. And, in case that’s not enough, the famed British artist Tacita Dean just released a gorgeous book of close-up photographs of Twombly paintings—a kind of love letter to the artist—bearing the quizzical title Why Cy.
Indeed. Why Cy?
And why Cy now?
Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928 and died in 2011 in Rome, where he lived most of his adult life. He attended Black Mountain College, where he studied with the artist Robert Motherwell and the poet Charles Olson. After graduation, he moved to Italy, and though he would return to the States now and then (he often kept studios in New York City and in Lexington), Italy became his home. Twombly is probably best known for his large “blackboard” paintings that resemble experiments in cursive gone bad. There are big chalk loops, endless scrawls and scribbles, mysterious marks that look like letters but aren’t. Poets and writers love Twombly because much of his work—roughly a third—contains lines of poetry written directly onto the canvas in his shaky, nearly illegible script. The artist regularly inscribed into his paintings passages from modern poets like Rainer Maria Rilke, Federico García Lorca, and Wallace Stevens; Romantic poets like Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats; and classical poets such as Virgil, Homer, and Sappho. One series is devoted to Japanese haiku poets. Some of his most famous works are nothing more than the names of Greek and Roman poets from antiquity emblazoned in black ink on a white background.
TACITUS
OVID
VIRGIL
Put another way: Twombly’s art is not particularly sexy.
It’s heady and abstract and inscrutable and erudite and primitive all at the same time.
And yet, it’s never been more popular.
Which means this is a perfect moment to visit (or revisit) the artist’s work—ideally in person. The scale and scope and texture of his paintings, drawings, and sculpture always look cool on the page, but they don’t radiate like they do when you are in their presence. The good news for those of us in California is that one of the world’s greatest Twombly collections is located at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. SFMOMA’s Twombly gallery is one of only three Twombly-specific spaces in the country and is one of the most impressive aesthetic spaces on the entire West Coast. It is a treasure that often flies under the radar of the contemporary art scene, but it is one I highly recommend. Beyond being a gift to California’s cultural scene, the Twombly gallery is also one of the single most important spaces to me on the planet.
When SFMOMA expanded in 2016, it acquired the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, which enabled the museum to create the Twombly gallery. Comprising four paintings and one sculpture—all of which were owned by the Fishers—the room at SFMOMA is special in part because it represents work from different phases in the artist’s career and yet embodies the kind of paintings for which he is most famous. (The museum also recently acquired Twombly’s Second Voyage to Italy (Second Version), which currently is not hung in the room.) Housed on the fourth floor with other postwar and abstract art, the Twombly gallery is situated sort of near the center, sandwiched between rooms featuring Brice Marden and Clyfford Still. Typically, visitors enter from a smaller room preceding the Twombly space.
Something happens to my head and my heart when I realize I am about to walk into this room. I know what’s in there. I’ve probably spent more time within those four walls than anyone not employed by SFMOMA, but I always feel a current of excitement.
My eyes immediately travel to the far wall, to a huge vertical painting that is utterly riveting. I am never not shaken by it. Splatters of blood. Ribbons of blood. Rivulets of blood. Blood drippings and blood drawings. The trace of a blood-bound finger on the flesh-colored canvas. The painting is so violent, so explosive, it dares you to ignore it, to look away. I never can. At nearly nine feet tall, Untitled (Bacchus 1st Version IV) is both imposing and intense.
UNTITLED (BACCHUS 1ST VERSION IV)
Thankfully, the mania of the Bacchus is countered by the surface serenity of the painting to its left, the gorgeous Note I, from the series III Notes from Salalah. I love this piece so much. I think about it all the time. That green! What is it? Lake green. Seaweed green. Forest green. A green of mysticism and dreams.
NOTE I FROM III NOTES FROM SALALAH
An aspect of this painting that has always mesmerized me is how it can be inviting and frightening at the same time. It beckons me to dive into it as into the ocean, but there is also something mildly sinister, just beneath the surface.
This piece makes me think about one of my favorite lines from Rilke’s “The First Elegy” in Duino Elegies: “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.” Beauty as the beginning of terror. Its shallows. That’s what I see lurking just beneath Twombly’s otherworldly layers.
UNTITLED (2001)
No.
Yes!
What we really want to do is get closer to the second-oldest piece in the gallery, the haunting and mystifying Untitled from 1968, which hangs just behind us. If Twombly has a “brand,” it is this series of six lines of spirals bounding across a rectangular field. Pick your referent for the spirals—barbed wire, a coiled Slinky, sky writing, bad cursive, waves, currents. This is the Twombly that might invite mockery and caricature. My kindergartner could do that and so on. Trust me—they can’t.
UNTITLED (1968)
But no piece in the collection—maybe no piece in Twombly’s entire oeuvre—does this work better and more brilliantly than Untitled from 1971. This painting is an absolute masterpiece and one of the truly magnificent works of art of the 20th century. At 10 feet tall and over 16 feet wide, Untitled is truly monumental. I think of it as the great illegible chalkboard of the universe.
UNTITLED (1971)
I can see why.
It’s astonishing.
Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon in which people see faces in things that are not faces, like clouds or tortillas. It can also explain the desire to try to look for faces in a disorganized visual space. To help make sense of the sensation of beholding Untitled, I’m inventing a new term, paraepistoli, which is the impulse to look for and identify letters in a field of marks that approximate writing. The “writing” is so close to being a collage of identifiable letters, but alas, it is not. But if it’s not writing, what is it? A code? A cipher? I cannot count the number of times I have stood in front of this canvas and stared at the marks. Sometimes I look for letters. Sometimes for words. Sometimes for patterns. Sometimes for some hidden clue. Sometimes for god.
Sometimes, I feel like I’ve found all of them.
And more.
I should say here that Cy Twombly changed my life.
I mean, he did not rescue me from a burning house or pull me from a plane crash or save me from drowning, but his work did find me at a time in my life when there was a hole. And while I’m not sentimental enough to say that Twombly’s art filled that hole, it changed it from a void to a venture. A path. A portal. A purpose.
My father died in 2017, a few days before Christmas. In 2018, I returned to Oklahoma, where I grew up, to go through my father’s things. My dad was a big guy with an even bigger personality. He was mayor of my hometown, president of the Kiwanis Club, a state-championship baseball coach, a bail bondsman, the MC of every parade, the announcer for high school football games, a semipro poker player. He was a loser in his bid for state senate but the winner of a hog-calling competition. He was an extrovert. His entire life was outward-facing. As my sister and I went through his effects, I found myself asking two questions:
What makes a life?
And
How does one contribute?
Not long after that trip, I made another, to New York, where I was giving a reading from my new book of poems at New York University. The following day, I visited In Beauty it is Finished, a retrospective of Twombly’s drawings at Gagosian down in Chelsea.
I was blown away.
Or, to use another, more appropriate trope, I felt like something had been blown into me. I was truly inspired. Inspiration, from the Latin inspirare. To breathe or blow into.
When I stepped into the gallery and walked among Twombly’s drawings, I felt, for the first time since my father’s death, that I could breathe.
As I moved through the show and looked at the drawings, which spanned 57 years (longer than I had been alive), I found myself thinking of them as Twombly’s effects. And I began to see them through the lens of my father. And I asked the same two questions: What makes a life? How does one contribute? My father was probably a kinder man than Twombly, a more civic-facing man, a more community-focused man, but I realized that I was choosing or had already chosen the path of Twombly. The inward path, the aesthetic path. The path that retreats, that goes deep within. The path of Rilke.
That night, I was the last one out of the gallery. In fact, they sort of had to kick me out. After I left the gallery, I walked back to my hotel by way of the High Line. When I got to my room, I took out my notebook and started writing a poem I titled “Troubled by Thoughts About Infinity and Oblivion, I Exit the Twombly Retrospective at Dusk and Walk the High Line with the Ghost of My Father.” But that poem led to another about Twombly, which led to another and to another, and those led me back to SFMOMA, which led me to the Twombly gallery and to Untitled (1971). I can’t say how long I stood in front of the painting, but at some point, I reached into my bag, took out my notebook, and jotted down this line: within the writing there are no words
And then I wrote black field of white wheat
And then I wrote snow strings across the windshield
And then I wrote the strange stenography of the stars
And then I thought this could be a book
That idea and those early poems did, in fact, become a book. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly was published in 2023. Part art book, part collection of poems, Before the Borderless features more than 50 Twombly drawings and paintings. It is notable in part because it is believed to be the first time the estate of a major American artist partnered with a poet and a press to make such a book.
And the seed for the whole project was planted in this gallery.
As it happens, SFMOMA’s Twombly gallery continues to play a major part in my life. After my mother died of COVID-19, I mourned her passing in the Twombly room. I’ve taken countless visitors there, including several noted poets, one of whom has also written about the gallery. Once, my youngest son and I were thrown out of the museum because he and I had sneaked back into the gallery at closing time so that he could film me reading my poem about Note I in front of the painting. When my wife was diagnosed with cancer, I went to the Twombly gallery to pray. It is for me a sacred space.
I’m not saying you will have the same experiences in the gallery as I do, but you might. Who is to say what you will do in front of any of the Untitleds?
I know I dress in layers.•
Dean Rader has authored or coedited 12 books, including Self-Portrait As Wikipedia Entry and Works & Days, which won the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly appeared in 2023. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.
